| a motley collection of poems, musings and quotations I find interesting... | |
| ee cummings: since feeling is first | |
| "...the more i can forget about being embarrassed when i make something, the more it is going to mean something to someone else. i can't anticipate what it's going to be or how it's going to be perceived, so the quicker i let go of something i make, the better. " (Jeff Tweedy quoted in Learning to Die by Greg Kott, 67) | "You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness." (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, 180) |
| Richard Powers: The Time of Our Singing | |
| "Time is not a trace that moves through a collection of moments. Time is a moment that collects all moving traces." (271) | "The deeper you look, the more God's plan recedes. At the edge of human measurements, infinite strangeness." (330) |
| "Da liked to say you can send a message 'down into time.' But you can't send one back up. He never explained to me how you can send any message, in any direction, and expect it to reach its mark. For even if the message arrives intact, everything it speaks about will already have changed." (355) | "'You must learn to listen,' he says. If particles, forces, fields, obey the curve that binds the flow of numbers, then they must sound like harmonies in time. 'You think with your eyes; this is your problem. No one can see four independent variables mapping out a surface in five or more dimensions. But the tuned ear can hear chords." (411) |
| Robert Shelton: No Direction Home - The Life and Music of Bob Dylan | |
| "we're just passing through. . . . A lot of time, you just have to go down many roads to get where you are going. . . . The important thing is to keep on moving. . . Or else to stop by the side of the road every once in a while and build a house. I guess that's the best thing anyone can do." (14) | "I can't decay. I would not let myself decay. I'm against decay. That's nature's will--decay. I am against nature. I don't dig nature at all. I think nature is very unnatural. I think the truly natural things are dreams, which nature can't touch with decay. . ." (60) |
| "Dylan is a genius, that's all. He is irksome and irritating, very much the Chekhov genius. He is not more complex than most people; he is simpler." (67) | "I borrowed my life from the works of your life. I have felt your energy in me and seen mine move in you. You may have been taught to call me by the name of a poet, but I am no more a poet than you are. I am no more of a writer of songs than you are, no better singer." (Woody Guthrie, 79) |
| "Dylan used to sound like a lung cancer victim singing Woody Guthrie. Now he sounds like a Rolling Stone singing Immanuel Kant." (Ed Freeman, 85) | "The first way to answer these questions . . . is by asking them" (155) |
| "every line in it is actually the start of a whole song. I thought I wouldn't have enough time alive to write all those songs so I put all I could into this one." (about A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall, 156) | "'What did I steal? Did I steal the word the, the word a, the word so? Everybody has to get their words from somewhere. Woody didn't write ten original melodies, but nobody ever called him a thief." (163) |
| "There is nothing so stable as change." (198) | "Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now." (My Back Pages) |
| "To be in hell is to drift . . . to be in heaven is to steer. . . ." (George Bernard Shaw, 239) | "I'm not disillusioned. I'm just not illusioned, either." (287) |
| "You are what you think you are." (299) | "There doesn't seem to be any tomorrow. Every time I wake up, no matter in what position, it's always been today." (328) |
| "It's not a question of breaking the rules, don't you understand? I don't break the rules, because I don't see any rules to break. As far as I'm concerned, there aren't any rules. . . ." (344) | |