Some food for your thoughts--may you always hunger for more.
"You're saying?" Dix asks me.
"What I'm saying," I tell him.
"But you mean?" he asks.
"Same as the words mean," I say.
Why Did I Ever by Mary Robison
I feel around in my handbag, extract something, use it, and put it back. Later on I might need something else. this is my life, what my life is really made of.
Why Did I Ever by Mary Robison
"Where was I?" I ask myself, just out of bed in the morning.
I say, "Three clues. Not at Pizza Hut, not in outer space, not in New Jersey."
"That still doesn't tell me, though," I say.
Why Did I Ever by Mary Robison
"I just regret everything and using my turn signal is too much trouble. Fuck you. Why should you get to know where I'm going, I don't."
Why Did I Ever by Mary Robison
"I don't think--" he begins."
I say, "Well, no you don't, do you? You don't think this! You don't think that! Don't relay any more thoughts to me if you do not have them."
Why Did I Ever by Mary Robison
"Do you wish you hadn't...?"
"Would my life have been easier? I'd have pottered around my library perfectly contented till I died. But my heart would never have started beating. I can't wish myself unborn. Now I am in the world and there are no steps backward, as I have learned on this journey."
The Book of Flying by Keith Miller
“Memories must enter the bloodstream, must churn a while through the heart’s mill, must be crushed and polished, be nearly forgotten or cling like burrs to other stories before they spill forth …”
The Book of Flying by Keith Miller
"Those who seek with the heart's eye will always find each other...We bind the world with our words, our travels are our winding-sheets."
The Book of Flying by Keith Miller
“Here at last he sat among those who elevated beauty above moneymaking, who revered what he did, holding the…pursuit of loveliness holy above the liturgy of trade and manners that cohered and stifled ordinary lives.”
The Book of Flying by Keith Miller
“Dreams are the soul of the imagination, the slender and evasive revenants of the shells we erect as our dwellings. ….A few, the rare, the beautiful, remain as near to the heat of their dreams as children, and we know them by their laughter, by the ease with which they are moved to tears, by our own desire to be around them.”
The Book of Flying by Keith Miller
“Yes, dreams are the seam I mine, the soil I till, the timber I fell. I am a carpenter, sawing, planning, hammering my dreams, jointing them into structures sturdy enough to bear the weight of a body, the weight of flesh.”
The Book of Flying by Keith Miller
“She knew this music…It grew from the core of mystery that gives a secret its special delight, religion its awe. It demanded to be accepted by simple faith, not dissected or questioned, and at the same time, it begged to be doubted and probed.
There was wonder in its strains, and bright flares of joy that set the heart on fire…”
The Little Country by Charles DeLint
“This was the real magic…the understanding that neither logic nor emotion on their own was enough to keep a man’s soul pure…The mind narrowed and blocked the world into understandable packages with which it could deal, but the soul required a broader view, one that encompassed both the microcosm of the mind’s perceptions as well as the macrocosm of the world as a whole with which it must interact. Less than a perfect harmony of the two left one crippled.”
The Little Country by Charles DeLint
“Your world grows ever more regimented and orderly; soon it will lose all of its ability to imagine, to know enchantment, to be joyful for no other reason than that its people perceive the wonder of the world they are blessed to live in.”
The Little Country by Charles DeLint
"All get what they want; they do not always like it."
"Oh Adam's sons, how cleverly you defend yourselves against all that might do you good!"
-The Magician's Nephew by C.S. Lewis
"But he who had found, could give his approval to every path, every goal; nothing separated him from all the other thousands who lived in eternity, who breathed the Divine."
-Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
"If you want to know how to do a thing you must first have a complete desire to do that thing. Then go to kindred spirits—others who have wanted to do that thing—and study their ways and means, learn from their successes and failures and add your quota…with this technical knowledge you may go forward, expressing through the play of forms the music that is in you and which is very personal to you.
You can do anything you want to do. What is rare is this actual wanting to do a specific thing: wanting it so much that you are practically blind to all other things, that nothing else will satisfy you.
An artist has got to get acquainted with himself just as much as he can. It is no easy job, for it is not a present-day habit of humanity.
The artist should have a powerful will. He should be powerfully possessed by one idea. He should be intoxicated with the idea of the thing he wants to express."
-My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok
"'There is no God but Reality,' goes a saying attributed to a mythical Sufi sect--and, blasphemous as this sounds, it is not a declaration of unbelief. Rather, it is a warning to avoid turning inspiration into fetish and tradition into dogma; it is an admonition to never reduce the spiritual realm to the narrow borders of your own perceptions, prejudices, and ideals."
