Hendrix Quotes

I'm the one that's got to die when it's time for me to die, so let me live my life the way I want to.

When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.

Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens

The day the power of love overrules the love of power, the world will know peace.

The story of life is quicker than the wink of an eye, the story of love is hello and goodbye...until we meet again

Who are you to judge the life i live i know i'm not perfect and i don't live to be. but before you start pointing fingers make sure your hands are clean.

Excuse me while I kiss the sky.

Music is a safe kind of high.

Don't be reckless with other people's hearts. Don't put up with people who are reckless with yours.

I refuse to believe that Hendrix had the last possessed hand, that Joplin had the last drunken throat, that Morrison had the last enlightened mind.

Butterflies and zebras and moonbeams and fairy tales, That's all she ever thinks about, Riding with the wind.

You have to forget about what other people say, when you're supposed to die, or when you're supposed to be loving. You have to forget about all these things. You have to go on and be crazy. Craziness is like heaven.

I've been imitated so well I've heard people copy my mistakes.

You have to go on and be crazy. Craziness is like heaven.

Sometimes she craved a little danger. And that was why she had book club.

And so castles made of sand slips into the sea, eventually.

I used to live in a room full of mirrors; all I could see was me. I take my spirit and I crash my mirrors, now the whole world is here for me to see.

All I'm gonna do is just go on and do what I feel.

He thinks we’re what we look like on the outside: nice Southern ladies. Let me tell you something…there’s nothing nice about Southern ladies.

If I'm free, it's because I'm always running.

Music doesn't lie. If there is something to be changed in this world, then it can only happen through music.

Music is my religion.

It would be too much for me to deal with to be sitting up there next to God, Bon Scott, Sid Vicious, and Jimi Hendrix, and hear somebody read my obituary from below: NIKKI SIXX DIED TODAY...FUCKING GOLFING

Men don’t have to pay attention the way we do. Men die because they make mistakes. Women? We die because we’re female

All I'm writing is just what I feel, that's all. I just keep it almost naked. And probably the words are so bland.

I love you, Gretchen Lang. You are my reflection and my shadow and I will not let you go. We are bound together forever and ever! Until Halley’s Comet comes around again. I love you dearly and I love you queerly and no demon is bigger than this!

When things get too heavy, just call me helium, the lightest known gas to man.

those times i burned my guitar it was like a sacrifice. we all burn things we love. i love my guitar

We’re a book club,” Maryellen said. “What are we supposed to do? Read him to death? Use strong language?

Dying isn’t the important thing. It’s nothing more than the punctuation mark on the end of your life. It’s everything that came before that matters. Punctuation marks, most people skip right over them. They don’t even have a sound.

Let's make sure it's really raining before we worry about floods.

it is possible to be crazy and paranoid and totally insane and still be right. Maybe the problem with everyone is that the world has become so insane they’re not out of their minds enough to comprehend it.

The line between being too careful and not being careful enough is a line you only get to cross once.

WHEN THE POWER OF LOVE IS STRONGER THAN THE LOVE OF POWER, THE WORLD WILL KNOW PEACE—JIMI HENDRIX.

...God was like the best musician in the world, because he put together all the sounds of nature and gave people like Jimi Hendrix his fingers and John Lennon his brain.

A reader lives many lives,” James Harris said. “The person who doesn’t read lives but one. But if you’re happy just doing what you’re told and reading what other people think you should read, then don’t let me stop you. I just find it sad.

Dani: Crank it up. Lets get this party started. *I hand Dancer my iPod.* Lor: What is this crap. Where the hell is Hendrix on this thing? Jo: Did you get any Muse? Dani: Muse is something you do Jo: Distrubed is something you are Dancer: And Godsmacked is something you get Lor: Don't you have any Motley Crue or Van Halen? Christian: How about some Flogging Molly? Ryodan: Whats the deal with all the Linkin Park, for fuck's sake. Dancer: Mega has a crush on Chester Jo: You got any Adele? Dani: Got some Nicki Minaj. Ryodan: Somebody kill me now.

Life is Quicker Than a Blink of an Eye

She’s the kind of person who either dies tragically at twenty-seven, like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, or else grows up to win, like, the first-ever Nobel Prize for Awesome.

