“River smiled sweetly at his tormentors and told them, "If you want to kick my ass, go ahead. Just explain to me why you're doing it."
After a confused pause, one of the skinheads said, "Ah, you wouldn't be worth it."
"We're all worth it, man," River said with a beatific smile. "We're all worth millions of planets and stars and galaxies and universes.”
Source: Last Night at the Viper Room: River Phoenix and the Hollywood He Left Behind
“When it was Hearts turn, she related a vision she had: that River hadn't wanted to be born, preferring to stay with God in heaven. God had convinced him to go, and they haggled over how long, settling on twenty-three years.”
Source: Last Night at the Viper Room: River Phoenix and the Hollywood He Left Behind
“Invest in success today—courage compounds, but delay multiplies the cost.”
“For River to discover himself in Rimbaud's life and Miller's prose was simultaneously self-aggrandizing and self-pitying. Tellingly, he was more interested in Miller's book than in Rimbaud's actual writing: he responded to Rimbaud not as a poet, but as a symbol.”
Source: Last Night at the Viper Room: River Phoenix and the Hollywood He Left Behind
“The film that has influenced me the most is probably Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho, with whom I had the chance to work while in the US. Seeing that movie during a time of my life in which I was exploring my sexuality and looking at the work of River Phoenix made me dream about acting in a film.”
“But River had an impact that far exceeded the number of films he had the chance to make; he seemed like he had the chance to be the brightest light of his generatiom”
Source: Last Night at the Viper Room: River Phoenix and the Hollywood He Left Behind
“While Daniel disappeared into his room, probably to limn the contours of some exquisite constellation of philosophical nonsense for his internship applications and gasp in the throes of his overachieving OCDness.”
Source: The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer
“Schoolmastering kept me busy by day and part of each night. I was an assistant housemaster, with a fine big room under the eaves of the main building, and a wretched kennel of a bedroom, and rights in a bathroom used by two or three other resident masters. I taught all day, but my wooden leg mercifully spared me from the nuisance of having to supervise sports after school. There were exercises to mark every night, but I soon gained a professional attitude towards these woeful explorations of the caves of ignorance and did not let them depress me. I liked the company of most of my colleagues, who were about equally divided among good men who were good teachers, awful men who were awful teachers, and the grotesques and misfits who drift into teaching and are so often the most educative influences a boy meets in school. If a boy can't have a good teacher, give him a psychological cripple or an exotic failure to cope with; don't just give him a bad, dull teacher. This is where the private schools score over state-run schools; they can accommodate a few cultured madmen on the staff without having to offer explanations.”
Source: Fifth business
“One cannot get rid of a good education, nor, unfortunately, of a bad one, which often is such because one has not wanted to defray the expenses of a good one.”
“Our discussion has been about education and not about schools, for schooling is only a means, and not always an absolute necessary one, toward education. Parents had the duty of educating their children long before there were any schools, and the duty would remain were all schools abolished. Even today, if the parents have the ability and the leisure to give adequate instruction to their children at home, they have no moral obligation to send them to school at all. (p. 436)”
Source: Right And Reason: Ethics in Theory and Practice