“
I've apparently been the victim of growing up, which apparently happens to all of us at one point or another. It's been going on for quite some time now, without me knowing it. I've found that growing up can mean a lot of things. For me, it doesn't mean I should become somebody completely new and stop loving the things I used to love. It means I've just added more things to my list. Like for example, I'm still beyond obsessed with the winter season and I still start putting up strings of lights in September. I still love sparkles and grocery shopping and really old cats that are only nice to you half the time. I still love writing in my journal and wearing dresses all the time and staring at chandeliers. But some new things I've fallen in love with -- mismatched everything. Mismatched chairs, mismatched colors, mismatched personalities. I love spraying perfumes I used to wear when I was in high school. It brings me back to the days of trying to get a close parking spot at school, trying to get noticed by soccer players, and trying to figure out how to avoid doing or saying anything uncool, and wishing every minute of every day that one day maybe I'd get a chance to win a Grammy. Or something crazy and out of reach like that. ;) I love old buildings with the paint chipping off the walls and my dad's stories about college. I love the freedom of living alone, but I also love things that make me feel seven again. Back then naivety was the norm and skepticism was a foreign language, and I just think every once in a while you need fries and a chocolate milkshake and your mom. I love picking up a cookbook and closing my eyes and opening it to a random page, then attempting to make that recipe. I've loved my fans from the very first day, but they've said things and done things recently that make me feel like they're my friends -- more now than ever before. I'll never go a day without thinking about our memories together.
”
”
Taylor Swift (Taylor Swift Songbook: Guitar Recorded Versions)
“
Most of the members of the convent were old-fashioned Satanists, like their parents and grandparents before them. They'd been brought up to it, and weren't, when you got right down to it, particularly evil. Human beings mostly aren't. They just get carried away by new ideas, like dressing up in jackboots and shooting people, or dressing up in white sheets and lynching people, or dressing up in tie-dye jeans and playing guitars at people. Offer people a new creed with a costume and their hearts and minds will follow. Anyway, being brought up as a Satanist tended to take the edge off it. It was something you did on Saturday nights.
And the rest of the time you simply got on with life as best you could, just like everyone else.
”
”
Terry Pratchett (Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch)
“
Live your life like you're 80 looking back on your teenager years. You know if your dad calls you at eight in the morning and asks if you want to go out for breakfast. As a teenager you're like no, I want to sleep. But as an eighty year old looking back you have that breakfast with your dad. It just little things like that, that helped me when I was a teenager in terms of making choices you won't regret.
”
”
Taylor Swift (Taylor Swift Songbook: Guitar Recorded Versions)
“
These days, I've been trying to classify my thoughts into two categories: "Things I can change," and "Things I can't." It seems to help me sort through what to really stress about. But there I go again, over-planning and over-organizing my over-thinking! I write songs about my adventures and misadventures, most of which concern love. Love is a tricky business. But if it wasn't, I wouldn't be so enthralled with it. Lately I've come to a wonderful realization that makes me even more fascinated by it: I have no idea what I'm doing when it comes to love. No one does! There's no pattern to it, except that it happens to all of us, of course. I can't plan for it. I can't predict how it'll end up. Because love is unpredictable and it's frustrating and it's tragic and it's beautiful. And even though there's no way to feel like I'm an expert at it, it's worth writing songs about -- more than anything else I've ever experienced in my life.
”
”
Taylor Swift (Taylor Swift Songbook: Guitar Recorded Versions)
“
Sometimes in life you don't always feel like a winner, but that doesn't mean you're not a winner.
”
”
Lady Gaga (Lady Gaga - Born This Way Piano, Vocal and Guitar Chords)
“
Well, I’ve been a musician my whole life. When I was two, I would sing the theme from Star Wars in my crib; my mom taped it for proof. Then, when I was five, I asked for a violin. No one knew why I would want one, but my wish was granted and I ended up a classically trained fiddler by age 12. The only problem with that was, when you’re a classical violinist, everybody expects you to be satisfied with playing Tchaikovsky for the rest of your life, and saying you want to play jazz, rock, write songs, sing your songs, hook up your fiddle to a guitar amp, sleep with your 4-track recorder, mess around with synths, dress like Tinkerbell in combat boots, AND play Tchaikovsky is equivalent to spitting on the Pope.
”
”
Emilie Autumn
“
Boast of Quietness
Writings of light assault the darkness, more prodigious than meteors.
The tall unknowable city takes over the countryside.
Sure of my life and death, I observe the ambitious and would like to
understand them.
Their day is greedy as a lariat in the air.
Their night is a rest from the rage within steel, quick to attack.
They speak of humanity.
My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of that same poverty.
They speak of homeland.
My homeland is the rhythm of a guitar, a few portraits, an old sword,
the willow grove's visible prayer as evening falls.
Time is living me.
More silent than my shadow, I pass through the loftily covetous multitude.
They are indispensable, singular, worthy of tomorrow.
My name is someone and anyone.
I walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn't expect to arrive.
”
”
Jorge Luis Borges
“
You take a deep breath and you walk through the doors. It's the morning of your very first day. You say hi to your friends you ain't seen in a while, try and stay out of everybody's way. It's your freshman year and your gonna be here for the next four years in this town. Hopin' one of those senior boys will wink at you and say, "You know I haven't seen you around before." 'Cause when you're fifteen and somebody tells you they love you, you're gonna believe them. And when you're fifteen, feelin' like there's nothin' to figure out, but, count to ten, take it in. This is life before you know who you're gonna be. Fifteen.
”
”
Taylor Swift (Taylor Swift - Fearless: Easy Guitar with Notes & Tab)
“
SONIA: What can we do? We must live our lives. [A pause] Yes, we shall live, Uncle Vanya. We shall live through the long procession of days before us, and through the long evenings; we shall patiently bear the trials that fate imposes on us; we shall work for others without rest, both now and when we are old; and when our last hour comes we shall meet it humbly, and there, beyond the grave, we shall say that we have suffered and wept, that our life was bitter, and God will have pity on us. Ah, then dear, dear Uncle, we shall see that bright and beautiful life; we shall rejoice and look back upon our sorrow here; a tender smile—and—we shall rest. I have faith, Uncle, fervent, passionate faith. [SONIA kneels down before her uncle and lays her head on his hands. She speaks in a weary voice] We shall rest. [TELEGIN plays softly on the guitar] We shall rest. We shall hear the angels. We shall see heaven shining like a jewel. We shall see all evil and all our pain sink away in the great compassion that shall enfold the world. Our life will be as peaceful and tender and sweet as a caress. I have faith; I have faith. [She wipes away her tears] My poor, poor Uncle Vanya, you are crying! [Weeping] You have never known what happiness was, but wait, Uncle Vanya, wait! We shall rest. [She embraces him] We shall rest. [The WATCHMAN’S rattle is heard in the garden; TELEGIN plays softly; MME. VOITSKAYA writes something on the margin of her pamphlet; MARINA knits her stocking] We shall rest.
”
”
Anton Chekhov (Uncle Vanya)
“
When I was younger, I would cling to life because life was at the top of the turning wheel. But like the song of my gypsy girl, the great wheel turns over and lands on a minor key. It is then that you come of age and life means nothing to you. To live, to die, to overdose, to fall in a coma in the street... it is all the same. It is only in the peach innocence of youth that life is at its crest on top of the wheel. And there being only life, the young cling to it, they fear death… And they should! ...For they are 'in' life.
”
”
Roman Payne (The Wanderess)
“
I have never been
So insulted in all my life
I could swallow the seas
To wash down all this pride
First you run like a fool
Just to be at my side
And now you run like a fool
But you just run to hide.
”
”
Fiona Apple (Fiona Apple - Tidal Piano, Vocal and Guitar Chords)
“
His heart was like a battered guitar; worn and scuffed from a life spent
out on the road, but still capable
of bringing forth beautiful music.
”
”
John Mark Green
“
Time spent for temporary happiness like movie or outing or weekend on a beach is all synthetic; with shelf life of a day or two. Work for your bigger dreams that should last for whole life. Then movie and beach would seem more interesting, realising that you have done something.
”
”
Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma (Guru with Guitar)
“
It's like this when you fall hard for a musician. It's a crush with religious overtones. You listen to the songs and you memorize the words and the notes and this is a form of prayer. You attend the shows and this is the liturgy. You're interested in relics -- guitar picks, set lists, the sweaty napkin applied to His brow. You set up shrines in your room. It's not just about the music. It's about who you are when you listen to the music and who you wish to be and the way a particular song can bridge that gap, can make you feel the abrupt thrill of absolute faith.
”
”
Steve Almond (Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life: A Book by and for the Fanatics Among Us)
“
Life can sometimes feel like an overproduced song, with a cacophony of a hundred instruments playing all at once. Sometimes the song sounds better stripped back to just a guitar and a voice. Sometimes, when a song has too much happening, it's hard to hear the song at all.
”
”
Matt Haig (Notes on a Nervous Planet)
“
I'm never really comfortable at parties. Maybe I'm just not the partying type.
...I think it's because I'm never sure what to do with myself.
I mean, there're drinks, but I don't like being drunk.... There's music, but I never really learned to dance to anything that involved an electric guitar. There are people to talk to...but once you put all the stupid things I do aside, I'm really not that interesting. I like reading, staying home, going on walks with my dog.... Who wants to hear about that? Especially when I would have to scream it over music to which no one dances.
So I'm there but not drinking, listening to music but not dancing, and trying to have conversations with near-strangers about anything other than my own stupid life.... Leads to a lot of awkward pauses. And then I start wondering why I showed up in the first place."
-- Cold Days (The Dresden Files Book 14), pg. 33
”
”
Jim Butcher
“
If I could find a real-life place that made me feel like Tiffany’s, then I’d buy some furniture and give the cat a name.
”
”
Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany's and Three Stories: House of Flowers, A Diamond Guitar, and A Christmas Memory)
“
The multiple choices and possibilities of daily life are the music we dance to. They are like strings on a guitar. Strum and you create a pleasing sound. A harmonic.
”
”
Stephen King (11/22/63)
“
I’ve had a lot of sucks in life
A lot
My parents died almost four years ago, right after I turned seven
With every day that goes by I remember them less and less
Like my mom…I remember that she used to sing.
She was always happy,
always dancing.
Other than what I’ve seen of her in pictures, I don’t really remember what she looks like.
Or what she smells like
Or what she sounds like
And my Dad
I remember more things about him, but only because I thought he was the most amazing man in the world.
He was smart. He knew the answer to everything.
And he was strong.
And he played the guitar.
I used to love lying in bed at night, listening to the music coming from the living room.
I miss that the most.
His music.
After they died, I went to live with my grandma and grandpaul.
Don’t get me wrong…I love my grandparents.
But I loved my home even more.
It reminded me of them.
Of my mom and dad.
My brother had just started college the year they died.
He knew how much I wanted to be home.
He knew how much it meant to me,
so he made it happen.
I was only seven at the time, so I let him do it.
I let him give up his entire life just so I could be home.
Just so I wouldn’t be so sad.
If I could do it all over again, I would have never let him take me.
He deserved a shot, too. A shot at being young.
But sometimes when you’re seven, the world isn’t in 3-D.
So,
I owe a lot to my brother.
A lot of ‘thank you’d’
A lot of ‘I’m sorry’s’
A lot of ‘I love you’s’
I owe a lot to you, Will
For making the sucks in my life a little less suckier
And my sweet?
My sweet is right now.
”
”
Colleen Hoover (Point of Retreat (Slammed, #2))
“
Life is like playing a guitar and meditation is like music. Small session of rehearsals daily won’t show much but would make you ROCK in the long run.
”
”
Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma (Guru with Guitar)
“
I was ten when I heard the music that ended the first phase of my life and cast me hurtling towards a new horizon. Drenched to the skin, I stood on Dunoon’s pier peering seawards through diagonal rain, looking for the ferry that would take me home. There, on the everwet west coast of Scotland, I heard it: like sonic scalpels, the sounds of electric guitars sliced through the dreich weather. My body hairs pricked up like antennae. To my young ears these amplified guitars sounded angelic, for surely no man-made instrument could produce that tone. The singer couldn't be human. His voice was too clean, too pure, too resonant, as though a robot larynx were piping words through vocal chords of polished silver. The overall effect was intoxicating - a storm of drums, earthquake bass, razor-sharp guitar riffs, and soaring vocals of astonishing clarity. I knew that I was hearing the future.