When those things happened, they learned that although those inches may add up to miles, sometimes those miles were only inches after all.

I'll always touch you.

You’d rather get stabbed forty-one times than ruin the curb appeal of your home?” Maryellen asked. “Yes,” Grace said.

I am the flying saucer man from another world trapped on yours until they come to rescue me. One day the saucer will land. Jimi Hendrix and John Coltrane will open the hatch and tell me to get in before someone tries to blow up the ship. I'll just ask what took them so long. Within seconds we'll be out of here.

You can’t beg the world to do what you want. You can’t ask it nicely. You must force the world. You must bend it to your will.

A girl with a guitar never has to apologize for anything.

one thing I learned from all these books: it pays to be paranoid.

With this book, I wanted to pit a man freed from all responsibilities but his appetites against women whose lives are shaped by their endless responsibilities. I wanted to pit Dracula against my mom. As you'll see, it's not a fair fight.

Why do you pretend what we do is nothing?” she asked. “Every day, all the chaos and messiness of life happens and every day we clean it all up. Without us, they would just wallow in filth and disorder and nothing of any consequence would ever get done. Who taught you to sneer at that? I’ll tell you who. Someone who took their mother for granted.

Imagination is the key to my lyrics. The rest is painted with a little science fiction.

Murder is man’s attempt to steal birth from women,” she says. “We make children, they kill them. We create life, they create death. It’s the way it’s always been.

Reading the wrong book is almost worse than not reading any book at all,

I've had three children . . . And some man who's never felt . . . his baby crown is stronger than me? Is tougher than me?

Life doesn’t care what you want, other people don’t care what you want. All that matters is what you do.

Corn dogs," the exorcist said, "are all the proof I need that there is a God.

Are you experienced? Have you ever been experienced?

I wish they'd had electric guitars in cotton fields back in the good old days. A whole lot of things would've been straightened out.

You must make choices, or the world will make them for you.

Being a teenager isn't a number, " Maryellen said. "It's the age when you stop liking them.

Think of us what you will," she thought, "we made mistakes, and probably scarred our children for life, and we froze sandwiches, and forgot car pool, and got divorced. But when the time came, we went the distance.

wishing harder than she’d ever wished before that for just sixty seconds someone would hold her, but no one holds moms.

She didn’t expect life to be fair, but did it have to be so relentless?

So, do you, like, talk pirate?” GG raises his brows. “No, love.” “Well that’s no fun. I think I need to introduce that to ye scallywags.” They all burst out laughing. … I turn and grin up at Hendrix. “Aye cap’n, I took ye advice and joined in this party.” He raises his brows. “Seriously?

Even castles made of sand, fall into the sea, eventually.

There are enough people running around in here. It’s starting to feel like an episode of Scooby-Doo.

What had been destroyed made what remained that much more precious. That much more solid. That much more important.

I am not sure what the appropriate gesture is to make toward the family of the woman who bit off your ear, but if you felt absolutely compelled, I certainly wouldn’t take food.

Time only moves in one direction no matter how hard we wish it wasn’t so.

Kris had been alive long enough to know it was dangerous when men accused you of being better than them.

These stuffed animals were how she had first learned to love something that couldn’t always love you back.

I try all night to play a pretty note.

When the power of love overpowers the love of power the world will know peace

A no-good man will tell you he's going to change," she said. "He'll tell you whatever you want to hear, but you're the fool if you don't believe what you see.

A song isn't a commercial for an album. It isn't a tool to build name awareness or reinforce your brand. A song is a bullet that can shatter your chains.

I firmly believe if you want to be a guitar player, you better start on acoustic and then graduate to electric. Don’t think you’re going to be Townshend or Hendrix just because you can go wee wee wah wah, and all the electronic tricks of the trade. First you’ve got to know that fucker. And you go to bed with it. If there’s no babe around, you sleep with it. She’s just the right shape.

You ladies read a strange assortment of books," James Harris said. "We're a strange assortment of broads," Kitty replied.

Viviré en París y no comeré nada que no sea chocolate; además fumaré puros, me inyectaré heroína y solo escucharé a Jimi Hendrix y The Doors.