-Vagabonding by Rolf Potts
"When Taker peoples–people of your culture–encounter them [the Other], they naturally aren't curious to know why they live this way or whether it works for them. They simply say, 'This is not a nice way to live and we won't tolerate it.' It would never occur to them to try to stop white-footed mice from living the way they live or stop mountain goats from living the way they live or stop elephant seals from living the way they live, but they naturally consider themselves experts on the way humans ought to live."
-My Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
Sir Edward E. Evans-Pritchard, on fieldwork: "...one lives in two different worlds of thought at the same time, in categories and concepts and values which often cannot be easily reconciled. One becomes, at least temporarily, a sort of double marginal man, alienated from both worlds."
"There are no final truths. The scientific mind does ont so much provide the right answers as ask the right questions."
-Claude Levi-Strauss
"Age-long family traditions disappear with the destruction of a family; and virtue having been lost, vice takes hold of the entire race."
The Bhagavadgita
"Being in love was like China: you knew it was there, and no doubt it was very interesting, and some people went there, but I never would. I'd spend all my life without ever going to China, but it wouldn't matter, because there was all the rest of the world to visit."
The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman
"I used to be a nun, you see. I thought physics could be done to the glory of God, till I saw there wasn't any God at all and that physics was more interesting anyway."
The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman
"The proof of poetry was...that it reduced to the essence of a single line the vague philosophy that floated in all men's minds, so as to render it portable and useful, ready to the hand."
The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl
"The very weeping there prevents all weeping
and grief, which finds no outlet at the eye,
turns inward to increase the anguish--"
"Inferno"-Dante-Canto XXXIII line 94-6-(describing the very deepest layer of Hell [lucky me])
"I was meant to be a composer and will be I'm sure...Don't ask me to try to forget this unpleasant thing and go play football--please." -Barber
"The people of your culture cling with fanatical tenacity to the specialness of man. They want desperately to perceive a vast gulf between man and the rest of creation. This mythology of human superiority justifies their doing whatever they please with the world, just the way Hitler's mythology of Aryan superiority justified his doing whatever he pleased with Europe. But in the end this mythology is not deeply satisfying. The Takers are a profoundly lonely people. The world for them is enemy territory, and they live in it everywhere like an army of occupation, alienated and isolated by their extraordinary specialness."
Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn
"Trial and error isn't a bad way to learn how to build an aircraft, but it can be a disastrous way to learn how to build a civilization."
Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn
"According to your maps, the world of thought is coterminous with your culture. It ends at the border of your culture, and if you venture beyond that border, you simply fall off the edge of the world."
Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn
"There's nothing fundamentally wrong with people. Given a story to enact that puts them in accord with the world, they will live in accord with the world. But given a story to enact that puts them at odds with the world, as yours does, they will live at odds with the world...given a story to enact in which the world is a foe to be conquered, they will conquer it like a foe, and one day, inevitably, their foe will lie bleeding to death at their feet, as the world is now."
Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn
"Facts are facts, even when they're embodied in mythology."
Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn
"What sort of world would it be without an anthropologist?"
Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn
"You're really not thinking, I'm afraid. You've recited a story you've heard a thousand times, and now you're listening to Mother Culture as she murmurs in your ear: 'There, there, my child, there's nothing to think about, nothing to worry about, don't get excited, don't listen to the nasty animal, this is no myth, nothing I tell you is a myth, so there's nothing to think about, nothing to worry about, just listen to my voice and go to sleep, go to sleep, go to sleep..."
Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn
"No creation story is a myth to the people who tell it. It's just the story."
Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn
"I sometimes fly in my dreams, and each time I say to myself, 'At last--it's happening in reality and not in a dream!'"
Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn
"There are times when having too much to say can be as dumbfounding as having too little."
Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn
"...the only way, we say
you rid a sea with dance
and banish love to verse."
The Whalestoe Letters , by Mark Z Danielewsky
"Do not entrust your future to the limits of your stride."
The Whalestoe Letters , by Mark Z Danielewsky
"Get thee to a dictionary and be relentless about your visits there."
The Whalestoe Letters , by Mark Z Danielewsky
"I may be dreaming, but I'm living, too."
--Lourey Middlecamp
""Someone once wrote that musicians are touched on the shoulder by God," she said, "and I think it's true. You can make other people happy with music, but you can make yourself happy too."
-Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, by John Berendt
"If you truly believe that...then for you it is truth--all the Gods are One God and all the Goddesses one Goddess. But would you presume ot declare one truth for all of mankind throughout the world?"
-The Mists of Avalon, by Marion Zimmer Bradley
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public!"
-"Tommy Boy"
"The primary function of teachers...is to teach."
-My psychology textbook
"It is what happens in the soul of the man...not whether it is Christian or pagan or Druid. If [a man] faces the mystery in his heart, and it makes him a better man in his soul, does it matter whence it comes, from the Goddess or from Christ or from that Name the Druids may not speak--or from the very goodness within himself?"
