Bill Evans Quotes

When you play music you discover a part of yourself that you never knew existed.

There’s something satisfying, I think,’ Evans said, ‘about the idea of light travelling for millions of years through space and just at the right moment as it reaches Earth someone looks at the right bit of sky and sees it. It just seems right that an event of that magnitude should be witnessed.

I found a Bill Evans record in the bookcase and was listening to it while drying my hair when I realized that it was the record I had played in Naoko's room on the night of her birthday, the night she cried and I took her in my arms. That had happened only six months earlier, but it felt like something from a much remoter past. Maybe it felt that way because I had thought about it so often-too often, to the point where it had distorted my sense of time.

The rest of the band faded down to almost nothing while my dad did his best Bill Evans impression — except hopefully without the untreated hepatitis.

There’s something satisfying, I think,” Evans said, “about the idea of light travelling for millions of years through space and just at the right moment as it reaches Earth someone looks at the right bit of sky and sees it.

The moon was so bright, I turned the lights off and stretched out on the sofa to listen to Bill Evans' piano. Streaming through the window, the moonlight cast long shadows and splashed the walls with a touch of diluted Indian ink.

Materials Needed: Epsom

God never brought anyone to earth to pay bills till they die.

If you can’t pay the bill, I’ll pay it for you.” “Thanks,” I said, and turned my head to the side. “But in exchange for what?

effects were horrific – Evans needed a kidney transplant and all members of the party suffered lasting damage – yet nothing in the taste alerted anyone to the perils

Don't let the enemy convince you to pick up the invoice for your past mistakes. You owe nothing. Jesus already paid the bill.

One of the most powerful ways to design your life is to design your lives.

If it’s not actionable, it’s not a problem. It’s a situation, a circumstance, a fact of life. It may be a drag (so to speak), but, like gravity, it’s not a problem that can be solved.

Words are the children of reason and, therefore, can't explain it. They really can't translate feeling because they're not part of it. That's why it bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It's not. It's feeling.

At the piano, he felt a stinging of notes in A minor play themselves, doodling down and then upward as a sort of introduction before an odd bluesy tune interrupted the chords he had been vamping around with. The tune started in his right hand before moving to his left, sounding vaguely like an absentminded jazz pianist remembering Bill Evans but as Bill Evans, debilitated and in a cocaine haze, might have remembered Debussy. All of Brettigan’s music was filled with memories of other music.

Evan saw a man across the kitchen, butt leaning against the counter, muscular arms folded over his broad chest. His blond hair was cut very short, and his eyes were bright blue sparks. Evan’s gaze locked with Paul’s, and a sudden sense of vertigo swam through his head. The conversation in the other room, the back and forth between John and Alden, the startling brilliance of Bill’s teeth -- all of that faded away as Paul stared back at him. Evan found himself inside a strange bubble that blocked all outside stimuli. He had never experienced a connection this intense before, especially with an initial look, and even though it terrified him in a thrillingly sexual way, he didn’t dare pull his gaze away from Paul’s for fear of breaking the timeless moment between them.

President Theodore Roosevelt (after whom the Teddy Bear is named) was particularly fond of animals, having five guinea pigs called Dr. Johnson, Bishop Doane, Fighting Bob Evans, Admiral Dewey, and Father O’Grady. He also owned a small bear called Jonathan Edwards, a lizard by the name of Bill, Baron Spreckle (a hen), a badger called Josiah, Eli Yale the parrot and - brilliantly - a snake known to his family as Emily Spinach.

The first home I remember in Copper Cliff was 11 Evans Road, a tiny place: kitchen, bathroom off of that, a “front room” or parlor with two bedrooms squeezed onto the side. It was here, at the kitchen table, that I had my first lessons on the bagpipe. My dad was teaching my brother Ranald, who, at the time was eleven, and I was four. The two of them would sit at the kitchen table, music book opened, sounding away on the practice chanters. Family lore has it that I was a most annoying kid at these times, wanting to get in on the strange but enticing action. Apparently as a result of being repeatedly rebuffed or ignored, I would crawl under the table and from this ideally placed launching pad, would deliver a “lower punch,” as it came to be known, to the delicate regions of dad and brother. This finally led to their capitulation and I was allowed to join them at the table. I was ultimately outfitted with a very small child’s practice chanter, a family heirloom passed down through dad’s sister Betty, a piper herself who had died many years before in childbirth.