”
”
Mark Rice (Metallic Dreams)
“
Unless you're a true prodigy, you're going to have to practice for a while being bad before you get any good. And it will seem like a waste of time. I remember that feeling well. But don't worry about wasting time, because it'll be so worth it. It's my experience that in the end, life lessons and guitar lessons begin to blur in all sorts of interesting ways.
”
”
Brad Paisley (Diary of a Player: How My Musical Heroes Made a Guitar Man Out of Me)
“
The multiple choices and possibilities of daily life are the music we dance to. They are like strings on a guitar. Strum them and you create a pleasing sound. A harmonic. But then start adding strings. Ten strings, a hundred strings, a thousand, a million. Because they multiply!
”
”
Stephen King (11/22/63)
“
Mira moved into the light like a sleepwalker, leaving Blue behind in the dust, the unused room, the past.
She thought of the fabled hundred years that cursed girls like her had slept, and how, after that much time, everything would be covered by a thick blanket of dust, including the princess. The intrepid prince would have to trust that something beautiful was hidden underneath. He'd kiss her and the first color to be revealed would be the chapped pink of her lips.
Her eyes went to Freddie, playing his guitar and lit by the sun. She couldn't picture him kissing a girl coated by dust - he was too alive for that.
He was golden. And she ... she was covered with death, with her grief over her parents. She'd tried to replace them with dreams, and she'd drifted through life in a haze, her eyes seeking ghosts instead of the world around her.
She was already asleep.
She had been for a long time.
”
”
Sarah Cross (Kill Me Softly (Beau Rivage, #1))
“
Life is like a guitar, Strums it until your fingers bleed
”
”
Sumit Upadhyay
“
The multiple choices and possibilities of daily life are the music we dance to. They are like strings on a guitar. Strum them and you create a pleasing sound. A harmonic.
”
”
Stephen King (11/22/63)
“
My head whips back from the impact and my ribs twang like a dropped guitar. The sky spins above me like a penny. My bike has dematerialized, and my iPod is strewn about the intersection in a million glittering pieces. When I try to move, ten different parts of my body light up at once, like someone's pressing all the buttons at an anatomy exhibit. The magnolia tree blows me a kiss of perfumed air, and I can't decide if what I'm feeling is incredible bliss of excruciating pain. This might just be the greatest moment of my life. It's possible. And if it is, I don't want to waste it lying around in the middle of the road. For a single, golden second I breathe galaxies.
”
”
Hilary T. Smith (Wild Awake)
“
IT HAS TO DO WITH ALL OF US,” said Owen Meany, when I called him that night. “SHE WAS JUST LIKE OUR WHOLE COUNTRY—NOT QUITE YOUNG ANYMORE, NOT BUT OLD EITHER; A LITTLE BREATHLESS, VERY BEAUTIFUL, MAYBE A LITTLE STUPID, MAYBE A LOT SMARTER THAN SHE SEEMED. AND SHE WAS LOOKING FOR SOMETHING—I THINK SHE WANTED TO BE GOOD. LOOK AT THE MEN IN HER LIFE—JOE DIMAGGIO, ARTHUR MILLER, MAYBE THE KENNEDYS. LOOK AT HOW GOOD THEY SEEM! LOOK AT HOW DESIRABLE SHE WAS! THAT’S WHAT SHE WAS: SHE WAS DESIRABLE. SHE WAS FUNNY AND SEXY—AND SHE WAS VULNERABLE, TOO. SHE WAS NEVER QUITE HAPPY, SHE WAS ALWAYS A LITTLE OVERWEIGHT. SHE WAS JUST LIKE OUR WHOLE COUNTRY,” he repeated; he was on a roll. I could hear Hester playing her guitar in the background, as if she were trying to improvise a folk song from everything she said. “AND THOSE MEN,” he said. “THOSE FAMOUS, POWERFUL MEN—DID THEY REALLY LOVE HER? AND DID THEY TAKE CARE OF HER? IF SHE WAS EVER WITH THE KENNEDYS, THEY COULDN’T HAVE LOVED HER—THEY WERE JUST USING HER, THEY WERE JUST BEING CARELESS AND TREATING THEMSELVES TO A THRILL. THAT’S WHAT POWERFUL MEN DO TO THIS COUNTRY—IT’S A BEAUITFUL, SEXY, BREATHLESS COUNTRY, AND POWERFUL MEN USE IT TO TREAT THEMSELVES TO A THRILL! THEY SAY THEY LOVE IT BUT THEY DON’T MEAN IT. THEY SAY THINGS TO MAKE THEMSELVES APPEAR GOOD—THEY MAKE THEMSELVES APPEAR MORAL. THAT”S WHAT I THOUGHT KENNEDY WAS: A MORALIST. BUT HE WAS JUST GIVING US A SNOW JOB, HE WAS JUST BEING A GOOD SEDUCER. I THOUGHT HE WAS A SAVIOR. I THOUGHT HE WANTED TO USE HIS POWER TO DO GOOD. BUT PEOPLE WILL SAY AND DO ANYTHING JUST TO GET THE POWER; THEN THEY’LL USE THE POWER JUST TO GET A THRILL. MARILYN MONROE WAS ALWAYS LOOKING FOR THE BEST MAN—MAYBE SHE WANTED THE MAN WITH THE MOST INTEGRITY, MAYBE SHE WANTED THE MAN WITH THE MOST ABILITY TO DO GOOD. AND SHE WAS SEDUCED, OVER AND OVER AGAIN—SHE GOT FOOLED, SHE WAS TRICKED, SHE GOT USED, SHE WAS USED UP. JUST LIKE THE COUNTRY. THE COUNTRY WANTS A SAVIOR. THE COUNTRY IS A SUCKER FOR POWERFUL MEN WHO LOOK GOOD. WE THINK THEY’RE MORALISTS AND THEN THEY JUST USE US. THAT'S WHAT’S GOING TO HAPPEN TO YOU AND ME,” said Owen Meany. “WE’RE GOING TO BE USED.
”
”
John Irving (A Prayer for Owen Meany)
“
To paint one must forget everything else. Where you live, who you know, what you eat, when to sleep. The landscape of the canvas becomes your only reality. The planet you inhabit is a single plane of infinite dimensions, stretched like a guitar string, and standing before you like a concubine waiting for your command.
”
”
Thomas Lloyd Qualls (Waking Up at Rembrandt's)
“
When I started everything, and by everything, I mean life, suicide was a joke. If I have to ride in that car with you, I'll slash my wrists with a butter knife. It was as real as a unicorn. No, less than that. It was as real as the explosion around an animated coyote. A hundred thousand people threaten to kill themselves every day and make a hundred thousand other people laugh, because like a cartoon, it's funny and meaningless. Gone even before you turn off the TV.
Then it was a disease. Something other people got, if they lived someplace dirty enough to get the infection under their nails. It was not a pleasant dinner table conversation, Cole, and like the flu, it only killed the weak. If you'd been exposed, you didn't talk about it. Wouldn't want to put other people off their feed.
It wasn't until high school that it became a possibility. Not an immediate one, not like It is a possibility I will download this album because the guitar is so sick it makes me want to dance, but possibility in the way that some people said when they grew up, they might be a fireman or an astronaut or a CPA who works late every single weekend while his wife has an affair with the guy who drives the DHL truck. It became a possibility like Maybe when I grow up, I will be dead.
”
”
Maggie Stiefvater (Forever (The Wolves of Mercy Falls, #3))
“
The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate. I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship. I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things. Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone, and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.
I do not know which of us has written this page.
”
”
Jorge Luis Borges (Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings)
“
The Marie bit is easy enough to understand, then. The Laura thing takes a bit more explaining, but what it is, I think, is this: sentimental music has this great way of taking you back somewhere at the same time that it takes you forward, so you feel nostalgic and hopeful all at the same time. Marie’s the hopeful, forward part of it – maybe not her, necessarily, but somebody like her, somebody who can turn things around for me. (Exactly that: I always think that women are going to save me, lead me through to a better life, that they can change and redeem me.) And Laura’s the backward part, the last person I loved, and when I hear those sweet, sticky acoustic guitar chords I reinvent our time together, and, before I know it, we’re in the car trying to sing the harmonies on “Sloop John B” and getting it wrong and laughing. We never did that in real life. We never sang in the car, and we certainly never laughed when we got something wrong. This is why I shouldn’t be listening to pop music at the moment.
”
”
Nick Hornby (High Fidelity)
“
He was rowed down from the north in a leather skiff manned by a crew of trolls. His fur cape was caked with candle wax, his brow stained blue by wine - though the latter was seldom noticed due to the fox mask he wore at-all times. A quill in his teeth, a solitary teardrop a-squirm in his palm, he was the young poet prince of Montreal, handsome, immaculate, searching for sturdier doors to nail his poignant verses on.
In Manhattan, grit drifted into his ink bottle. In Vienna, his spice box exploded. On the Greek island of Hydra, Orpheus came to him at dawn astride a transparent donkey and restrung his cheap guitar. From that moment on, he shamelessly and willingly exposed himself to the contagion of music. To the secretly religious curiosity of the traveler was added the openly foolhardy dignity of the troubadour. By the time he returned to America, songs were working in him like bees in an attic. Connoisseurs developed cravings for his nocturnal honey, despite the fact that hearts were occasionally stung.
Now, thirty years later, as society staggers towards the millennium - nailing and screeching at the while, like an orangutan with a steak knife in its side - Leonard Cohen, his vision, his gift, his perseverance, are finally getting their due. It may be because he speaks to this wounded zeitgeist with particular eloquence and accuracy, it may be merely cultural time-lag, another example of the slow-to-catch-on many opening their ears belatedly to what the few have been hearing all along. In any case, the sparkle curtain has shredded, the boogie-woogie gate has rocked loose from its hinges, and here sits L. Cohen at an altar in the garden, solemnly enjoying new-found popularity and expanded respect.
From the beginning, his musical peers have recognized Cohen´s ability to establish succinct analogies among life´s realities, his talent for creating intimate relationships between the interior world of longing and language and the exterior world of trains and violins. Even those performers who have neither "covered" his compositions nor been overtly influenced by them have professed to admire their artfulness: the darkly delicious melodies - aural bouquets of gardenia and thistle - that bring to mind an electrified, de-Germanized Kurt Weill; the playfully (and therefore dangerously) mournful lyrics that can peel the apple of love and the peach of lust with a knife that cuts all the way to the mystery, a layer Cole Porter just could`t expose. It is their desire to honor L. Cohen, songwriter, that has prompted a delegation of our brightest artists to climb, one by one, joss sticks smoldering, the steep and salty staircase in the Tower of Song.
”
”
Tom Robbins
“
The multiple choices and possibilities of daily life are the music we dance to. They are like strings on a guitar. Strum them and you create a pleasing sound. A harmonic. But then start adding strings. Ten strings, a hundred strings, a thousand, a million.
”
”
Stephen King (11/22/63)
“
Yes You Are!
Like the Blossoming rose,
Like the Rays of hope.
Like a deer in the forest,
Like an athlete full of zest.
Like a lamp in temple,
Like the life feeling ample.
Like the feel of the dawn,
Like the grace of the swan.
Like the melody of sitar,
Like the rage of guitar.
Like a group of angels in the sky,
Like the pot that makes you high.
Like the peacock's dance,
Like she is the romance.
Like the silent talk,
Like the wine from Medoc.
Like the colors of life,
Like the music from the fife.
Like the calmness of the cold wind
Like the beauty of the hind.