The problem with book club these days is too many men. They don’t know how to pick a book to save their lives and they love to listen to themselves talk. It’s nothing but opinions, all day long.

Your generation - you've not heard the Verve or Jimi Hendrix or Eminem, you've not read The Catcher in the Rye, you've not seen a classic film like Terminator or Blade Runner. All you've done is read dross, listen to crap and watch Disney movies with happy endings. And what kind of generation have we produced? A slow, simple, dull one who never questions anything. A stunted generation. It's devolution because in order for society to progress, you need to be able to debate ideas, to question, to see the dark and the light in things

Each of us has a monster we must confront, a monster designed to test our personal weaknesses. And in the end, they bring about our deaths. Not literal death, but death as the conclusion of this phase and the beginning of another. Death is the harbinger of transformation, that which precedes a new life.

Where everyone was desperate to be an individual, but they all were terrified to stand out.

Books can inspire you to love yourself more, it said. By listening to, writing out, or verbally expressing your feelings.

By the power of Phil Collins, I rebuke you!” she said. “By the power of Phil Collins, who knows that you coming back to me is against all odds, in his name I command you to leave this servant of Genesis alone... By the power of The Thorn Birds - she cried - by the sacred strength of My Sweet Audrina and Forever... By the power of lost retainers and Jamaica and bad cornrows and fireflies and Madonna, by all these things I rebuke you

It’s complicated. But pain and fear have a way of simplifying things.

Everyone's hungry for our children," she said, and her voice cracked. "The whole world wants to gobble up colored children and no matter how many it takes it just licks its lips and wants more.

He doesn’t tell me how beautiful I am; he shows me.

Mothering, manipulating—sometimes there wasn’t a difference. She’d learned that from her mom.

Wasting food is no joke!” he’d shout. “That’s how Karen Carpenter died!

Be strong, trust in the Lord, and stay hydrated.

Why is it always bitches, Kitty thought. As if men believed that word had some kind of magic power.

You’ll look like this one day,” she said. “They hate us enough. Don’t hate yourselves, too.

It's time for a new National Anthem. America is divided into two definite divisions. The easy thing to cop out with is sayin' black and white. You can see a black person. But now to get down to the nitty-gritty, it's getting' to be old and young - not the age, but the way of thinking. Old and new, actually... because there's so many even older people that took half their lives to reach a certain point that little kids understand now.

There was no falling-out, no great tragedy, just a hundred thousand trivial moments they didn’t share, each one an inch of distance between them, and eventually those inches added up to miles.

I couldn’t strut around like Mick Jagger, or smash my instrument up like Jimi Hendrix or Pete Townshend: bitter subsequent experience has taught me that if you get carried away and try and smash up a piano by pushing it offstage, you end up looking less like a lawless rock god and more like a furniture removal man having a bad day.

You're sure this isn't satanic?' Ruth Anne asked. 'It's a nondenominational séance," Trinity said.

A true witch does not fear change. She is in an eternal state of revolution.

No one loves me! Boo hoo! Guess what? We play fucking metal! I don't want to sing about your sad feelings! I want dragons.

Would you prefer me to be ashamed?” she asked. “My appearance is the least of my qualities.

Where are you supposed to stay?” He ground out... “Hendrix, are you kidding me?” “By me, Reagan. Always, by me,” he answered, ignoring my sarcasm.

We sat side by side on the swings. The creaking sound they made seemed sexier to me than a Jimi Hendrix guitar solo.

He dreamed of amassing musicians from all over the world in Woodstock and they would sit in a field in a circle and play and play. It didn't matter what key or tempo or what melody, they would keep on playing through their discordance until they found a common language.

The silence continued and Patricia felt something bigger than her fear: solidarity.

Because you’re real, Pupkin,” Louise said. “And nothing real can last forever. That’s how you know you’re real. Because one day you die.

I wanted to pit Dracula against my mom. As you'll see, it's not a fair fight.

Daughter, student, whore- they change you into whatever they need you to be. Choose for yourself. For once in your life.