One of the most astonishing and precious things about motherhood," writes Kathleen Norris, "is the brave way in which women consent to give birth to creatures who will one day die." I am not so brave. Far more frightening to me than the threat of interrupted plans or endless to-do lists is the thread of loving someone as intensely as a mother loves her child. To invite in to the universe a new life, knowing full well that no one can protect thatl ife from the currents of evil that pulse through our world and through our very bloodstreams, seems a grave and awesome task that is at once unspeakably selfish and miraculously good. I am frightened enough by how fervently I love Dan, by my absolute revolt against the possibility -- no, the inevitable reality -- that he will get hurt, that he will experience loss, and that one day he will die. I'm not sure my heart is big enough to wrap itself around another breakable soul. I was once waiting in an airport next to a woman whose six-year-old daughter suffered from a rare heart defect that could take her life at any moment. In spite of mounting medical bills and the pressures of raising both a child with special needs and another younger daughter, the woman said she and her husband planned to adopt a boy from Ethiopia later that year. "What made you want to grow your family in the midst of all this turmoil?" I asked. "Why did the Jews have children after the Holocaust?" she asked back. "Why do women keep trying after multiple miscarraiges? It's our way of shaking our fists at the future and saying, you know what?--we will be hopeful; things will get better; you can't scare us after all. Having children is, ultimately, an act of faith.

They taught him how to milk cows and now they expected him to tame lions. Perhaps they expected him to behave like all good lion tamers. Use a whip and a chair. But what happens to the best lion tamer when he puts down his whip and his chair. Goddamnit! It was wrong. He felt cheated, he felt almost violated. He felt cheated for himself, and he felt cheated for guys like Joshua Edwards who wanted to teach and who didn’t know how to teach because he’d been pumped full of manure and theoretical hogwash. Why hadn’t anyone told them, in plain, frank English, just what to do? Couldn’t someone, somewhere along the line, have told them? Not one single college instructor? Not someone from the board of Ed, someone to orientate them after they’d passed the emergency exam? Not anyone? Now one sonofabitch somewhere who gave a good goddamn? Not even Stanley? Not even Small? Did they have to figure it out for themselves, sink and swim, kill or be killed? Rick had never been told how to stop in his class. He’d never been told what to do with a second term student who doesn’t even know how to write down his own goddamn name on a sheet of paper. He didn’t know, he’d never been advised on the proper tactics for dealing with a boy whose I.Q. was 66, a big, fat, round, moronic 66. He hadn’t been taught about kids’ yelling out in class, not one kid, not the occasional “difficult child” the ed courses had loftily philosophized about, not him. But a whole goddamn, shouting, screaming class load of them all yelling their sonofbitching heads off. What do you do with a kid who can’t read even though he’s fifteen years old? Recommend him for special reading classes, sure. And what do you do when those special reading classes are loaded to the asshole, packed because there are kids who can’t read in abundance, and you have to take only those who can’t read the worst, dumping them onto a teacher who’s already overloaded and those who doesn’t want to teach a remedial class to begin with? And what do you with that poor ignorant jerk? Do you call him on class, knowing damn well he hasn’t read the assignment because he doesn’t know how to read? Or do you ignore him? Or do you ask him to stop by after school, knowing he would prefer playing stickball to learning how to read. And knowing he considers himself liberated the moment the bell sounds at the end of the eighth period. What do you do when you’ve explained something patiently and fully, explained it just the way you were taught to explain in your education courses, explained in minute detail, and you look out at your class and see that stretching, vacant wall of blank, blank faces and you know nothing has penetrated, not a goddamn thing has sunk in? What do you do then? Give them all board erasers to clean. What do you do when you call on a kid and ask “What did that last passage mean?”and the kid stands there without any idea of what the passage meant , and you know that he’s not alone, you know every other kid in the class hasn’t the faintest idea either? What the hell do you do then? Do you go home and browse through the philosophy of education books the G.I bill generously provided. Do you scratch your ugly head and seek enlightenment from the educational psychology texts? Do you consult Dewey? And who the hell do you condemn, just who? Do you condemn elementary schools for sending a kid on to high school without knowing how to read, without knowing how to write his own name on a piece of paper? Do you condemn the masterminds who plot the education systems of a nation, or a state or a city?