”
”
Ameya Agrawal (A Leap Within)
“
I'd been trying to turn my life into art, but I wasn't sure what form it should take. I played guitar with half-callused fingers, I found a discarded headboard on the side of the road and tied a hundred rope knots around it. I rented a studio so I could feel like an artist, and that worked for a while. I taped parts of essays to the wall in order to liberate them from my hard drive--to see them as whole. Rearranging them felt good, throwing them away felt even better. I was getting closer to saving only the most rapturous moments of my life. I disposed of memories until everything served me.
”
”
Chelsea Hodson (Tonight I'm Someone Else: Essays)
“
a guitar store is the only place in the known universe where a guy will allow himself to shop like a woman
”
”
Tim Brookes (Guitar: An American Life)
“
They were as unexpected as a mirage, those dancers on the Pont des Arts. Strictly speaking, the bridge is for pedestrians only, but waltzing is allowed on special nights like this. A guitar, a violin, an accordian -- a tune everyone knows -- and the dancers begin to twirl, spin, soar and glide all around us, in love with life at 3/4 time.
Did I say waltzing was allowed?
Under these circumstances, it's mandatory.
”
”
Vivian Swift (Le Road Trip: A Traveler's Journal of Love and France)
“
Charlotte Caffey played lead guitar like it was a totally normal thing for a girl to do, which made it a totally normal thing for a girl to do. It didn’t seem shocking or revolutionary to me—they were just a fucking great band.
”
”
Kathleen Hanna (Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk)
“
She suspected Primm operated a few decibels above the norm. Like an amplified electric guitar played with distortion. You liked it because power chords heightened the experience, making you feel life was being lived with higher intensity.
”
”
Julie Valerie (The Peculiar Fate of Holly Banks (Village of Primm #2))
“
Book, when I close you
life itself opens.
I hear
broken screams
in the harbor.
The copper slugs
cross the sandy areas,
descending to Tocopilla.
It is night.
Between the islands
our ocean
palpitates with fish.
It touches the feet, the thighs,
the chalky ribs
of my homeland.
Night touches the shoreline
and rises while singing
at daybreak
like a guitar awakening.
I feel the irresistible force
of the ocean's call. I am
called by the wind,
and called by Rodriguez,
José Antonio,
I received a telegram
from the "Mina" worker's union
and the one I love
(I won't tell you her name)
waits for me in Bucalemu.
Book, you haven't been able
to enwrap me,
you haven't covered me
with typography,
with celestial impressions,
you haven't been able
to trap my eyes between covers,
I leave you so I can populate groves
with the hoarse family of my song,
to work burning metals
or to eat grilled meat
at the fireside in the mountains.
I love books
that are explorers,
books with forest and snow,
depth and sky,
but
I despise
the book of spiders
that employs thought
to weave its venomous wires
to trap the young
and unsuspecting fly.
Book, free me.
I don't want to be entombed
like a volume,
I don't come from a tome,
my poems don't eat poems,
they devour
passionate events,
they're nurtured by the open air
and fed by the earth
and by men.
Book, let me wander the road
with dust in my low shoes
and without mythology:
go back to the library
while I go into the streets.
I've learned to take life
from life,
to love after a single kiss,
and I didn't teach anything to anyone
except what I myself lived,
what I shared with other men,
what I fought along with them:
what I expressed from all of us in my song.
”
”
Pablo Neruda (All the Odes)
“
Lollipops and raindrops
Sunflowers and sun-kissed daisies
Rolling surf and raging sea
Sailing ships and submarines
Old Glory and “purple mountain’s majesty”
Screaming guitar and lilting rhyme
Flight of fancy and high-steppin’ dances
Set free my mind to wander…
Imagine the ant’s marching journeys.
Fly, in my mind’s eye, on butterfly wings.
Roam the distant depths of space.
Unfurl tall sails and cross the ocean.
Pictures made just to enthrall
Creating images from my truth
Painting hopes and dreams on my canvas
Capturing, through my lens, the ephemeral
Let me ruminate ‘pon sensual darkness…
Tremble o’er Hollywood’s fluttering Gothics…
Ride the edge of my seat with the hero…
Weep with the heroine’s desperation.
Yet… more than all these things…
Give me words spun out masterfully…
Terms set out in meter and rhyme…
Phrases bent to rattle the soul…
Prose that always miraculously inspires me!
The trill runs up my spine, as I recall…
A touch… a caress…a whispered kiss…
Ebony eyes embracing my soul…
Two souls united in beat of hearts.
A butterfly flutter in my womb
My lover’s wonder o’er my swelling
The testament of our love given life
Newly laid in my lover’s arms
Luminous, sweet ebony eyes
Just so much like his father’s
A gaze of wonder and contentment
From my babe at mother’s breast
Words of the Divine set down for me
Faith, Hope, Love, and Charity
Grace, Mercy, and undeserved Salvation
“My Shepherd will supply my need”
These are the things that inspire me.
”
”
D. Denise Dianaty (My Life In Poetry)
“
(This is from a tribute poem to Ronnie James Dio: Former lead vocalist of the band Rainbow, Black Sabbath. This is written with all the titles of the hit songs of DIO. The titles are all in upper case)
You can “CATCH THE RAINBOW” –
“A RAINBOW IN THE DARK”
Through “ROCK & ROLL CHILDREN”
“HOLY DIVER” will lurk
“BEFORE THE FALL” of “ELECTRA”
“ALL THE FOOLS SAILED AWAY”
“JESUS,MARY AND THE HOLY GHOST”-
“LORD OF THE LAST DAY”
“MASTER OF THE MOON” you are
When my “ONE FOOT IN THE GRAVE”
With our “BLACK”, “COLD FEET”,
“MYSTERY” of “PAIN” you crave
You’re “CAUGHT IN THE MIDDLE”,
“BETWEEN TWO HEARTS”
When “HUNGRY FOR HEAVEN”
“HUNTER OF THE HEART” hurts
“FALLEN ANGELS” “FEED MY HEART”
“FEVER DREAMS” “FEED MY HEAD”
“I AM” “ANOTHER LIE”
“AFTER ALL (THE DEAD)”
Not “GUILTY” if you “HIDE IN THE RAINBOW’’
With your perfect “GUITAR SOLO”
“DON’T TELL THE KIDS” to “DREAM EVIL”
Don’t “GIVE HER THE GUN” to follow
“DON’T TALK TO STRANGERS”
Those “EVIL EYES” can see
“LORD OF THE NIGHT” “MISTREATED”;
“MY EYES” hate to fancy
“SHAME ON THE NIGHT” “TURN UP THE NIGHT”
Now it’s “TIME TO BURN”
“TWISTED” “VOODOO” does “WALK ON WATER”
And today its our turn
“BLOOD FROM A STONE” “BORN ON THE SUN”
I’m “BETTER IN THE DARK” “BREATHLESS”
The “PRISONER OF PARADISE” you are!
Forever you are deathless
“SACRED HEART” “SHIVERS”
Laying “NAKED IN THE RAIN”
“THIS IS YOUR LIFE”- “ WILD ONE”!
Your “GOLDEN RULES” we gain
“IN DREAMS” “I SPEED AT NIGHT”
I’m “LOSING MY INSANITY”
“ANOTHER LIE”: “COMPUTER GOD”
Your “HEAVEN AND HELL”- my vanity!
By “KILLING THE DRAGON”
“I COULD HAVE BEEN A DREAMER”
I’m “THE LAST IN LINE” To “SCREAM”
Like an “INVISIBLE” screamer
Now that you are gone
“THE END OF THE WORLD” is here
“STRAIGHT THROUGH THE HEART”
“PUSH” “JUST ANOTHER DAY” in fear
“CHILDREN OF THE SEA” “ DYING IN AMERICA”
Is it “DEATH BY LOVE”?
“FACES IN THE WINDOW” looking for
A “GYPSY” from above
Dear “STARGAZER” from “STRANGE HIGHWAYS”
Our love “HERE’S TO YOU”
“WE ROCK” “ONE MORE FOR THE ROAD”
The “OTHER WORLD” anew
“ONE NIGHT IN THE CITY” with “NEON KNIGHTS”
“THE EYES” “STAY OUT OF MY MIND”
The “STARSTRUCK” “SUNSET SUPERMAN”
Is what we long to find
“THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING”
Is the “INSTITUTIONAL MAN”
“SHOOT SHOOT” to “TURN TO STONE”
“WHEN A WOMAN CRIES” to plan
To “STAND UP AND SHOUT”
before “ THE KING OF ROCK AND ROLL”
Though “GOD HATES HEAVY METAL”
“EAT YOUR HEART OUT” to reach the goal.
From the poem- Holy Dio: the Diver (A tribute to Ronnie James Dio)
”
”
Munia Khan
“
On some intuitive level, I knew that learning had to be more than the mastery of facts. I've experienced it as an adult. I become consumed with a subject like quilting or preparing yogurt cultures, and that topic takes over my life - fabric scraps scattered on the floor, little jars of white sludge cuddled by blankets on my kitchen countertops. When I learned to play guitar in my thirties, no one had to schedule my practices. My guitar lived on a stand in the living room and I tormented our ears multiple times a day until my fingers bled. Passion for learning has that fiery, consuming, can't-stop quality.
”
”
Julie Bogart (The Brave Learner: Finding Everyday Magic in Homeschool, Learning, and Life)
“
Make for yourself a world you can believe in.
It sounds simple, I know. But it’s not. Listen, there are a million worlds you could make for yourself. Everyone you know has a completely different one—the woman in 5G, that cab driver over there, you. Sure, there are overlaps, but only in the details. Some people make their worlds around what they think reality is like. They convince themselves that they had nothing to do with their worlds’ creations or continuations. Some make their worlds without knowing it. Their universes are just sesame seeds and three-day weekends and dial tones and skinned knees and physics and driftwood and emerald earrings and books dropped in bathtubs and holes in guitars and plastic and empathy and hardwood and heavy water and high black stockings and the history of the Vikings and brass and obsolescence and burnt hair and collapsed souffles and the impossibility of not falling in love in an art museum with the person standing next to you looking at the same painting and all the other things that just happen and are. But you want to make for yourself a world that is deliberately and meticulously personalized. A theater for your life, if I could put it like that. Don’t live an accident. Don’t call a knife a knife. Live a life that has never been lived before, in which everything you experience is yours and only yours. Make accidents on purpose. Call a knife a name by which only you will recognize it. Now I’m not a very smart man, but I’m not a dumb one, either. So listen: If you can manage what I’ve told you, as I was never able to, you will give your life meaning.
”
”
Jonathan Safran Foer (A Convergence of Birds: Original Fiction and Poetry Inspired by Joseph Cornell)
“
And messengers must have come running to Don Jorge, telling him the service was on the point of beginning, and he must have waved them away with a grave gesture of a long white hand, while in his mind the distant sound of chanting, the jingle of the silver bit of his roan horse stamping nervously where he was tied to a twined Moorish column, memories of cavalcades filing with braying of trumpets and flutter of crimson damask into conquered towns, of court ladies dancing, and the noise of pigeons in the eaves, drew together like strings plucked in succession on a guitar into a great wave of rhythm in which his life was sucked away into this one poem in praise of death.
”
”
John Dos Passos (Rosinante to the Road Again)
“
People everywhere, enjoying life, smiling, and just slowing down to let the world take care of itself for a few hours.
The feeling was contagious. Especially when I stepped into McPherson's Pub to grab a bite of the special and listen to some traditional Irish music. The fiddle made me want to dance with myself, and many did. The drum beat like my very own heart. And some little flute that looked no wider than a pencil reminded me of the Aran Islands floating not too far from Abbeyglen.
God was here tonight. In the strings of the guitar and the call of the singer's voice. I realize how often I overlook him back at home.
And I know I don't want to do that anymore.
The LORD will send His faithful love by day; His song will be with me in the night a prayer to the Gid of my life.
”
”
Jenny B. Jones (There You'll Find Me)
“
HUG DAY POEM:
Wrap me in your hug..
make me feel happy!
Hold me tight and close..
not like a pillow or a teddy!!
My heart needs you..
for you touched my soul,
believe me things shall go fine.
Walk me to my Dreams..
and take me to divine!!
My life is yours forever..