Something I learned from the Serbian tribes. Churches are built where saints were martyred. A bridge requires a child in its foundations if it is to hold. All great works must begin with a sacrifice.

Fame is not so impossible for people with charisma, passion and talent. Being famous just means you have fans, and even one or two is enough to make you someone special. Ask a music fan who the best guitarist of all time is, and while one group insists that it was Jimmi Hendrix, another group swears that it was Eddie Van Halen instead. There will never be a time when everyone on this planet agrees on something like that, but luckily that's not important. All that matters is that both sides remain loyal, which they will assuming you continue to be who you are and do your thing. This is all that you need to be immortalized.

The problem was the liars. They said she could do anything she set her mind to, they told her she should shoot for the moon because if she missed she’d be among the stars, they made movies tricking her into thinking she could achieve heroic things. All lies. Because she was born to answer phones in call centers, to carry bags to customers’ cars, to punch a clock, to measure her life in smoke breaks. To think otherwise was insane.

Do you want to be right, or do you want to be in relationship?” Because you can’t always have both. You can’t cuddle up and relax with “being right” after a long day.

Out there in the world it’s a nonstop murder party, and if I make the slightest mistake I’ll wind up dead.

I’ll come right out and say it,” Mercy told them. “Strange noises, bad vibes, your mom and dad recently passed— Your house is haunted and I’m not selling it until you deal with that.

You know, Louise, statistically, and there’s a lot of variance in these numbers, but in general, from a strictly scientific point of view, everything turns out okay an improbable number of times.

When you know who you are, you know what to do.

The devil is loud and brash and full of drama. God, He's like a sparrow.

She had nothing. Except her music.

Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens.

Sometimes you need the money more than you need to live with yourself

Stop saying drug use makes people lazy. Jimi Hendrix did a lot of drugs, even though he's been dead for forty years, he's still making new records. Suck on that, Partnership for a Drug-Free America!

If the mountains fell in the sea, Let it be, it ain't me. Got my own world to live through And I ain't gonna copy you. Now, if 6 turned up to be 9, I don't mind, I don't mind. If all the hippies cut off their hair, I don't care, I don't care. Did, 'cos I got my own world to live through And I ain't gonna copy you.

Romantic Love delivers us into the passionate arms of someone who will ultimately trigger the same frustrations we had with our parents, but for the best possible reason! Doing so brings our childhood wounds to the surface so they can be healed.

I think,” Grace said, and they sat up straighter, “that it shows a remarkable lack of planning on Betty’s part. If you’re going to murder your best friend with an axe, you should make sure you know what you’re doing.

You say tomato and I say shamanistic vision quest that uses an ordeal to lead us inward on a journey of spiritual discovery and eventual synthesis and peace.

When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will see peace.

If ifs and buts were candy and nuts it would be Christmas every day,

The police think all kind of things,” Mrs. Greene said. “Doesn’t necessarily make them true.

Hard rock, heavy metal, stoner rock, doom metal-it all dragged itself up out of the swamp called the blues.

Why are we more comfortable with fast, dramatic deaths than the slow decay most people get? After all, isn’t this why we fought so hard? To have the right to do what Michelle is doing right this minute?

The final girl and the monster are two sides of one person. Think about it. One runs fast, and screams, and is resourceful, and fights for her friends. The other is slow, and implacable, and silent, and he kills, and is alone.

The movies, I thought, have got the soundtrack to war all wrong. War isn't rock 'n' roll. It's got nothing to do with Jimi Hendrix or Richard Wagner. War is nursery rhymes and early Madonna tracks. War is the music from your childhood. Because war, when it's not making you kill or be killed, turns you into an infant. For the past eight days, I'd been living like a five-year-old — a nonexistence of daytime naps, mushy food, and lavatory breaks. My adult life was back in Los Angeles with my dirty dishes and credit card bills.

I will be dead in five years' time, but while I am here, I will travel many highways and I will, of necessity, die at a time when my message of love, peace, and freedom can be shared with people all over the world.

Does it hurt?" I ask. "Getting shot in the legs?" she asks. "What, because I'm paralyzed? You think it doesn't hurt? Here's an idea, Lynnette. Why don't you go get shot in something you don't use, like your head, and report back, okay?