Oscar is our Liszt and Bill Evans is our Chopin,

Our minds are generally lazy and like to get rid of problems as quickly as possible, so they surround first ideas with a lot of positive chemicals to make us “fall in love” with them. Do not fall in love with your first idea. This relationship almost never works out. Most often, our first solutions are pretty average and not very creative. Humans have a tendency to suggest the obvious first. Learning to use great ideation tools helps you overcome this bias toward the obvious and helps you regain a sense of creative confidence.

Evans was as skilled with computers as Gates and Allen. Lakeside once struggled to manually put together the school’s class schedule—a maze of complexity to get hundreds of students the classes they need at times that don’t conflict with other courses. The school tasked Bill and Kent—children, by any measure—to build a computer program to solve the problem. It worked. And unlike Paul Allen, Kent shared Bill’s business mind and endless ambition. “Kent always had the big briefcase, like a lawyer’s briefcase,” Gates recalls. “We were always scheming about what we’d be doing five or six years in the future. Should we go be CEOs? What kind of impact could you have? Should we go be generals? Should we go be ambassadors?” Whatever it was, Bill and Kent knew they’d do it together. After reminiscing on his friendship with Kent, Gates trails off. “We would have kept working together. I’m sure we would have gone to college together.” Kent could have been a founding partner of Microsoft with Gates and Allen. But it would never happen. Kent died in a mountaineering accident before he graduated high school.

Bill Gates experienced one in a million luck by ending up at Lakeside. Kent Evans experienced one in a million risk by never getting to finish what he and Gates set out to achieve. The same force, the same magnitude, working in opposite directions.

For every Bill Gates there is a Kent Evans who was just as skilled and driven but ended up on the other side of life roulette.

Americans invented jazz; the French, Brazilians and Japanese also understand it. It is important to have formal training in the classical repertoire, but a true musician is not a train which can only run on the rails. My mother admired Bill Evans.

I didn’t lose the war, nor did the men who fought it. The high command lost the war. And after the war was over, they didn’t stand up for us. Veterans had to build their own memorial—with their own initiative, time, and money. Congress had to pass a bill so we could have this memorial; all they had to do was lift a pen to their fingers. But almost three million men and women who served in Vietnam lifted things far heavier—and carried those things every day, long after the war was over.

The fellow’s name was Lincoln W. Higgie–Bill to his friends–and he’d recently returned from Turkey, where he’d spent a couple of years earning a precarious living smuggling rare coins and antiquities out of the country. (Precarious because it was illegal; if the authorities caught you they might sentence you to death, which was bad, or throw you into prison, which was demonstrably worse.) Bill Higgle was a numismatist–if you Google him, you’ll find he wrote a book on the coinage, tokens, and paper money of the Virgin Islands–and I was editing a numismatic magazine at the time. He showed up at the office, I

Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Julian “Cannonball” Adderley, Paul Chambers, Bill Evans, and Jimmy Cobb playing “All Blues,” a moody, blues form piece in 6/8, off the 1959 album Kind of Blue.

When you play music, you discover a part of yourself you never knew existed.

If you want to see the key to success, look into the mirror. You are the key to your own success.