O girl, O girl, O.. O.. girl.. you be mine.
Let the hearts embrace..
Sugar you be my.. Valentine.
Just be mine..
O O.. my Valentine!
”
”
Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma (Guru with Guitar)
“
You’ve heard that song a thousand times before, but now you suddenly hear it in all its soul-piercing beauty, the sweet bottomless poignancy of the guitar line like a revelation, and for the first time you can understand, really understand, just what Jerry Garcia meant by every note, his unhurried cheerful-baleful improvisation piping something very near the meaning of life directly into your mind.
”
”
Michael Pollan (The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World)
“
If I were stranded on a desert island and could bring only one instrument to keep me company, I’d take a guitar. It’s versatile, and it gives you such a huge repertoire to draw from. I’d be able to play so many more types of songs than I could with a mandolin or a fiddle or a banjo. A guitar is handy to sing along with, too, and I’d have a lot of singing to do to keep from getting too lonesome. Praising God fights depression and loneliness like nothing else can. When you’re praising Him, you’re not thinking about yourself.
”
”
Ricky Skaggs (Kentucky Traveler: My Life in Music)
“
Last Saturday night I was in a club on the South Side of Chicago listening to live rock music and talking to a guitar playing veteran of the music scene in the city. He looked and talked like the musicians that I recall from my childhood; he was a thin, cigarette smoking, avant garde and interesting guy. We got to talking about a life in the relatively risky creative arts and he said, “Look, you could get that safe job and spend your whole life that way, but what are you waiting for? When you’re ninety-six years old and have three days left? Is that when you decide to do what you love?
”
”
Jamie Freveletti
“
Here's my suggestion to musicians: When you're about to reach for whatever musical tools you use, virtual or real, guitar or computer, ask yourself if you're doing so to save time or because you don't feel like straining your brain. Or, more important, ask yourself if you have anything to say yet. If not, keep working (or playing) upstairs, in your brain. Sure, it's okay to react to what happens when playing with the tools -- or the way a chord sounds, a loop, or even an accident. But make sure you express what you wanted to say or what you imagined. Don't let your tools make you their bitch.
”
”
Ben Folds (A Dream About Lightning Bugs: A Life of Music and Cheap Lessons)
“
Life at the Chelsea was an open market, everyone with something of himself to sell. (..) the lobby hung with bad art. Big invasive stuff unloaded on Stanley Bard in exchange for rent. The hotel is an energetic, desperate haven for scores of gifted hustling children from every rung of the ladder. Guitar bums and stoned-out beauties in Victorian dresses. Junkie poets, playwrights, broke down filmmakers, and French actors. Everybody passing through here is somebody, if nobody in the outside world (…) The Chelsea was like a doll’s house in the Twilight Zone, with a hundred rooms, each a small universe.
”
”
Patti Smith (Just Kids)
“
The conversation swings from the brothers Bush to the war in Iraq to the emerging rights of Muslim women to postfeminism to current cinema—Mexican, American, European (Giorgio goes spasmodically mad over Bu-ñuel), and back to Mexican again—to the relative superiority of shrimp over any other kind of taco to the excellence of Ana’s paella, to Ana’s childhood, then to Jimena’s, to the changing role of motherhood in a postindustrial world, to sculpture, then painting, then poetry, then baseball, then Jimena’s inexplicable (to Pablo) fondness for American football (she’s a Dallas Cowboys fan) over real (to Pablo) fútbol, to his admittedly adolescent passion for the game, to the trials of adolescence itself and revelations over the loss of virginity and why we refer to it as a loss and now Óscar and Tomás, arms over each other’s shoulders, are chanting poetry and then Giorgio picks up a guitar and starts to play and this is the Juárez that Pablo loves, this is the city of his soul—the poetry, the passionate discussions (Ana makes her counterpoints jabbing her cigarette like a foil; Jimena’s words flow like a gentle wave across beach sand, washing away the words before; Giorgio trills a jazz saxophone while Pablo plays bass—they are a jazz combo of argument), the ideas flowing with the wine and beer, the lilting music in a black night, this is the gentle heartbeat of the Mexico that he adores, the laughter, the subtle perfume of desert flowers that grow in alleys alongside garbage, and now everyone is singing— México, está muy contento, Dando gracias a millares… —and this is his life—this is his city, these are his friends, his beloved friends, these people, and if this is all that there is or will be, it is enough for him, his world, his life, his city, his people, his sad beautiful Juárez… —empezaré de Durango, Torreón y Ciudad de
”
”
Don Winslow (The Cartel (Power of the Dog #2))
“
With Tommy by his side but Anthony Jr. nowhere to be seen, Anthony cranks out an old 8mm projector, and soon choppy black- and-white images appear on the cream wall capturing a few snapshots from the canyon of their life—that tell nothing, and yet somehow everything. They watch old movies, from 1963, 1952, 1948, 1947—the older, the more raucous the children and parents becoming. This year, because Ingrid isn’t here, Anthony shows them something new. It’s from 1963. A birthday party, this one with happy sound, cake, unlit candles. Anthony is turning twenty. Tatiana is very pregnant with Janie. (“Mommy, look, that’s you in Grammy’s belly!” exclaims Vicky.) Harry toddling around, pursued loudly and relentlessly by Pasha—oh, how in 1999 six children love to see their fathers wild like them, how Mary and Amy love to see their precious husbands small. The delight in the den is abundant. Anthony sits on the patio, bare chested, in swimshorts, one leg draped over the other, playing his guitar, “playing Happy Birthday to myself,” he says now, except it’s not “Happy Birthday.” The joy dims slightly at the sight of their brother, their father so beautiful and whole he hurts their united hearts—and suddenly into the frame, in a mini-dress, walks a tall dark striking woman with endless legs and comes to stand close to Anthony. The camera remains on him because Anthony is singing, while she flicks on her lighter and ignites the candles on his cake; one by one she lights them as he strums his guitar and sings the number one hit of the day, falling into a burning “Ring of Fire ... ” The woman doesn’t look at Anthony, he doesn’t look at her, but in the frame you can see her bare thigh flush against the sole of his bare foot the whole time she lights his twenty candles plus one to grow on. And it burns, burns, burns . . . And when she is done, the camera—which never lies—catches just one microsecond of an exchanged glance before she walks away, just one gram of neutral matter exploding into an equivalent of 20,000 pounds of TNT. The reel ends. Next. The budding novelist Rebecca says, “Dad, who was that? Was that Grammy’s friend Vikki?” “Yes,” says Anthony. “That was Grammy’s friend Vikki.” Tak zhivya, bez radosti/bez muki/pomniu ya ushedshiye goda/i tvoi serebryannyiye ruki/v troike yeletevshey navsegda . . . So I live—remembering with sadness all the happy years now gone by, remembering your long and silver arms, forever in the troika that flew by . . . Back
”
”
Paullina Simons (The Summer Garden (The Bronze Horseman, #3))
“
Life at the Chelsea was an open market, everyone with something of himself to sell.” (p.107) (..)the lobby hung with bad art. Big invasive stuff unloaded on Stanley Bard [gerente do hotel] in exchange for rent. The hotel is an energetic, desperate haven for scores of gifted hustling children from every rung of the ladder. Guitar bums and stoned-out beauties in Victorian dresses. Junkie poets, playwrights, broke down filmmakers, and French actors. Everybody passing through here is somebody, if nobody in the outside world.” (p.91). (…) The Chelsea was like a doll’s house in the Twilight Zone, with a hundred rooms, each a small universe.
”
”
Patti Smith (Just Kids)
“
Old couples began to pair off and spin each other around, and the younger ones lined the walls, clapping and stomping their feet and swishing their drinks. In that little pub, on that little stage by the windows, Kevin was a life force, a star. With the aid of an instrument, he could spend four hours in a new country and fit in better than Maggie could after four months. He sang about drunk tanks and love and Christmas hopes, but in the spaces between the words of the song and in the cold shadows of his closed eyes rested all the things that he allowed to escape from himself only on the stage. Watching him, Maggie thought of their conversation earlier that day--how he had quit the band, quit his music, hadn't picked up a guitar in months. She could see the way he picked gingerly at the strings on his uncalloused fingers. His voice wasn't beautiful, but it had always contained a kind of arresting truth. Now too, Maggie detected a new quality--a desperation that had not been there before. Looking around the table at her family, she knew that Nanny Eli heard it, too. Her grandmother was leaning forward, holding her cigarette aloft while the ash grew longer and longer, and she was not listening to her son like the rest of them were but watching him, the movements of his long, skeletal fingers, the closed bruises of his eyes.
”
”
Jessie Ann Foley (The Carnival at Bray)
“
One day in the next five hundred billion years, while the probes complete one full circuit of the Milky Way, maybe they’ll stumble upon intelligent life. In forty thousand years or so, when the two probes sail close enough to a planetary system, maybe just maybe one of these plants will be home to some life form which will spy the probe with whatever it has that passes for eyes, stay its telescope, retrieve the derelict fuel-less old probe with whatever it has that passes for curiosity, lower the stylus (supplied) to the record with whatever it has that passes for digits, and set free the dadadadaa of Beethoven’s Fifth. It’ll roll like thunder through a different frontier. Human music will permeate the Milky Way’s outer reaches. There’ll be Chuck Berry and Bach, there’ll be Stravinsky and Blind Willie Johnson, and the didgeridoo, violin, slide guitar and shakuhachi. Whale song will drift through the constellation of Ursa Minor. Perhaps a being on a planet of the star AC +793888 will hear the 1970s recording of sheep bleat, laughter, footsteps, and the soft pluck of a kiss. Perhaps they’ll hear the trundle of a tractor and the voice of a child.
When they hear on the phonograph a recording of rapid firecracker drills and bursts, will they know that these sounds denote brainwaves? Will they ever infer that over forty thousand years before in a solar system unknown a woman was rigged to an EEG and her thoughts recorded? Could they know to work backwards from the abstract sounds and translate them once more into brainwaves, and could they know from these brainwaves the kinds of thoughts the woman was having? Could they see into a human’s mind? Could they know she was a young woman in love? Could they tell from this dip and rise in the EEG’s pattern that she was thinking simultaneously of earth and lover as if the two were continuous? Could they see that, though she tried to keep her mental script, to bring to mind Lincoln and the Ice Age and the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt and whatever grand things have shaped the earth and which she wished to convey to an alien audience, every thought cascaded into the drawn brows and proud nose of her lover, the wonderful articulation of his hands and the way he listened like a bird and how they had touched so often without touching. And then a spike in sound as she thought of that great city Alexandria and of nuclear disarmament and the symphony of the earth’s tides and the squareness of his jaw and the way he spoke with such bright precision so that everything he said was epiphany and discovery and the way he looked at her as though she were the epiphany he kept on having and the thud of her heart and the flooding how heat about her body when she considered what it was he wanted to do to her and the migration of bison across a Utah plain and a geisha’s expressionless face and the knowledge of having found that thing in the world which she ought never to have had the good fortune of finding, of two minds and bodies flung at each other at full dumbfounding force so that her life had skittered sidelong and all her pin-boned plans just gone like that and her self engulfed in a fire of longing and thoughts of sex and destiny, the completeness of love, their astounding earth, his hands, his throat, his bare back.
”
”
Samantha Harvey (Orbital)
“
Writings of light assault the darkness, more prodigious than
meteors. The tall unknowable city takes over the countryside. Sure of my life and my death, I observe the ambitious and would
like to understand them. Their day is greedy as a lariat in the air. Their night is a rest from the rage within steel, quick to attack. They speak of humanity. My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of the same poverty. They speak of homeland. My homeland is the rhythm of a guitar, a few portraits, an old
sword, the willow grove’s visible prayer as evening falls. Time is living me. More silent than my shadow, I pass through the loftily covetous
multitude. They are indispensable, singular, worthy of tomorrow. My name is someone and anyone. I walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn’t
expect to arrive. —Jorge Luis Borges
”
”
Kiran Desai (The Inheritance of Loss)
“
It could be said of Mr Schaeffer that in his life he'd done only one really bad thing: he'd killed a man. The circumstances of that deed are unimportant, expect to say that the man deserved to die and that for it Mr Schaeffer was sentenced to ninety-nnie years and a day. For a long while - for many years, in fact - he had not thought of how it was before he came to the farm. His memory of those times was like a house where no one lives and where the furniture has rotted away. But tonight it was as if lamps had been lighted through all the gloomy dead rooms. It had begun to happen when he saw Tico Feo coming through the dusk with his splendid guitar. Until that moment he had not been lonesome. Now, recognising his loneliness, he felt alive. He had not wanted to be alive. To be alive was to remember brown rivers where the fish run, and sunlight on a lady's hair.