Sometimes you'll want to give up the guitar. You'll hate the guitar. But if you stick with it, you're gonna be rewarded.

Nothing was strong enough to stand against the passage of time.

She checked underneath the sink but didn’t see anything that might destroy an evil puppet.

Because we’re women,” Periwinkle said. “Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Jew—the one thing they all have in common is that they hate us. For hundreds of thousands of years,

She could decide how she was going to be. She had a choice. Life could be an endless series of joyless chores, or she could get totally pumped and make it fun. There were bad things, and there were good things, but she got to choose which things to focus on. Her mom focused only on the bad things. Abby didn’t have to.

Nightwalking men always have a hunger on them [...] They never stop taking and they don't know about enough. They mortgaged their souls away and now they eat and eat and never know how to stop.

I want my love to be the most extravagant gift I ever give you,” he whispers, his voice deep and reverent. “I want it to be outrageously unconditional. I want it to overflow and spill into every crevice of your life, every corner of your heart because that’s what you do for me. You overwhelm me, Hendrix.

Knowledge is speaking, Wisdom is listening

Work gives you a goal. It lets you build something that lives on after you’re gone. Work has a purpose beyond making money.

Surviving is good, but overcoming is better.

it made no sense, but sometimes you did a thing because that was just what you did, not because it was sensible.

You said you wanted to live where people watched out for each other,” Patricia told her. “But what’s the good of watching if we’re not going to act?

We were never girls. We were witches.

Had Kurt Cobain not committed suicide in 1994, would his genius have survived the continuous incisions of a media that was only too proud of its ability to chisel away at his fragile psyche in the years before he decided that he'd had enough off their invasions? And, had Jimi Hendrix not passed way in 1970, would he, too have eventually fallen into decline, first equalled, then eclipsed by the brilliant wave of new guitarists: Robin Trower, Ritchie Blackmore, Mick Ronson, who emerged during the early 1970s? In death, Hendrix led by example: in life he could have been left for the dead.

How did he keep playing when money got really tight, and there was no more food in the house? How did he play on when it became clear he was flunking out of school? Was music really enough when the whole world seemed to be collapsing around him? Or was it just the only thing left?

Abby and Gretchen still kept up, but it was phone calls and letters, then postcards and voicemail, and finally emails and Facebook likes. There was no falling-out, no great tragedy, just a hundred thousand trivial moments they didn’t share, each one an inch of distance between them, and eventually those inches added up to miles.

You have a smile like fire and eyes like thunder, and you make servants kill their masters and children kill their parents. You are the devourer of stars, the destroyer of time, the rash solution, the cleaving that can never be rejoined, giver of dooming rage.

Someone comes along saying they’ll save you and you throw yourself into their arms and let them make all the decisions. You can only hope that by the time you come to your senses they haven’t done too much damage.

Everyone realizes that at some point, right? It's part of growing up. You realize you're not going to be the star of the show. You realize you're going to be lucky to scrape by and pay the rent.

I’m every girl who’s ever run from a man with a weapon, every girl who ever ran for her life across spaces where she was supposed to be safe. I crash into the next studio and I’m Julia running through her dorm, I’m Heather running down her high school halls, I’m Marilyn running through the Texas afternoon, I’m Dani running through a hospital, I’m Adrienne running through this camp, this camp where there will always be a girl running and screaming and screaming, and I’m Lynnette, running at last, and he can’t catch me, I’m as fast as all of us put together, I’m faster than Billy Walker, I’m faster than the Ghost, I’m faster than the entire Volker family, I’m the fastest girl in the world.

In every book we read, no one ever thought anything bad was happening until it was too late. This is where we live, it's where our children live, it's our home. Don't you want to do absolutely everything you can to keep it safe?

In order to change the world, you have to get your head together first.

A monstrous bird unfurled its wings inside Amy’s chest and her anger felt bigger than the world.

Isn’t the point of therapy that one day you don’t need it anymore?

These false prophets come wandering into town, take hold of your mind, and lead you down a primrose path... People fall for honeyed words.

We get subjected to sequels. That's what makes our guys different, that's what makes them monsters - they keep coming back.

