Lumineers Lyrics Quotes

For my nymphet I needed a diminutive with a lyrical lilt to it. One of the most limpid and luminous letters is "L". The suffix "-ita" has a lot of Latin tenderness, and this I required too. Hence: Lolita. However, it should not be pronounced as you and most Americans pronounce it: Low-lee-ta, with a heavy, clammy "L" and a long "o". No, the first syllable should be as in "lollipop", the "L" liquid and delicate, the "lee" not too sharp. Spaniards and Italians pronounce it, of course, with exactly the necessary note of archness and caress. Another consideration was the welcome murmur of its source name, the fountain name: those roses and tears in "Dolores." My little girl's heartrending fate had to be taken into account together with the cuteness and limpidity. Dolores also provided her with another, plainer, more familiar and infantile diminutive: Dolly, which went nicely with the surname "Haze," where Irish mists blend with a German bunny—I mean, a small German hare.

I was not born to drown

A morning song that can shiver quiet backwaters of the future and fill their waves and silt with hope. A luminous and tranquil song full of thought. . . A song skinned of lyric. . . A song to go to the soul of things." Excerpts from "Se ha puesto el sol" (The Sun Has Set, 1920)

Is it not possible that the accent falls a little differently, that the moment of importance came before or after, that, if one were free and could set down what one chose, there would be no plot,the moment of importance came before or after, that, if one were free and could set down what one chose, there would be no plot, little probability, and a vague general confusion in which the clear-cut features of the tragic, the comic, the passionate, and the lyrical were dissolved beyond the possibility of separate recognition? The mind, exposed to the ordinary course of life, receives upon its surface a myriad impressions--trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms, composing in their sum what we might venture to call life itself; and to figure further as the semi-transparent envelope, or luminous halo, surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not perhaps the chief task of the novelist to convey this incessantly varying spirit with whatever stress or sudden deviation it may display, and as little admixture of the alien and external as possible? We are not pleading merely for courage and sincerity; but suggesting that the proper stuff for fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it.

Song and the lyric poem came first. Prose was invented centuries later. In Israel, Greece, and China came the primal, model lyrics for two and a half millennia. Read the biblical Song of Songs in Hebrew, Sappho in Greek, and Wang Wei in Chinese and be deeply civilized. You will know the passions, tragedy, spirit, politic, philosophy, and beauty that have commanded our solitary rooms and public spaces. I emphasize solitary, because the lyric, unlike theater and sport, is an intimate dialogue between maker and reader. From the Jews we have their two bibles of wisdom poetry, from the Chinese we have thousands of ancient nightingales whose song is calm ecstasy, and from the Greeks we have major and minor names and wondrous poems. However, because of bigotry, most of Greek poetry, especially Sappho, was by religious decree destroyed from the Fall of the Roman Empire to the Renaissance. So apart from one complete ode, we read Sappho in fragments. Yet there survive fragrant hills for lovers and dark and luminous mountains for metaphysicians. Most of ancient Greek lyric poetry is contained in this volume. Do not despair about loss. You are lucky if you can spend your life reading and rereading the individual poets. They shine. If technology or return to legal digs in Egypt and Syria are to reveal a library of buried papyri of Greek lyrics equivalent to the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Gnostic Nag Hammadi Library, we should be able to keep singing and dancing for ten moons straight. For now, we have the song, human comedy, political outrage, and personal cry for centuries of good reading.

Throughout the entire song, her eyes never left his. Each note, each lyric, was a new promise not only to share her life with him but also to elevate his. She was daring him to be more than who he was. To live life at a brighter luminance.

A note about the songs: “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe was first published in 1845. “Ah! Sun-flower” by William Blake appeared in his Songs of Experience in 1794. “The Goose and the Common” was written by an unknown author in the seventeenth or eighteenth century. “Ladybug, Ladybug” is a District 12 variation of a centuries-old nursery rhyme. I wrote both “Wiress’s Arena Song” and “The Harvest Song” for this story. “The Happy Birthday Song” and “Gem of Panem” first appeared in the novel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes; James Newton Howard wrote the music to the latter for the screen. “The Hanging Tree” lyrics originated in the book Mockingjay, and the film version was composed by Jeremiah Caleb Fraites & Wesley Keith Schultz of the Lumineers and arranged by James Newton Howard. “Nothing You Can Take From Me,” “The Ballad of Lucy Gray Baird,” and “The Old Therebefore” all first appeared in the Ballad novel and Dave Cobb wrote their music for the film. Much gratitude goes to all these artists, from long ago to the present, whose brilliant, whimsical, and soulful works have enriched Panem.