”
”
Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories)
“
It could be said of Mr Schaeffer that in his life he'd done only one really bad thing: he'd killed a man. The circumstances of that deed are unimportant, expect to say that the man deserved to die and that for it Mr Schaeffer was sentenced to ninety-nine years and a day. For a long while - for many years, in fact - he had not thought of how it was before he came to the farm. His memory of those times was like a house where no one lives and where the furniture has rotted away. But tonight it was as if lamps had been lighted through all the gloomy dead rooms. It had begun to happen when he saw Tico Feo coming through the dusk with his splendid guitar. Until that moment he had not been lonesome. Now, recognising his loneliness, he felt alive. He had not wanted to be alive. To be alive was to remember brown rivers where the fish run, and sunlight on a lady's hair.
”
”
Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories)
“
The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things.
Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.
I do not know which of us has written this page.
”
”
Jorge Luis Borges (Borges and I)
“
The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things.
Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.
I do not know which of us has written this page.
”
”
Jorge Luis Borges (Borges and I)
“
The big problem here is that getting any young person with a short attention span to spend ten thousand hours doing something can be an uphill battle. That’s never been more true than these days when whatever kids do has to compete with so many attractive options. It can be surfing the Web, playing video games, tweeting, or Facebook. Back in my day, I confess that I played my fair share of Donkey Kong, but even than there was no Web for me to surf and I didn’t have a status. Well, yes I did, it just wasn’t posted anywhere yet.
Whatever you want to do in this life, I’m here to encourage you not to lose hope or give up during the first hundred or so of those ten thousand hours that it takes to get good. You should know that in my case it took me a while to “get the bug” for guitar, as my grandpa used to call it. He always said it would happen, almost like a slow sickness. And he knew it would take time.
”
”
Brad Paisley
“
The four solo careers unveiled previously hidden internal politics as each man packed and moved out from the cozy Beatle mansion. Lennon seemed closest to Ringo, and then George; neither Harrison nor Lennon ever appeared on a McCartney solo album or vice-versa, whereas Ringo played for all three. Of course, Lennon’s solo “career” had begun as early as 1968 with numbers like “What’s the New Mary Jane” and “Revolution 9” during the White Album sessions, and then his avant-garde projects with Ono. Casual jams reflected these affinities as well: John and Yoko appeared onstage with George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and the Bonnie and Delaney band in London in December of 1969. Harrison was slumming with the band after sitting in for a night and having rather too much fun; he appeared onstage anonymously until it got reported in the music press. Mostly they got away with two weeks of touring, with Clapton and Harrison sharing lead guitars almost before most audiences figured this out.
”
”
Tim Riley (Lennon)
“
Last Thoughts On Woody Guthrie
When yer head gets twisted and yer mind grows numb
When you think you're too old, too young, too smart or too dumb
When yer laggin' behind an' losin' yer pace
In a slow-motion crawl of life's busy race
No matter what yer doing if you start givin' up
If the wine don't come to the top of yer cup
If the wind's got you sideways with with one hand holdin' on
And the other starts slipping and the feeling is gone
And yer train engine fire needs a new spark to catch it
And the wood's easy findin' but yer lazy to fetch it
And yer sidewalk starts curlin' and the street gets too long
And you start walkin' backwards though you know its wrong
And lonesome comes up as down goes the day
And tomorrow's mornin' seems so far away
And you feel the reins from yer pony are slippin'
And yer rope is a-slidin' 'cause yer hands are a-drippin'
And yer sun-decked desert and evergreen valleys
Turn to broken down slums and trash-can alleys
And yer sky cries water and yer drain pipe's a-pourin'
And the lightnin's a-flashing and the thunder's a-crashin'
And the windows are rattlin' and breakin' and the roof tops a-shakin'
And yer whole world's a-slammin' and bangin'
And yer minutes of sun turn to hours of storm
And to yourself you sometimes say
"I never knew it was gonna be this way
Why didn't they tell me the day I was born"
And you start gettin' chills and yer jumping from sweat
And you're lookin' for somethin' you ain't quite found yet
And yer knee-deep in the dark water with yer hands in the air
And the whole world's a-watchin' with a window peek stare
And yer good gal leaves and she's long gone a-flying
And yer heart feels sick like fish when they're fryin'
And yer jackhammer falls from yer hand to yer feet
And you need it badly but it lays on the street
And yer bell's bangin' loudly but you can't hear its beat
And you think yer ears might a been hurt
Or yer eyes've turned filthy from the sight-blindin' dirt
And you figured you failed in yesterdays rush
When you were faked out an' fooled white facing a four flush
And all the time you were holdin' three queens
And it's makin you mad, it's makin' you mean
Like in the middle of Life magazine
Bouncin' around a pinball machine
And there's something on yer mind you wanna be saying
That somebody someplace oughta be hearin'
But it's trapped on yer tongue and sealed in yer head
And it bothers you badly when your layin' in bed
And no matter how you try you just can't say it
And yer scared to yer soul you just might forget it
And yer eyes get swimmy from the tears in yer head
And yer pillows of feathers turn to blankets of lead
And the lion's mouth opens and yer staring at his teeth
And his jaws start closin with you underneath
And yer flat on your belly with yer hands tied behind
And you wish you'd never taken that last detour sign
And you say to yourself just what am I doin'
On this road I'm walkin', on this trail I'm turnin'
On this curve I'm hanging
On this pathway I'm strolling, in the space I'm taking
In this air I'm inhaling
Am I mixed up too much, am I mixed up too hard
Why am I walking, where am I running
What am I saying, what am I knowing
On this guitar I'm playing, on this banjo I'm frailin'
On this mandolin I'm strummin', in the song I'm singin'
In the tune I'm hummin', in the words I'm writin'
In the words that I'm thinkin'
In this ocean of hours I'm all the time drinkin'
Who am I helping, what am I breaking
What am I giving, what am I taking
But you try with your whole soul best
Never to think these thoughts and never to let
Them kind of thoughts gain ground
Or make yer heart pound
...
”
”
Bob Dylan
“
Translating how that latter fact came to life in the studio, engineer Chuck Zwicky explained from his own observations during the recording of the album that “the way that Prince’s music comes together has everything to do with how he views the individual instruments, and for example, when he’s sitting down at the drums, he’s derivatively thinking about Dave Gerbaldi, the drummer from Tower of Power, and that’s a real fascile and funky drummer; and when he plays keyboards, he’s thinking about James Brown’s horn player, on one aspect; and when he’s playing guitar, other elements creep in, because he loves Carlos Santana, and Jimi Hendrix, and this other guitar player named Bill Nelson, a rock guitar player from the 70s. And so these aspects all come together to make this unique sound that is Prince, and it’s not rock, it’s not funk, it’s not jazz, it’s not blues—it’s just his own kind of music. I remember there was one particular moment when he started playing this keyboard line, and I’m thinking ‘He can’t play that, that’s Gary Newman.’ And at that moment, he stops the tape, and turns and looks at me and asks ‘Do you like Gary Newman?’ And I said ‘You know, the album Replica never left my turntable in Jr. High School after my sister bought it for me. I listened to it until it wore out.’ And he said ‘There are people still trying to figure out what a genius he is.
”
”
Jake Brown (Prince "In the Studio" 1975 - 1995)
“
There is a natural talent or mother wit, as it is called, about the Spaniards, which renders them intellectual and agreeable companions, whatever may be their condition in life, or however imperfect may have been their education: add to this, they are never vulgar; nature has endowed them with an inherent dignity of spirit.
There are none who understand the art of doing nothing and living upon nothing than the poor classes of Spain. Climate does one half and temperament the rest. Give a Spaniard the shade in summer and the sun in winter; a little bread, garlic, oil and garbances, an old brown cloak and a guitar and let the world roll on as it pleases. Talk of poverty! with him it has no disgrace. It sits upon him with a grandiose style, like his ragged cloak. He is a hidalgo, even when in rags.
Who can do justice to a moonlight night in such a climate and such a place?The temperature of a summer midnight in Andalusia is perfectly ethereal. We seem lifted up into a purer atmosphere; we feel a serenity of soul, a buoyancy of spirits, an elasticity of frame, which render mere existence happiness. But when moonlight is added to all this, the effect is like enchantment.
Enjoying that mixture of reverie and sensation which steal away existence in a southern climate.
The sage Ebben Bonabben shook his dry head at the words. Here is an end to philosophy, thought he. The prince has discovered he has a heart.
Love is the torment of one, the felicity of two, the strife and enmity of three.
”
”
Washington Irving
“
what could Marilyn Monroe’s death ever have to do with me? “IT HAS TO DO WITH ALL OF US,” said Owen Meany, when I called him that night. “SHE WAS JUST LIKE OUR WHOLE COUNTRY—NOT QUITE YOUNG ANYMORE, BUT NOT OLD EITHER; A LITTLE BREATHLESS, VERY BEAUTIFUL, MAYBE A LITTLE STUPID, MAYBE A LOT SMARTER THAN SHE SEEMED. AND SHE WAS LOOKING FOR SOMETHING—I THINK SHE WANTED TO BE GOOD. LOOK AT THE MEN IN HER LIFE—JOE DIMAGGIO, ARTHUR MILLER, MAYBE THE KENNEDYS. LOOK AT HOW GOOD THEY SEEM! LOOK AT HOW DESIRABLE SHE WAS! THAT’S WHAT SHE WAS: SHE WAS DESIRABLE. SHE WAS FUNNY AND SEXY—AND SHE WAS VULNERABLE, TOO. SHE WAS NEVER QUITE HAPPY, SHE WAS ALWAYS A LITTLE OVERWEIGHT. SHE WAS JUST LIKE OUR WHOLE COUNTRY,” he repeated; he was on a roll. I could hear Hester playing her guitar in the background, as if she were trying to improvise a folk song from everything he said. “AND THOSE MEN,” he said. “THOSE FAMOUS, POWERFUL MEN—DID THEY REALLY LOVE HER? DID THEY TAKE CARE OF HER? IF SHE WAS EVER WITH THE KENNEDYS, THEY COULDN’T HAVE LOVED HER—THEY WERE JUST USING HER, THEY WERE JUST BEING CARELESS AND TREATING THEMSELVES TO A THRILL. THAT’S WHAT POWERFUL MEN DO TO THIS COUNTRY—IT’S A BEAUTIFUL, SEXY, BREATHLESS COUNTRY, AND POWERFUL MEN USE IT TO TREAT THEMSELVES TO A THRILL! THEY SAY THEY LOVE IT BUT THEY DON’T MEAN IT. THEY SAY THINGS TO MAKE THEMSELVES APPEAR GOOD—THEY MAKE THEMSELVES APPEAR MORAL. THAT’S WHAT I THOUGHT KENNEDY WAS: A MORALIST. BUT HE WAS JUST GIVING US A SNOW JOB, HE WAS JUST BEING A GOOD SEDUCER. I THOUGHT HE WAS A SAVIOR. I THOUGHT HE WANTED TO USE HIS POWER TO DO GOOD. BUT PEOPLE WILL SAY AND DO ANYTHING JUST TO GET THE POWER; THEN THEY’LL USE THE POWER JUST TO GET A THRILL. MARILYN MONROE WAS ALWAYS LOOKING FOR THE BEST MAN—MAYBE SHE WANTED THE MAN WITH THE MOST INTEGRITY, MAYBE SHE WANTED THE MAN WITH THE MOST ABILITY TO DO GOOD. AND SHE WAS SEDUCED, OVER AND OVER AGAIN—SHE GOT FOOLED, SHE WAS TRICKED, SHE GOT USED, SHE WAS USED UP. JUST LIKE THE COUNTRY. THE COUNTRY WANTS A SAVIOR. THE COUNTRY IS A SUCKER FOR POWERFUL MEN WHO LOOK GOOD. WE THINK THEY’RE MORALISTS AND THEN THEY JUST USE US. THAT’S WHAT’S GOING TO HAPPEN TO YOU AND ME,” said Owen Meany. “WE’RE GOING TO BE USED.