So What.’ That’s the name. It’s a classic. Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans. Catchy, isn’t it?” “It

Fear and doubt are conquered by a faith that rejoices. And faith can rejoice because the promises of God are as certain as God Himself. Kay Arthur For Christians who believe God’s promises, the future is actually too bright to comprehend. Marie T. Freeman The love of God is so vast, the power of His touch so invigorating, we could just stay in His presence for hours, soaking up His glory, basking in His blessings. Debra Evans MORE FROM GOD’S WORD Whatever God has promised gets stamped with the Yes of Jesus. In him, this is what we preach and pray, the great Amen, God’s Yes and our Yes together, gloriously evident. 2 Corinthians 1:20 MSG Let’s keep a firm grip on the promises that keep us going. He always keeps his word. Hebrews 10:23 MSG For ye have need of patience, that, after ye have done the will of God, ye might receive the promise. Hebrews 10:36 KJV And we desire that each one of you show the same diligence so as to realize the full assurance of hope until the end, so that you will not be sluggish, but imitators of those who through faith and patience inherit the promises. Hebrews 6:11-12 NASB You will be a good servant of Christ Jesus, nourished by the words of the faith and of the good teaching that you have followed. 1 Timothy 4:6 HCSB Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. Matthew 4:4 NKJV SHADES OF GRACE Grace comes from the heart of a gracious God who wants to stun you and overwhelm you with a gift you don’t deserve—salvation, adoption, a spiritual ability to use in kingdom service, answered prayer, the church, His presence, His wisdom, His guidance, His love. Bill Hybels

recounting bygone legends of the vanished. One of these beams had originated in a little-noticed nook of the universe once known as “the Milky Way.” It was so faint that the eyes of the vast majority of living beings could not detect it, yet it contained innumerable legends that had once moved heaven and earth, shocked belief and understanding. Ye Wenjie, Mike Evans, Ding Yi, Frederick Tyler, Zhang Beihai, Bill Hines, Luo Ji, Thomas Wade … Red Coast Base, the Earth-Trisolaris Organization, the Wallfacer Project, the Staircase Program, the Swordholders, the Bunker Project … The ancient stories remained as vivid as though they had taken place yesterday; the figures of heroes and saints continued to twinkle among the constellations.

Well, if it started with Coltrane, what is he doin’ about to burn his hand lookin’ at Charlie Parker play, with his mouth open?’ 

Chough. It’s an odd word referring to a red billed member of the crow family. Rare apparently. But birds are not his thing. Unless they’re stuffed with sage and onion and served with roast potatoes and gravy.

Ezra Klein’s Why We’re Polarized; George Packer’s Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal; Evan Osnos’s Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury; Yascha Mounk’s The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure; Suzanne Mettler and Robert Lieberman’s Four Threats: The Recurring Crises of American Democracy; Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die; Bill Bishop and Robert Cushing’s The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart; and Michael Sandel’s Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy. I also suggest you read the January/February 2022 issue of the Atlantic. For contrast, and decidedly more upbeat, is Robert Putnam’s The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again. The public hearings held by the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol should be required viewing and are readily available online.

Luck and risk are both the reality that every outcome in life is guided by forces other than individual effort. They are so similar that you can’t believe in one without equally respecting the other. They both happen because the world is too complex to allow 100% of your actions to dictate 100% of your outcomes. They are driven by the same thing: You are one person in a game with seven billion other people and infinite moving parts. The accidental impact of actions outside of your control can be more consequential than the ones you consciously take. But both are so hard to measure, and hard to accept, that they too often go overlooked. For every Bill Gates there is a Kent Evans who was just as skilled and driven but ended up on the other side of life roulette. If you give luck and risk their proper respect, you realize that when judging people’s financial success—both your own and others’—it’s never as good or as bad as it seems.

Early on I sense a profound disconnect between what I was supposed to believe and what I actually believed. At home, my parents encouraged questions, and when they didn't know the answers, they said so. But in Sunday school, my precocious inquiries met with furrowed brows, cleared throats, and the not-too-subtle suggestion that good Christians don't ask such impertinent things. At home, we talked about a world that was broken and beautiful, just waiting for us to make our mark on it. At my Pentecostal elementary school, I learned that demons hid around every corner, Bill Clinton was the antichrist (I sobbed when I found out that my grandfather had voted for Clinton for president), and the rest of the world lived in "darkness." My church told me a woman's place was in the some; in my home, dad told me I could be anything I wanted to be. My Christian books said following my heart would only lead me astray; mom taught me to listen to my gut.

