Guts Lyrics Quotes

It's so easy to laugh It's so easy to hate It takes guts to be gentle and kind

...he details everything around the beauty and excitement, which is enough to evoke it again for each of us, in the mind's eye, the gut, the secret heart, or wherever one's most vivid, passionate, lyric, and lavender images are stored. - Tobi Tobias, "Balletgorey

As far as I was concerned, I wrote songs; chords and beats and lyrics, verses. and bridges and hooks. But then, as we got bigger, people began to dissect the songs, like a frog from biology class until there was nothing left but guts- tiny parts, so much less than the sum.

If you do fall in love with him please go slowly. Be careful. Trust your gut and know not all things are easy. Damaged things can become beautiful if they’re placed in the right hands. Loving someone isn’t always what we need but what they need.

Doctor Girdon Face, and his American Crusade. Oh, it’s very big lately. Lectures and tent shows and local television and so on. And special phone numbers to call any time of day or night. The liberal-socialist-commy conspiracy that is gutting all the old-time virtues. It has a kind of phonied-up religious fervor about it. And it is about ten degrees to the right of the Birchers. The president is selling the country down the river with the help of the Supreme Court. Agree with us or you are a marked traitor. You know the sort of thing, all that tiresome pea-brained nonsense that attracts those people who are so dim-witted that the only way they can understand the world is to believe that it is all some kind of conspiracy. The most amusing thing about it is the way Dr. Face keeps plugging for virtue and morality. He wants to burn everything since Tom Swift, and he is not too certain about Tom. He wants a big crackdown on movies, books, plays, song lyrics, public dancing. And he wants to be the one to weed out the evil.

Suppose, in our time, the War actually comes. With no current refinements wasted, the elephantine blasts, fire storms, and fallout finish their appointed tasks. Several decades later the literary archaeologists from Tierra del Fuego and the Samoyedes rake loose from London's heaps part of a volume of literary criticism in which stand, entire, Yeats' lines 'My fiftieth year had come and gone'⁠—and the 'Second Coming,' with a few single lines quoted amid the unknown critic's comments. Then a gutted Pittsburgh mansion yields two charred anonymous sheets of a poem whose style⁠—what can be seen of it⁠—resembles Yeats. A fragmentary dictionary cites, as a rare alternate pronunciation of fanatic: "F⁠á-na-tic. Thus in W. B. Yeats' 'Remorse for Intemperate Speech'". There are similar further recoveries, equally scanty. So much for the poet whom T. S. Eliot has called the greatest of the twentieth century. But this has happened already, in time's glacial cataclysm, to the greatest lyric poet (so men say) of the West before the thirteenth century—to Sappho. And to Archilochos, whom some ancients paired with Homer. And to many others, the Herricks, Donne, and Herberts of Greece's first lyric flowering. For however much one may take it as unmerited grace that one at least has Homer, at least the iceburg tip of the fifth century and its epigones, one must still question the providence which allowed from the vastly different age between—the Lyric Age of the seventh and sixth centuries—only Pindar and the scraps for one other small book. That uniquely organic outgrowth of successive literary styles and forms in Greece—forms which are the ineluctable basis for most Western literature—is thus desperately mutilated for us in what seems to have been its most explosively diverse and luxuriant phase.

In one of our conversations, she told me about Finland’s development of sisu, a rough cognate for grit. Etymologically, sisu denotes a person’s viscera, their “intestines (sisucunda).” It is defined as “having guts,” intentional, stoic, constant bravery in the face of adversity. 21 For Finns, sisu is a part of national culture, forged through their history of war with Russia and required by the harsh climate. 22 In this Nordic country, pride is equated with endurance. When Finnish mountain climber Veikka Gustafsson ascended a peak in Antarctica, it was named Mount Sisu. The fortitude to withstand war and foreign occupations is lyrically heralded in the Finnish epic poem, The Kalevala. 23 Even the saunas—two million, one for every three Finns in a country of approximately five and a half million—involve fortitude: A sauna roast is often followed by a nude plunge into the ice-cold Baltic Sea. If Iceland is happier than it has any right to be considering the hours the country spends plunged in darkness each year, Finland’s past circumstances, climate, and developed culture have turned it into one of the grittiest. Finland’s educational system is also currently ranked first, ahead of South Korea, now at number two. 24 The United States is midway down the list. 25 In Finland, there is no after-school tutoring or training, no “miracle pedagogy” in the classrooms, where students are on a first-name basis with their teachers, all of whom have master’s degrees. There is also more “creative play.” 26 Perhaps the tradition of sisu and play, I suspect, are part of the larger, unstated reason for its success. 27 “Wouldn’t it be great if you heard people talking about how they were going to do something to build their grit?” Duckworth asked.