”
”
John Irving (A Prayer for Owen Meany)
“
The Personal Job Advertisement These two activities are likely to have encouraged some clearer ideas about genuine career possibilities, but you should not assume that you are necessarily the best judge of what might offer you fulfilment. Writing a Personal Job Advertisement allows you to seek the advice of other people. The concept behind this task is the opposite of a standard career search: imagine that newspapers didn’t advertise jobs, but rather advertised people who were looking for jobs. You do it in two steps. First, write a half-page job advertisement that tells the world who you are and what you care about in life. Put down your talents (e.g. you speak Mongolian, can play the bass guitar), your passions (e.g. ikebana, scuba diving), and the core values and causes you believe in (e.g. wildlife preservation, women’s rights). Include your personal qualities (e.g. you are quick-witted, impatient, lacking self-confidence). And record anything else that is important to you – a minimum salary or that you want to work abroad. Make sure you don’t include any particular job you are keen on, or your educational qualifications or career background. Keep it at the level of underlying motivations and interests. Here comes the intriguing part. Make a list of ten people you know from different walks of life and who have a range of careers – maybe a policeman uncle or a cartoonist friend – and email them your Personal Job Advertisement, asking them to recommend two or three careers that might fit with what you have written. Tell them to be specific – for example, not replying ‘you should work with children’ but ‘you should do charity work with street kids in Rio de Janeiro’. You will probably end up with an eclectic list of careers, many of which you would never have thought of yourself. The purpose is not only to give you surprising ideas for future careers, but also to help you see your many possible selves. After doing these three activities, and having explored the various dimensions of meaning, you should feel more confident about making a list of potential careers that offer the promise of meaningful work. What should you do next? Certainly not begin sending out your CV. Rather, as the following chapter explains, the key to finding a fulfilling career is to experiment with these possibilities in that rather frightening place called the real world. It’s time to take a ‘radical sabbatical’.
”
”
Roman Krznaric (How to Find Fulfilling Work (The School of Life))
“
a guitar. A hammock is swung near the table. It is three o'clock in the afternoon of a cloudy day. MARINA, a quiet, grey-haired, little old woman, is sitting at the table knitting a stocking. ASTROFF is walking up and down near her. MARINA. [Pouring some tea into a glass] Take a little tea, my son. ASTROFF. [Takes the glass from her unwillingly] Somehow, I don't seem to want any. MARINA. Then will you have a little vodka instead? ASTROFF. No, I don't drink vodka every day, and besides, it is too hot now. [A pause] Tell me, nurse, how long have we known each other? MARINA. [Thoughtfully] Let me see, how long is it? Lord—help me to remember. You first came here, into our parts—let me think—when was it? Sonia's mother was still alive—it was two winters before she died; that was eleven years ago—[thoughtfully] perhaps more. ASTROFF. Have I changed much since then? MARINA. Oh, yes. You were handsome and young then, and now you are an old man and not handsome any more. You drink, too. ASTROFF. Yes, ten years have made me another man. And why? Because I am overworked. Nurse, I am on my feet from dawn till dusk. I know no rest; at night I tremble under my blankets for fear of being dragged out to visit some one who is sick; I have toiled without repose or a day's freedom since I have known you; could I help growing old? And then, existence is tedious, anyway; it is a senseless, dirty business, this life, and goes heavily. Every one about here is silly, and after living with them for two or three years one grows silly oneself. It is inevitable. [Twisting his moustache] See what a long moustache I have grown. A foolish, long moustache. Yes, I am as silly as the rest, nurse, but not as stupid; no, I have not grown stupid. Thank God, my brain is not addled yet, though my feelings have grown numb. I ask nothing, I need nothing, I love no one, unless it is yourself alone. [He kisses her head] I had a nurse just like you when I was a child. MARINA. Don't you want a bite of something to eat? ASTROFF. No. During the third week of Lent I went to the epidemic at Malitskoi. It was eruptive typhoid. The peasants were all lying side by side in their huts, and the calves and pigs were running about the floor among the sick. Such dirt there was, and smoke! Unspeakable! I slaved among those people all day, not a crumb passed my lips, but when I got home there was still no rest for me; a switchman was carried in from the railroad; I laid him on the operating table and he went and died in my arms under chloroform, and then my feelings that should have been deadened awoke
”
”
Anton Chekhov (Uncle Vanya)
“
What would be the natural thing? A man goes to college. He works as he wants to work, he plays as he wants to play, he exercises for the fun of the game, he makes friends where he wants to make them, he is held in by no fear of criticism above, for the class ahead of him has nothing to do with his standing in his own class. Everything he does has the one vital quality: it is spontaneous. That is the flame of youth itself. Now, what really exists?"
"...I say our colleges to-day are business colleges—Yale more so, perhaps, because it is more sensitively American. Let's take up any side of our life here. Begin with athletics. What has become of the natural, spontaneous joy of contest? Instead you have one of the most perfectly organized business systems for achieving a required result—success. Football is driving, slavish work; there isn't one man in twenty who gets any real pleasure out of it. Professional baseball is not more rigorously disciplined and driven than our 'amateur' teams. Add the crew and the track. Play, the fun of the thing itself, doesn't exist; and why? Because we have made a business out of it all, and the college is scoured for material, just as drummers are sent out to bring in business.
"Take another case. A man has a knack at the banjo or guitar, or has a good voice. What is the spontaneous thing? To meet with other kindred spirits in informal gatherings in one another's rooms or at the fence, according to the whim of the moment. Instead what happens? You have our university musical clubs, thoroughly professional organizations. If you are material, you must get out and begin to work for them—coach with a professional coach, make the Apollo clubs, and, working on, some day in junior year reach the varsity organization and go out on a professional tour. Again an organization conceived on business lines.
"The same is true with the competition for our papers: the struggle for existence outside in a business world is not one whit more intense than the struggle to win out in the News or Lit competition. We are like a beef trust, with every by-product organized, down to the last possibility. You come to Yale—what is said to you? 'Be natural, be spontaneous, revel in a certain freedom, enjoy a leisure you'll never get again, browse around, give your imagination a chance, see every one, rub wits with every one, get to know yourself.'
"Is that what's said? No. What are you told, instead? 'Here are twenty great machines that need new bolts and wheels. Get out and work. Work harder than the next man, who is going to try to outwork you. And, in order to succeed, work at only one thing. You don't count—everything for the college.' Regan says the colleges don't represent the nation; I say they don't even represent the individual.
”
”
Owen Johnson (Stover at Yale)
“
The heart of rock will always remain a primal world of action. The music revives itself over and over again in that form, primitive rockabilly, punk, hard soul and early rap. Integrating the world of thought and reflection with the world of primitive action is *not* a necessary skill for making great rock 'n' roll. Many of the music's most glorious moments feel as though they were birthed in an explosion of raw talent and creative instinct (some of them even were!). But ... if you want to burn bright, hard *and* long, you will need to depend on more than your initial instincts. You will need to develop some craft and a creative intelligence that will lead you *farther* when things get dicey. That's what'll help you make crucial sense and powerful music as time passes, giving you the skills that may also keep you alive, creatively and physically. The failure of so many of rock's artists to outlive their expiration date of a few years, make more than a few great albums and avoid treading water, or worse, I felt was due to the misfit nature of those drawn to the profession. These were strong, addictive personalities, fired by compulsion, narcissism, license, passion and an inbred entitlement, all slammed over a world of fear, hunger and insecurity. That's a Molotov cocktail of confusion that can leave you unable to make, or resistant to making, the lead of consciousness a life in the field demands. After first contact knocks you on your ass, you'd better have a plan, for some preparedness and personal development will be required if you expect to hang around any longer than your fifteen minutes.
Now, some guys' five minutes are worth other guys' fifty years, and while burning out in one brilliant supernova will send record sales through the roof, leave you living fast, dying young, leaving a beautiful corpse, there *is* something to be said for living. Personally, I like my gods old, grizzled and *here*. I'll take Dylan; the pirate raiding party of the Stones; the hope-I-get-very-old-before-I-die, present live power of the Who; a fat, still-mesmerizing-until-his-death Brando—they all suit me over the alternative. I would've liked to have seen that last Michael Jackson show, a seventy-year-old Elvis reinventing and relishing in his talents, where Jimi Hendrix might've next taken the electric guitar, Keith Moon, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain and all the others whose untimely deaths and lost talents stole something from the music I love, living on, enjoying the blessings of their gifts and their audience's regard. Aging is scary but fascinating, and great talent morphs in strange and often enlightening ways. Plus, to those you've received so much from, so much joy, knowledge and inspiration, you wish life, happiness and peace. These aren't easy to come by.
”
”
Bruce Springsteen (Born to Run)
“
FACT 4 – There is more to the creation of the Manson Family and their direction than has yet been exposed. There is more to the making of the movie Gimme Shelter than has been explained. This saga has interlocking links to all the beautiful people Robert Hall knew. The Manson Family and the Hell’s Angels were instruments to turn on enemy forces. They attacked and discredited politically active American youth who had dropped out of the establishment. The violence came down from neo-Nazis, adorned with Swastikas both in L.A. and in the Bay Area at Altamont. The blame was placed on persons not even associated with the violence. When it was all over, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were the icing on this cake, famed musicians associated with a racist, neo-Nazi murder. By rearranging the facts, cutting here and there, distorting evidence, neighbors and family feared their own youth. Charles Manson made the cover of Life with those wide eyes, like Rasputin. Charles Watson didn’t make the cover. Why not? He participated in all the killings. Manson wasn’t inside the house. Manson played a guitar and made records. Watson didn’t. He was too busy taking care of matters at the lawyer’s office prior to the killings, or with officials of Young Republicans. Who were Watson’s sponsors in Texas, where he remained until his trial, separate from the Manson Family’s to psychologically distance him from the linking of Watson to the murders he actually committed. “Pigs” was scrawled in Sharon Tate’s house in blood. Was this to make blacks the suspects? Credit cards of the La Bianca family were dropped intentionally in the ghetto after the massacre. The purpose was to stir racial fears and hatred. Who wrote the article, “Did Hate Kill Tate?”—blaming Black Panthers for the murders? Lee Harvey Oswald was passed off as a Marxist. Another deception. A pair of glasses was left on the floor of Sharon Tate’s home the day of the murder. They were never identified. Who moved the bodies after the killers left, before the police arrived? The Spahn ranch wasn’t a hippie commune. It bordered the Krupp ranch, and has been incorporated into a German Bavarian beer garden. Howard Hughes knew George Spahn. He visited this ranch daily while filming The Outlaw. Howard Hughes bought the 516 acres of Krupp property in Nevada after he moved into that territory. What about Altamont? What distortions and untruths are displayed in that movie? Why did Mick Jagger insist, “the concert must go on?” There was a demand that filmmakers be allowed to catch this concert. It couldn’t have happened the same in any other state. The Hell’s Angels had a long working relationship with law enforcement, particularly in the Oakland area. They were considered heroes by the San Francisco Chronicle and other newspapers when they physically assaulted the dirty anti-war hippies protesting the shipment of arms to Vietnam. The laboratory for choice LSD, the kind sent to England for the Stones, came from the Bay Area and would be consumed readily by this crowd. Attendees of the concert said there was “a compulsiveness to the event.” It had to take place. Melvin Belli, Jack Ruby’s lawyer, made the legal arrangements. Ruby had complained that Belli prohibited him from telling the full story of Lee Harvey Oswald’s murder (another media event). There were many layers of cover-up, and many names have reappeared in subsequent scripts. Sen. Philip Hart, a member of the committee investigating illegal intelligence operations inside the US, confessed that his own children told him these things were happening. He had refused to believe them. On November 18, 1975, Sen. Hart realized matters were not only out of hand, but crimes of the past had to be exposed to prevent future outrages. How shall we ensure that it will never happen again? It will happen repeatedly unless we can bring ourselves to understand and accept that it did go on.