She knew she shouldn’t ask. She knew she stood in a puddle of gasoline and every word was a lit match falling from her lips.

But,” Miss Parcae said, “power without mercy is cruelty. And isn’t that what you’re subjected to now?

She didn’t think things could get any worse, then she saw the sign. Welcome to Florida, it read. The Sunshine State.

Once you’ve finish reading it, you’ve finished needing it” was her motto.

Amanda, You look at life Through the eyes of a child, And I don’t know where you got them, And it’s making me very uncomfortable. Please, stop.

The more Amy struggled, the faster she sank. Every month she shuffled around less and less money to cover the same number of bills. The hamster wheel kept spinning and spinning and spinning. Sometimes she wanted to let go and find out exactly how far she’d fall if she just stopped fighting. She didn’t expect life to be fair, but did it have to be so relentless?

We tend to die, women who’ve been through the fire. Sometimes we choose obvious ways, suicide and overdoses; sometimes we’re more subtle, marrying someone who likes to use his fists, or we drink too much and keep getting behind the wheel until we run out of luck.

When we were babies, we didn’t smile sweetly at our mothers to get them to take care of us. We didn’t pinpoint our discomfort by putting it into words. We simply opened our mouths and screamed. And it didn’t take us long to learn that, the louder we screamed, the quicker they came. The success of this tactic was turned into an “imprint,” a part of our stored memory about how to get the world to respond to our needs: “When you are frustrated, provoke the people around you.

For her, the world was divided into two kinds of jobs: those where you had to stand up, and those where you could sit down. If you were standing up, you were paid hourly. If you were sitting down, you were salaried.

Power is not a material possession that can be given. Power is the ability to act and that must always be taken, for no one will ever give that power to you. Those who have power wish to keep it, and those who want power must learn to take it.’ 

You’re going to hurt the feelings of all those new library books,” Louise said, and instantly Poppy’s eyes got wide. “They’re going to be sad you didn’t want to read them first. You’re going to make them cry.

Do not start anything you cannot finish. Intention matters. Accept anger, accept weakness, accept pain. As these cannot be avoided, turn them to your use. Use care, caution, and common sense in all that you do.

Trust me,” I say. “I’ve seen things that make your porn look like Dora the Explorer.

When the power of love overcomes the love of power, there will be peace.

You have everything you need today to do what God has for you to do today.

I’m an atheist,” Mark said. “Pish,” Aunt Gail said, dismissing him. “You’re a Presbyterian, just like your parents.

Faith, without action, is no faith at all. Love, without sacrifice, is no love at all.

Do you believe in ghosts?” she asked. Amy stepped back, startled. “Jesus!” “I guess he counts as a ghost,

Pain is a four letter word the weak use to get out of doing what must be done.

West Virginia was a haunted house. Grocery stores sat dark, empty diners stared out from blank windows, farmhouses collapsed beside the highway like rotten teeth.

Nice clean cut," Santos said, and Louise almost said thank you but managed to stop herself.

You’ve become such a grouch,” she said. “Having your arm sawed off will do that.

But everything worth doing is accompanied by fear.

For Abby, "friend" is a word whose sharp corners have been worn smooth by overuse. "I'm friends with the guys in IT," she might say, or "I'm meeting some friends after work." But she remembers when the word "friend" could draw blood. She and Gretchen spent hours ranking their friendships, trying to determine who was a best friend and who was an everyday friend, debating whether anyone could have two best friends at the same time, writing each other's names over and over in purple ink, buzzed on the dopamine high of belonging to someone else, having a total stranger choose you, someone who wanted to know you, another person who cared that you were alive.

Well I walk right on up to your rebel roadside The one that rambles on for a million miles Yes I walk down this road searchin' for your love And my soul too When I find ya I ain't gonna let go.

People still mourn when people die. That’s self-sympathy. All human beings are selfish to a certain extent, and that’s why people get so sad when someone dies. They haven’t finished using him. The person who is dead ain’t crying. Sadness is for when a baby is born into this heavy world, and joy should be exhibited at someone’s death because they are going on to something more permanent and infinitely better.

