Music, Art and Madness Quotations and Proverbs

* some views expressed in these quotations not neccesarily endorsed by the author of this file.
* for entertainment only - history is not an exact science - dates and quotes not guaranteed for accuracy.

Added for March 2008:

Those who wish to sing always find a song.

When Jazz singer George Melly met Rolling Stones legend Mick Jagger, he told the aging rock star, "I didn’t expect you to have so many wrinkles." Jagger laughed off the remark. "They’re not wrinkles," he said. "They’re laugh lines." "Really?" Melly said. "Surely, nothing could be that funny."
  • Rolling Stone Magazine interview of George Melly (1926 - 2007)
[...] and learn the backward step that turns your light inward to illuminate your self. Body and mind of themselves will drop away, and your original face will be manifest.
  • Dogen (1200 - 1253)
All We are saying... is give Peace a Chance...
  • John Lennon ~lyric
Imagination is the highest kite one can fly.
  • Lauren Bacall
Deftly they opened the brain of a child, and it was full of flying dreams.
  • Stanley Kunitz, ‘My Surgeons.‘
An error doesn't become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.
  • Orlando A. Battista
Those aren't mistakes, those are grace notes.
  • [obq]
[...] the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.
  • Umberto Eco
Even the most Bush-happy, flag suckling jack-ass knows deep-down inside that something is wrong. America is over and everyone knows it. The New World Order has a dying empire odour and changing the channel ain't going to make this go away.
  • Jello Biafra
What a terrible thing memory is. Why can't we just tape our memory -- from the beginning so that you don't lose anything.
  • Lucille Kallen (1922-1999) writer for "Your Show of Shows"
Comedy: "It's just a positive look at negative things."
  • Bill Persky, writer/producer/director
Inventing is a combination of brains and materials. The more brains you use, the less material you need.
  • Charles Franklin Kettering (1876 - 1958)
The first time they [the aliens] came for me they milked me for sperm! Is that what a friend does?
  • Whitley Streiber _Coast to Coast_ (radio show )
The night before I left Las Vegas I walked out in the desert to look at the moon. There was a jeweled city on the horizon, spires rising in the night, but the jewels were diadems of electric and the spires were the neon of signs ten stories high.
  • Norman Mailer (1923 - 2007)
1. Love creative work. 2. Do not seek domination over others. 3. Avoid intimacy with the ruling authorities.
  • Pirke Avot 1:10, one of the Talmudic texts (c.300 BC)
Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.
  • Jonathan Safran Foer _ Extremely Loud, Incredibly Close _ 2005
While it may be true that there's white out on my computer screen and that I peel the shells off M&M's to make chocolate chip cookies, there is no truth to the accusation that I once buried Cheerios in an effort to grow a donut tree.
  • Harvey, Obama Making Hillary "Blonder"
For you see, each day I love you more, today more than yesterday and less than tomorrow.
  • Rosemonde Gerard (1866 - 1953)
It is often easy to make songs out of old quotations and proverbs.
  • [obq]
Here comes Tom Eliot in his four-piece suit.
  • Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) on T.S. Eliot
The truth is that sodomy is becoming generally recognised in England - but of such a degraded sort! Little boys of 13 are what the British Public love. There are choruses of them at most Comic Operas, and they flood all but the most distinguished of the Restaurants. In Florence people have better taste. Duncan (who's there) writes to say that large crowds collect every day to see the young aristocrats bathe in the Arno - and they are 18 or so. As each one steps out of the water a murmur of approbation or the reverse rises from the crowd. They criticise details - that young man's legs are too fat - oh! the beautiful torso! etc. I long to go and live there, or at any rate stay there a week.
  • Lytton Strachey, letter to Leonard Woolf, (June 20, 1907) [Duncan was Strachey's cousin, the painter Duncan Grant]

 

 

 

 

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