”
”
Mae Brussell (The Essential Mae Brussell: Investigations of Fascism in America)
“
The success is like an umbrella. It has wires in it called faith. It has no meaning if there is no rain and storm called ebbs and flows of life.
”
”
Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma (Guru with Guitar)
“
Life is like a guitar; Tune. Play. Repeat.
”
”
Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma (Guru with Guitar)
“
Abovitz is a technology entrepreneur with a background in biomedical engineering. He previously founded Mako Surgical, a company in Fort Lauderdale that makes a robotic arm equipped with haptic technology, which imparts a sense of touch so that orthopedic surgeons have the sensation of actually working on bones as they trigger the robot’s actions. Mako was sold to a medical technology company, Stryker, for nearly $1.7 billion in 2013. By night, Abovitz likes to rock out. He sings and plays guitar and bass in a pop-rock band called Sparkydog & Friends. And as he tells it, Magic Leap has its origins in both the robotic-surgery company and his life as a musician.
”
”
Anonymous
“
And late late late when he thought they had gone—or he had gone— to sleep maybe, to a place inside his head where they couldn’t reach him, in the dark, he opened his eyes, and next to him sat Anthony. Alexander shut his eyes, not wanting Anthony to see all the things he was carrying, and Anthony leaned deeply in and lowered his forehead onto Alexander’s bandaged chest. “Dad,” he whispered, “I swear to God, you have to stop it. You’ve been doing this for weeks now, turning away every time you look at me. Please. Stop. I’m hurt enough. Think of yourself, remember your-self—did you want my mother to turn her face from you when you came back from war? Please. I don’t give a fuck about the arm. I don’t. I’m not like Nick Moore. I’m like Mom. I’ll adjust, little by little. I’m just glad to be alive, to be back. I thought my life was over. I didn’t think I would ever come back, Dad,” said Anthony, raising his head. “What are you so upset about? It wasn’t even my good arm.” He smiled lightly. “I never liked it. Couldn’t pitch ball with it, couldn’t write with it. Certainly, unlike you, couldn’t shoot fucking Dudley with it. Now come on. Please.” “Yes,” whispered Alexander. “But you’ll never play guitar again.” And other things you will never do. Play basketball. Pitch. Hold your newborn baby in your palms. Anthony swallowed. “Or go to war again.” He broke off. “I know. I have some adjusting to do. It is what it is. Mom says this, and you should listen to her. She says I got away with my life, and I’m going to do just fine. All we want is for you to be all right,” Anthony said. “That’s all any of us ever wanted.” “Antman,” said Alexander, his hand on his son’s lowered head, his wounded chest drawn and quartered, “you’re a good kid.
”
”
Paullina Simons (The Summer Garden (The Bronze Horseman, #3))
“
I HAVEN’T HAD the Dream in a long time. But it’s back. And it’s changed. It does not begin as it always has, with the chase. The woods. The mad swooping of the griffins and the charge of the hose-beaked vromaski. The volcano about to erupt. The woman calling my name. The rift that opens in the ground before me. The fall into the void. The fall, where it always ends. Not this time. This time, these things are behind me. This time, it begins at the bottom. I am outside my own body. I am in a nanosecond frozen in time. I feel no pain. I feel nothing. I see someone below, twisted and motionless. The person is Jack. Jack of the Dream. But being outside it, I see that the body is not mine. Not the same face. As if, in these Dreams, I have been dwelling inside a stranger. I see small woodland creatures, fallen and motionless, strewn around the body. The earth shakes. High above, griffins cackle. Water trickles beneath the body now. It pools around the head and hips. And the nanosecond ends. The scene changes. I am no longer outside the body but in. Deep in. The shock of reentry is white-hot. It paralyzes every molecule, short-circuiting my senses. Sight, touch, hearing—all of them join in one huge barbaric scream of STOP. The water fills my ear, trickles down my neck and chest. It freezes and pricks. It soothes and heals. It is taking hold of the pain, drawing it away. Drawing out death and bringing life. I breathe. My flattened body inflates. I see. Smell. Hear. I am aware of the soil ground into my skin, the carcasses all around, the black clouds lowering overhead. The thunder and shaking of the earth. I blink the grit from my eyes and struggle to rise. I have fallen into a crevice. The cracked earth is a vertical wall before me. And the wall contains a hole, a kind of door into the earth. I see dim light within. I stand on shaking legs. I feel the snap of shattered bones knitting themselves together. One step. Two. With each it becomes easier. Entering the hole, I hear music. The Song of the Heptakiklos. The sound that seems to play my soul like a guitar. I draw near the light. It is inside a vast, round room, an underground chamber. I enter, lifted on a column of air. At the other side I see someone hunched over. The white lambda in his hair flashes in the reflected torch fire. I call to him and he turns. He looks like me. Beside him is an enormous satchel, full to bursting. Behind him is the Heptakiklos. Seven round indentations in the earth. All empty.
”
”
Peter Lerangis (Lost in Babylon (Seven Wonders, #2))
“
No cameras will be added in this room. There are a few guitars lined up, all of them nice and shiny. His whole life is nice and shiny. Just like all of them. I can’t wait to paint it red.
”
”
S.T. Abby (The Risk (Mindf*ck, #1))
“
I’ve never wanted to play like anybody else, except when I was first starting, when I wanted to be Scotty Moore or Chuck Berry. After that, I wanted to find out what the guitar or the piano could teach me.
”
”
Keith Richards (Life)
“
Thorn In My Pride"
Wake me when the day breaks
Show me how the sun shines
Tell me about your heartaches
Who could be so unkind?
Do you dream to touch me?
And smile down deep inside
Or could you just kill me?
Hey, it's hard to make up your mind sometimes.
My angels, my devils, my thorn in my pride
My angels, my devils, my thorn in my pride
Are you wanting inspiration?
You spill your secrets on me
Then you tell me with a whisper
Of things that will never be.
Do you hear me breathing?
Does it make you want to scream?
Did you ever like a bad dream?
Sometimes life is obscene.
My angels, my devils, my thorn in my pride
My angels, my devils, my thorn in my pride
My angels, my devils, my thorn in my pride
Lover, cover me with your sleep
Let your love light shine, let it shine
Lover, cover me with a good dream
Oh, let your love light
Oh, let your love light shine
Oh, I wanna know, do you ever wanna let it shine?
Do you ever wanna let it shine, baby?
Your love light, your love light
Listen, lover, cover me with your sleep
Let your love light shine, let it shine
Lover, cover me with your sleep
Let your love light shine, let it shine
Lover, cover me with your dream
Let your love light shine, let it shine
Thorn in my pride
The Southern Harmony And Musical Companion (1992)
”
”
The Black Crowes (Black Crowes -- Guitar Anthology: Authentic Guitar TAB)
“
He told me that because he was left-handed, he and John could play the guitars like mirrors opposite each other, watching each other’s hands.
”
”
Keith Richards (Life)
“
Never give the charge of your life in the hands of others; you’ll get screwed and people would enjoy it. Life is like a guitar. So hold the guitar of your destiny, and play it well. Don’t depend on others. If you believe in something, do it.
”
”
Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma (10 GOLDEN Steps of Life)
“
Everything was going well in my life. My career was spit-shined and gleaming, I’d made a name for myself in the sports world, and I had plans to get back onto the battlefield like a Navy SEAL should. But sometimes, even when you are doing everything right in life, shit storms appear and multiply. Chaos can and will descend without warning, and when (not if) that happens, there won’t be anything you can do to stop it. If you’re fortunate, the issues or injuries are relatively minor, and when those incidents crop up it’s on you to adjust and stay after it. If you get injured or other complications arise that prevent you from working on your primary passion, refocus your energy elsewhere. The activities we pursue tend to be our strengths because it’s fun to do what we’re great at. Very few people enjoy working on their weaknesses, so if you’re a terrific runner with a knee injury that will prevent you from running for twelve weeks, that is a great time to get into yoga, increasing your flexibility and your overall strength, which will make you a better and less injury-prone athlete. If you’re a guitar player with a broken hand, sit down at the keys
”
”
David Goggins (Can't Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds)
“
My mind goes back to these days often because they all pull on my heart; like strings on a guitar being tuned too tightly. To the point that I feel as if I am going to choke on the wooden splinters, and all the strings that were connecting us snapped away. Indeed, my angels Lily and Jaylynn are the only angelic and horrific faces that keep me going. They are like night- lights in my life, they are the stars that shine for me; Jaylynn reminds me of how I affectionately named her after my daddy, and that is bittersweet. Yet to this day, he has not said anything to me, I wonder why?
”
”
Marcel Ray Duriez (Nevaeh The Cursed)
“
I really like playing my guitars. Y’know, they don’t call it working my guitars, right?
”
”
Mark Shaiken (Automatic Stay a 3J mystery (2))
“
Not everything needs a shine, after all. If you leave a Pelham Blue Gibson Trini Lopez guitar in the case for fifty years, it will look like it was just delivered from the factory. But if you take it in your hands, show it to the sun, let it breathe, sweat on it, and fucking PLAY it, over time the finish will turn a unique shade. And each instrument ages entirely differently. To me, that is beauty. Not the gleam of prefabricated perfection, but the road-worn beauty of individuality, time, and wisdom.
”
”
Dave Grohl (The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music)
“
Winter's coming in the air tonight
Feel it blowing off the park
But that don't mean that we can't take a ride
60 miles to Seaside Heights
I do the same old thing again, because it don't feel old
There's no need to reinvent, you’re sensational
Poetry in motion, swinging with your saxophone in the rain
What's this devotion? I've never felt love, not from pain
Bodies or oceans, you fill mine up with your right rain
Because you're like, poetry in motion
Sippin' on your martini in the band
What’s this devotion? You really seem like a good man
Bodies or oceans, I cling to you like your mainland
Winter's coming in the air tonight
Feel it blowin' off the park
But that don't mean that we can't take a ride
60 miles to Seaside Heights
I want the same old thing again, 'cause it don't feel old
That there's no need to reinvent you, you're sensational
You're poetry in motion, swinging with your saxophone in the rain
What's this devotion? I never felt love, not from pain
Bodies or oceans, you lift mine up with your right rain
Because you're like poetry in motion
Sippin' on your martini in the band
What’s this devotion? You really feel like a good man
Bodies or oceans, mhm
On the cover of life is a picture of a man
Just like she's alive again, and everyone
Doesn't matter if you're a
One, two, three
Because you're like poetry in motion
Swinging with your saxophone in the bar
What's this devotion? Built with metal and with guitar
Bodies or oceans, wash over all my scars,
Because you're like poetry in motion
Swingin' with your martini in the band
What's this emotion? You really seem like a good man
Bodies or oceans, I cling to you like your mainland
”
”
Lana Del Rey
“
**Verse 1:**
I've got the blues, they're settin' in,
Like a slow train comin' 'round the bend.
My heart's heavy like boots in mud,
Life's dealt a hand, and it ain't good.
**Chorus:**
I'm down, but not out, in this lonesome town,
My spirit's low, but I ain't gonna drown.
I'll sing my sorrows to the prairie wind,
'Til I find my way up once again.
**Verse 2:**
The whiskey whispers and the guitar cries,
Telling tales of how time flies.
Lost my love, lost my way,
But I'll find the strength to face the day.
**Chorus:**
I'm down, but not out, in this lonesome town,
My spirit's low, but I ain't gonna drown.
I'll sing my sorrows to the prairie wind,
'Til I find my way up once again.
**Bridge:**
In the quiet of the night, under the starlight,
I find hope in the pale moon's glow.
The road is long, but my will is strong,
I'll rise again, this I know.