Isn't that how every serial killer gets away with it for so long?" Patricia asked. "Everyone ignores the little things and Ted Bundy keeps killing women until finally someone does what they should have done in the first place and connects the little things that didn't add up, but by then it's too late.

I won’t let this keep chewing up more and more people. I won’t let messed-up parents keep making monsters, and I wont let these boys keep making more final girls. It’s not some profound and ancient ritual. It’s just a waste of a life.

It was the voice of a preacher, a voice of the past, a voice for cathedrals, a voice from a time before microphones. It was a voice that denounced witches and flogged sinners. It was a voice that sang Latin while women burned at the stake and men were crushed beneath stones.

Here was the other option: the tranquilizing chair. It was always waiting for her. It always wanted her back. It always wanted her to quit again, to sit down and never get back up. In the end, Amy thought, everything always comes down to those two choices: stay down or stand up.

I don't like categorizing stuff, but women's roles all through history have been to act as hierophant or someone who's guarded the secrets or guarded the temple. I'm a girl doing what guys usually did, the way that I look, the goals and kinds of things I want to help achieve through rock. It's more heroic stuff and heroic stuff has been traditionally male. Like Hendrix and Jim Morrison and all those people. I mean, Jim Morrison was trying to elevate the word; he was the poet in rock & roll before me. He was an academic poet. Lou Reed -- another academic poet. I'm more like down-to-earth than them guys

There’s so much life and it just keeps going. Maybe not everyone’s life, but Life. (...) Because no matter how hard we try, we can’t stop life. No matter how much we fight, no matter how many we kill, things keep changing, and growing, and living, and people get lost, and fall away, and come back, and get born, and move on, and no matter what it’s all so much, it’s all so hard, the way life just keeps going and going.

Abby Rivers and Gretchen Lang were best friends, on and off, for seventy-five years, and there aren’t many people who can say that. They weren’t perfect. They didn’t always get along. They screwed up. They acted like assholes. They fought, they fell out, they patched things up, they drove each other crazy, and they didn’t make it to Halley’s Comet. But they tried.

Ever wonder what happens to those final girls? After the cops eliminate them as suspects, after the press releases their brace-faced, pizza-cheeked, bad-hair-day class photos that inevitably get included on the cover of the true crime book? After the candlelight vigils and the moments of silence, after someone plants the memorial shrub?

He thought he was in love with a person, when in fact he was in love with an image projected upon that person. Cheryl was not a real person with needs and desires of her own; she was a resource for the satisfaction of his unconscious childhood longings. He was in love with the idea of wish fulfillment and--like Narcissus--with a reflected part of himself.

Our parents say the War is good. The president says the bomb is good. They tell us factories that poison the earth are good. They say drugs are bad, and burning draft cards is bad, and hippies are bad, and everyone who wants to stop the War and save the planet is bad. It’s brainwashing! Everything they say is bad is good, and everything they say is good is bad. So maybe we should stop marching along like a bunch of sheep and start thinking for ourselves.

Helen and I like to think of two people in a conscious love relationship as companion stars. Each person is a unique individual ablaze with potential. One is just as important as the other, and each has a unique and equally valid view of the universe. Yet, together, they form a greater whole, kept connected by the pull of mutual love and respect. They mirror the interconnected universe.     New

My husband has no more consideration for me than a dog, she said. He goes off and screws little girls with the other men and we sit home like good little women and wash their shirts and pack their bags for their sex trips. We keep their houses warm and clean for when they’re ready to come home and shower off some other woman’s perfume before tucking their children into bed. For years I’ve pretended I don’t know where he goes, or who those girls are on the phone, but every time he comes home, I lie there in bed beside my husband, who doesn’t touch me, who doesn’t talk to me, who doesn’t love me, and I pretend I can’t smell some twenty-year-old’s body on him

She and Gretchen spent hours ranking their friendships, trying to determine who was a best friend and who was an everyday friend, debating whether anyone could have two best friends at the same time, writing each other’s names over and over in purple ink, buzzed on the dopamine high of belonging to someone else, having a total stranger choose you, someone who wanted to know you, another person who cared that you were alive.