Animals President Theodore Roosevelt (after whom the Teddy Bear is named) was particularly fond of animals, having five guinea pigs called Dr. Johnson, Bishop Doane, Fighting Bob Evans, Admiral Dewey, and Father O’Grady. He also owned a small bear called Jonathan Edwards, a lizard by the name of Bill, Baron Spreckle (a hen), a badger called Josiah, Eli Yale the parrot and - brilliantly - a snake known to his family as Emily Spinach. In its lifetime, an albatross is believed to fly around fifteen million miles. To put that into perspective, it is the same as flying half way to Mars when it is at its closest distance to the Earth. In possibly one of the cutest facts you will ever read, sea otters hold each other’s paws whilst they are asleep so they don’t drift apart from each other. Elephant shrews are more closely related to elephants than they are shrews. Some ribbon worms will eat themselves if they can’t find anything else to eat. Amazingly, they can consume up to 95% of their own bodyweight and still survive.

There was so much to think about and so much to do with all this activity and responsibility that he hardly had time to really consider how he missed London, the hum of it, the Brixton roar and the beloved river, the West Indian take aways, the glittering of the tower blocks at night, the mobile phone shacks, the Africans in Peckham, the common proximity of plantain, the stern beauty of church women on Sunday mornings, the West End, the art in the air, the music in the air, the sense of possibility. He missed the tube, the telephone boxes. He even missed, deep down, the wicked parking inspectors and the heartless bus drivers who flew past queues of freezing pedestrians out of spite. He missed riding from Loughborough to Surrey Quays on his bike with the plane trees whizzing by, the sight of some long-weaved woman walking along in tight jeans and a studded belt and look-at-me boots and maybe a little boy holding her hand. The skylines, the alleyways, and yes, the sirens and helicopters and the hit of life, all these things he knew so well. And the fact, most of all, that he belonged there in a way that he would never, could never, belong in Dorking. He was outside, displaced. He was off the A-Z. He felt, in a very fundamental way, that he was living outside of his life, outside of himself. And the problem was, if indeed it was a problem – how could you call something like this a problem when there were bills to pay and children to feed and a house to maintain? – the problem was that he did not know what to do about it, how to get rid of this feeling, how to get to a place where he felt that he was in the right place. And this not being such a serious problem, not really a problem at all, he had suppressed it and accepted things as they were.

having five guinea pigs called Dr. Johnson, Bishop Doane, Fighting Bob Evans, Admiral Dewey, and Father O’Grady. He also owned a small bear called Jonathan Edwards, a lizard by the name of Bill, Baron Spreckle (a hen), a badger called Josiah, Eli Yale the parrot

with the card? Bill

One of the best things about designers is that they love to explore crazy ideas. They embrace crazy ideas because they know the biggest creativity destroyer is judgment. If we want to create all possible ideas needed in our lives, we must first silence the critical voice in our head. Making mistakes is totally normal and expected. It is natural. And even though that crazy idea may not be what we end up with, it may help us create other creative possibilities. PART 7: WHAT IS MIND MAPPING?

Better to do something simple which is real

It wasn’t a “white person” who ordered the internment of Japanese-Americans based on nothing other than the color of their skin and the blood in their veins. That was the longest-serving, most powerful and best-loved Democrat of all, Franklin Roosevelt and it should not go unnoticed that it is this same Roosevelt who remains so beloved a figure in today’s Democratic party that, when Ocasio-Cortez sought to sell her massive one-size-fits-all “environmental” programs to her fellow Democrats, she did so by naming her bill after the Socialist/collectivist/ racist Roosevelt’s signature policies, “The New Deal.” That’s not a “dog whistle,” that’s a bullhorn.

While the Woke deface monuments dedicated to Abraham Lincoln who gave his life in freeing the slaves, the Democratic Socialist responsible for one of the worst acts of racism in American history still has Democrats naming bills for him. Democrats don’t fight racism; they exploit it.

Miss Evans was a scornful Max Reinhardt saint... She left the room, her hips provocative and fluid. page 270 Murder In The Madhouse/ by Jonathan Latimer

Miss Evans was a scornful Max Reinhardt saint. ... She left the room, her hips provocative and fluid.