**Chorus:**
I'm down, but not out, in this lonesome town,
My spirit's low, but I ain't gonna drown.
I'll sing my sorrows to the prairie wind,
'Til I find my way up once again.
**Outro:**
So here's to the down, but not defeated,
To the hearts that keep on beatin'.
In the end, we'll stand tall,
'Cause being down ain't the end at all.
”
”
James Hilton-Cowboy
“
Eyes That Noticed Him”
In the quiet corner of a crowded room,
With a jukebox playing an old love tune,
He was just a shadow, 'til her glance fell,
On him like a spell, in that moment, he dwelled.
Oh, her eyes lit up the room, like the break of dawn,
A love story starting, a new day born,
With a smile that shines, bright as the sun,
He knew she's the one, his heart she won.
They're dancing through life, with joy in their stride,
In her eyes, he's found his wild ride,
A love so bold, it breaks all the norms,
In her gaze, his world transforms.
She was the whisper in the summer wind,
A gentle touch on his weathered skin,
Her smile, a beacon in the night,
Guiding him to her, his heart's delight.
With just one look, his world stood still,
The future bright, theirs to fulfill,
Her eyes, a vow of love so true,
In that very moment, his life anew.
She was the rain to his parched earth,
Giving his dreams an endless birth,
Hand in hand, they found their way,
In her eyes, his forever lay.
Now every melody tells their tale,
Of a love that's strong, that will not fail,
He owes his joy to that twist of life,
When her eyes found him, cutting through strife.
Those eyes, they spoke without a word,
A love story, waiting to be heard,
She's the girl who rewrote his every day,
Since her eyes found him, in that serendipitous way.
In the stillness, their souls did dance,
A single look, and they took the chance,
He found a haven in her loving gaze,
Under the stars, they'll spend their days.
And they fell in love, oh so deep,
A love to sow, a love to reap,
In her eyes, he found his dream,
A love so profound, it makes the heart beam.
As the night winds down, they hold each other tight,
With hearts in tune, under the moonlight,
For in her eyes, he found his place,
A love story written in time and space.
So let the guitars strum, and the fiddles play,
For their love's a song that'll never fade away,
In a world that spins, sometimes too fast,
They found a love in her eyes, that'll always last.
”
”
James Hilton-Cowboy
“
I want to be practical now: how are you going to accomplish this? The answer is simple: keep a journal. It amazes me how often people call themselves writers and yet fail to write. Runners run everyday, and they know that not every run is a race. Musicians play music perpetually, but not every time they pick up the guitar is a concert. Writers, meanwhile, like to wait around for inspiration to strike. Don't wait; write! Describe, describe, describe, and find the pleasure in pinning the right words to life's incessant stream of sensations.
”
”
Teju Cole (Eight Letters to a Young Writer)
“
Ain't Lookin' Back"
(Verse 1)
City lights, country nights, blending in a perfect flow,
I'm hitting this life full throttle, ready for the show.
You're yesterday's echo, fading in the track,
When you take out the trash, ain't no sense in looking back.
(Chorus)
'Cause I'm living loud, in the here and now,
No rearview glances, I've made my vow.
I won't be a part of letting you destroy me,
I'm all about the future, that's where you'll see me.
(Verse 2)
Got my heart tuned up, like a guitar's string,
Every lesson learned, is a song I'll sing.
I'm done with the digging, done with the old hack,
When you take out the trash, you don't unpack.
(Bridge)
I'm a modern rebel, with an old soul's wisdom,
Cutting ties with the past, like a sharp incision.
I'm not just surviving, I'm on the attack,
When you take out the trash, you don't look back.
(Chorus)
'Cause I'm living loud, in the here and now,
No rearview glances, I've made my vow.
I won't be a part of letting you destroy me,
I'm all about the future, that's where you'll see me.
(Outro)
So here's to the bright days, and the starlit nights,
To the new beginnings, and the soaring heights.
I'm stepping forward, on a one-way track,
'Cause when you take out the trash, you ain't lookin' back.
”
”
James Hilton-Cowboy
“
The Ballad of the Lone Cowboy
In the heart of the prairie, where the wildflowers bloom, Lived a cowboy named James, with his guitar and tunes. He’d sit by the fire, under stars shining bright, And pen down his thoughts, every day and each night.
His page was a canvas, where his stories took flight, “Cowboy’s-just for fun,” in the soft moonlight. With quotes that inspired, and tales that spun, He shared his heart freely, just for fun.
One day he wrote of a boy, so young and so brave, Whose mother fought battles, no more could she save. Through the eyes of the child, the world seemed so vast, But James’ tender words, held the readers fast.
The cowboy’s creations, like his spirit, roamed free, From grand tales of adventure, to sweet family glee. Each post was a window, to a life rich and full, Of laughter and sorrow, of push and of pull.
So here’s to the cowboy, with his hat and his grin, Whose stories keep dancing, on the winds that spin. For in every line, and each word that’s penned, Lies the essence of life, from start to end.
I hope this story captures the essence of the “Cowboy’s-just for fun” page and resonates with the themes you enjoy. If you have any specific elements or ideas you’d like to include, feel free to let me know, and I can incorporate them into the story.
”
”
James Hilton-Cowboy
“
The Ballad of the Lone Cowboy
In the heart of the prairie, where the wildflowers bloom, Lived a cowboy named James, with his guitar and tunes. He’d sit by the fire, under stars shining bright, And pen down his thoughts, every day and each night.
His page was a canvas, where his stories took flight, “Cowboy’s-just for fun,” in the soft moonlight. With quotes that inspired, and tales that spun, He shared his heart freely, just for fun.
One day he wrote of a boy, so young and so brave, Whose mother fought battles, no more could she save. Through the eyes of the child, the world seemed so vast, But James’ tender words, held the readers fast.
The cowboy’s creations, like his spirit, roamed free, From grand tales of adventure, to sweet family glee. Each post was a window, to a life rich and full, Of laughter and sorrow, of push and of pull.
So here’s to the cowboy, with his hat and his grin, Whose stories keep dancing, on the winds that spin. For in every line, and each word that’s penned, Lies the essence of life, from start to end.
I hope this story captures the essence of the “Cowboy’s-just for fun” page and resonates with the themes you enjoy. And if you like this page, please share it with your friends.
I hope you enjoy this story and feel inspired to share it with others
”
”
James Hilton-Cowboy
“
Whiskey Truths and Lies"
(Verse 1)
In this dimly lit honky tonk, where the jukebox plays my life,
I've heard a thousand stories, felt a million eyes.
But the one thing I know, under these neon skies,
Hurt me with the truth, but never comfort me with a lie.
(Chorus)
'Cause lies are like whiskey, they burn going down,
Leaving you empty, spinning round and round.
But truth is like sunrise, clears the darkest night,
Hurt me with the truth, but never comfort me with a lie.
(Verse 2)
I've danced with shadows, I've sung with the band,
Worn my heart on my sleeve, got blood on my hands.
In the echo of the steel guitar, I've let out my cries,
Hurt me with the truth, but never comfort me with a lie.
(Bridge)
I'll take the pain, the bitter and the sweet,
Over a sugar-coated poison, that's no treat.
So pour me another, bartender, keep it neat,
And tell me something real, make this heart beat.
(Chorus)
'Cause lies are like whiskey, they burn going down,
Leaving you empty, spinning round and round.
But truth is like sunrise, clears the darkest night,
Hurt me with the truth, but never comfort me with a lie.
(Outro)
So here's to the truth, it's the song I'll sing,
In this honky tonk palace, let the truth bell ring.
For every broken heart, for every goodbye,
Hurt me with the truth, but never comfort me with a lie.
”
”
James Hilton-Cowboy
“
If you leave a Pelham Blue Gibson Trini Lopez guitar in the case for fifty years, it will look like it was just delivered from the factory.
But if you take it in your hands, show it to the sun, let it breathe, sweat on it, and fucking PLAY it, over time the finish will turn a unique shade. And each instrument ages entirely differently. To me, that is beauty. Not the gleam of prefabricated perfection, but the
road-worn beauty of individuality, time and wisdom.
”
”
Dave Grohl (The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music)
“
There was one of Cole on stage with his guitar, unmistakable. The blurry quality of the photo made it all the more real, more raw and unfiltered, like a genuine moment in life and not something produced.
”
”
Eleanor Wells (All Our Yesterdays (Velvet Records))
“
Davy, ever the daring one, bought a jumbo peppermint milk shake and got fifty cents back. He talked me out of getting plain vanilla. “You can get plain vanilla anytime!” he said. “Try…” He scanned the chalkboard that listed all the flavors. “Try peanut butter!”
I did. I have never been sorry, because it was the best milk shake I ever tasted, like a melted and frozen Reese’s cup. And then it happened.
We were walking across the parking lot, under the burning sun, with our shakes freezing our hands in the big white paper cups that had Spinnin’ Wheel in red across the sides. A sound began: music, first from a few car radios and then others as teenaged fingers turned the dial to that station. The volume dials were cranked up, and the music flooded out from the tinny speakers into the bright summer air. In a few seconds the same song was being played from every radio on the lot, and as it played, some of the car engines started and revved up and young laughter flew like sparks.
I stopped. Just couldn’t walk anymore. That music was unlike anything I’d ever heard: guys’ voices, intertwining, breaking apart, merging again in fantastic, otherworldly harmony. The voices soared up and up like happy birds, and underneath the harmony was a driving drumbeat and a twanging, gritty guitar that made cold chills skitter up and down my sunburned back.
“What’s that, Davy?” I said. “What’s that song?”
…Round…round…get around…wha wha wha-oooooo…
“What’s that song?” I asked him, close to panic that I might never know.
“Haven’t you heard that yet? All the high-school guys are singin’ it.”
…Gettin’ bugged drivin’ up and down the same ol’ strip…I gotta find a new place where the kids are hip…
“What’s the name of it?” I demanded, standing at the center of ecstasy.
“It’s on the radio all the time. It’s called—”
Right then the high-school kids in the lot started singing along with the music, some of them rocking their cars back and forth, and I stood with a peanut butter milk shake in my hand and the sun on my face and the clean chlorine smell of the swimming pool coming to me from across the street.
“—by the Beach Boys,” Davy Ray finished.
“What?”
“The Beach Boys. That’s who’s singin’ it.”
“Man!” I said. “That sounds…that sounds…”
What would describe it? What word in the English language would speak of youth and hope and freedom and desire, of sweet wanderlust and burning blood? What word describes the brotherhood of buddies, and the feeling that as long as the music plays, you are part of that tough, rambling breed who will inherit the earth?
“Cool,” Davy Ray supplied.
It would have to do.
…Yeah the bad guys know us and they leave us alone…I get arounnnnddddd…
I was amazed. I was transported. Those soaring voices lifted me off the hot pavement, and I flew with them to a land unknown. I had never been to the beach before. I’d never seen the ocean, except for pictures in magazines and on TV and movies. The Beach Boys. Those harmonies thrilled my soul, and for a moment I wore a letter jacket and owned a red hotrod and had beautiful blondes begging for my attention and I got around.
”
”
Robert McCammon (Boy's Life)
“
A Hymn I sang When I Found You (Poem)
******
You opened your arms to me
and my eyes to see.
You embraced me like your own.
In your soul,
You covered me with strength.
You opened my life with your breath.
Your comfort embraces my heart
like what paint is to art,
and jokes are to comedy,
and religion is to a prophecy,
and guitars are to music.
Importantly, you adorn me as artists do to the muse.
You swallowed me with your mind.
Sewn my broken pieces back into one,
and loved me throughout your research.
Like what members are to the church,
and grapes are to wine,
and mud is to a swine.
I was lost,
Now, I'm perfectly found at most.
In your love, I'm pulled.
Complete and full
without a piece amiss.
I'm washed with plenty a kiss.
A perfect melody!
Long gone are the days of melancholy.
Because no strange songs are sung.
You pierce into me like the sun
and comfort me like charms.
Mostly, you sing me a lullaby in your arms.
”
”
Mitta Xinindlu