Fifteen years ago, the cultural critic Greil Marcus wrote of Jimi's performance of our national anthem as "his great NO to the war, to racism, to whatever you or he might think of and want gone. But then that discord shattered, and for more than four and a half long, complex minutes Hendrix pursued each invisible crack in a vessel that had once been whole, feeling out and exploring and testing himself and his music against anguish, rage, fear, hate, love offered, and love refused. When he finished, he had created an anthem that could never be summed up and that would never come to rest. In the end it was a great YES, both a threat and a beckoning, an invitation to America to match its danger, glamour, and freedom." … In late 1969, Jimi Hendrix wrote a poem celebrating Woodstock, saying with words what his music had in August: "500,000 halos outshined the mud and history. We washed and drank in God's tears of joy. And for once, and for everyone, the truth was not still a mystery.

He died at forty-two. I was there to collect his talent. I was there at the hospital deathbed of my beloved Billie Holiday, just forty-four, her liver destroyed by drinking; I was there inside the hotel room of Charlie Parker, my singular jazz saxophonist, who died in his midthirties, but whose body was so ravaged by drugs the coroners thought he was sixty. Tommy Dorsey, the bandleader, choked in his sleep when he was fifty-one, too deep in pills to awaken. Johnny Allen Hendrix (you called him Jimi) swallowed a handful of barbiturates and expired. He was twenty-seven. It is not new, this idea that a purer art awaits you in a substance. But it is naive. I existed before the first grapes were fermented. Before the first whiskey was distilled. Be it opium or absinthe, marijuana or heroin, cocaine or ecstasy or whatever will follow, you may alter your state, but you will not alter this truth: I am Music. I am here inside you. Why would I hide behind a powder or a vapor? Do you think me so petty?

Everyone plays for someone, and Kris didn't play for the big dogs like Sabbath and Zep, she didn't play for the ones who made it, for the wizards who figured out how to turn their music into cars and cash and mansions and an endless party where no one ever gets old. She played for the losers. She played for the bands who never met their rainmaker, the musicians who drank too much and made all the wrong decisions. The singers who got shipped off to state hospitals because they couldn't handle living in the shadow of Black Iron Mountain. She played for the ones who recorded the wrong songs at the right times, and the right songs when it was wrong. The ones who blew it all recording an album that didn't fit the market, the ones who got dropped by their own labels, the singers who moved back home to live in their mom's basements.

Through Jimi Hendrix's music you can almost see the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and of Martin Luther King Junior, the beginnings of the Berlin Wall, Yuri Gagarin in space, Fidel Castro and Cuba, the debut of Spiderman, Martin Luther King Junior’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, Ford Mustang cars, anti-Vietnam protests, Mary Quant designing the mini-skirt, Indira Gandhi becoming the Prime Minister of India, four black students sitting down at a whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro North Carolina, President Johnson pushing the Civil Rights Act, flower children growing their hair long and practicing free love, USA-funded IRA blowing up innocent civilians on the streets and in the pubs of Great Britain, Napalm bombs being dropped on the lush and carpeted fields of Vietnam, a youth-driven cultural revolution in Swinging London, police using tear gas and billy-clubs to break up protests in Chicago, Mods and Rockers battling on Brighton Beach, Native Americans given the right to vote in their own country, the United Kingdom abolishing the death penalty, and the charismatic Argentinean Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara. It’s all in Jimi’s absurd and delirious guitar riffs.

Horror is a woman’s genre, and it has been all the way back to the oldest horror novel still widely read today: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, daughter of pioneering feminist author Mary Wollstonecraft. Ann Radcliffe’s gothic novels (The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Italian) made her the highest-paid writer of the late eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Charlotte Riddell were book-writing machines, turning out sensation novels and ghost stories by the pound. Edith Wharton wrote ghost stories before becoming a novelist of manners, and Vernon Lee (real name Violet Paget) wrote elegant tales of the uncanny that rival anything by Henry James. Three of Daphne du Maurier’s stories became Hitchcock films (Jamaica Inn, Rebecca, The Birds), and Shirley Jackson’s singular horror novel The Haunting of Hill House made her one of the highest-regarded American writers of the twentieth century.