-The Mists of Avalon, by Marion Zimmer Bradley
"The older I grow, the more I become certain that it makes no difference what words we use to tell the same truths."
The Mists of Avalon--Marion Zimmer Bradley
“If you could take the skewers of religion, those that riddle your frame, make you aware every time you move—if you could withdraw the scimitars of religion from your mental and moral systems—could you ever stand? Or do you need religion as, say, the hippos in the Grasslands need the poisonous little parasites within them, to help them digest fiber and pulp? The history of peoples who have shucked off religion isn’t an especially persuasive argument for living without it. Is religion itself—that tired and ironic phrase—the necessary evil?”
-Wicked, by Gregory Maguire
“Remember this: Nothing is written in the stars. Not these stars, nor any others. No one controls your destiny.”
-Wicked, by Gregory Maguire
“There were more ways to live than the ones given by one’s superiors.”
-Wicked, by Gregory Maguire
“I never use the words humanist or humanitarian, as it seems to me that to be human is to be capable of the most heinous crimes in nature.”
-Wicked, by Gregory Maguire
"There is apparently nothing that cannot happen."
-Mark Twain
"It doesn't matter what they believe so much as what you believe."
-Charles DeLint
"If you don't believe in magic, then it won't happen for you. If you don't believe that the world has a heart, then you won't hear it beating, you won't think it's alive and you won't consider what you're doing to it."
-Charles DeLint
"Could be where you want to go. Could be where you need to go. That's not always the same place, you know."
-Charles DeLint
"Big sky like that, it did wonders for the soul. Put everything into perspective. How serious could your problems ever be when you were this small in the overall scheme of things?"
-Charles DeLint
"Wondering's healthy. Broadens the mind. Opens you up to all sorts of stray thoughts and possibilities."
-Charles DeLint
"Once the sun sets, I tend to embrace whatever wild spirits are running around in the daqrkness, talking away to each other. I leave the logic of streets and pavement and cars and tall buildings behind and buy into the old magics that they're whispering about. Sometimes those little mysteries and bits of wisdom stick to the bones of my head and I carry them right out into the sunlight again. They're like...stories, true and not true, all at the same time. They don't exactly shape my life, but they certainly color it. I wouldn't like to live in a world where everything's as cut-and-dried as most people think it is."
-Charles DeLint
"I would say that I'm madly polishing this unbelievably tarnished mirror and hoping something shines forth."
-Loreena McKennitt
"...that's a magic all in itself. Paying attention, I mean. It's like touching a piece of the long ago."
-Charles DeLint
"There's no such thing as fiction. If you can imagine something, then it's happened."
-Charles DeLint
“I find courage is really a matter of choosing between action and fear. If your desire to make music is strong enough that you will try for it despite your fear of negative consequences should you fail, I call it “choosing the high road.” You might fail, you might miss a note, you might lose your job, but you have consciously decided to go for it. This choice must be made every day.”
-Barry Green
“The horn has a large range, and the notes get closer as they get to the top of the range. So what? What’s the big deal? …The reason I play the horn is that I like the sound of the horn. What I do is fun and enjoyable—and an incredible privilege.”
-Dale Clevenger
“When you very much want to accomplish something, your ambition will call forth the strength and commitment you need to do whatever is necessary to realize your goal.”
-Barry Green
"Technique is not music. Music is the thousandth of a millisecond between one note and another; how you get from one to the other--that's where the music is."
-Isaac Stern
"Aller anfang is schwer."
(Every new beginning is hard.)
-German proverb
"You cannot become a teacher because you say so. A teacher is God-made, not man-made."
-Maria von Trapp
"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music."
—Aldous Huxley
"Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark."
—Agnes de Mille
"Music should be a collective magic and hysteria."
-Pierre Boulez
"Dissonances are only the more remote consonances."
-Witold Lutoslawski
"Tonality is a natural force, like gravity."
-Paul Hindemith
"Music is life, and, like it, inextinguishable."
-Carl Nielsen
"It is only that which cannot be expressed otherwise that is worth expressing in music."<[>
-Frederick Delius
"Never compose anything unless the not composing of it becomes a positive nuisance to you."
-Holst
"For me...music exists to elevate us as far as possible above everyday existence."
-Faure
"It may be a good thing to copy reality; but to invent reality is much, much better."
-Verdi
"We are the music makers, We are the dreamers of dreams."
-Arthur O'Shaughnessy
"Music is not illusion, but revelation."
-Tchaikovsky
"Mozart is sunshine."
-Antonin Dvorak
"The expression of thought, of sentiment, of the passions, must be the true aim of music."
-Rameau
"...music oft hath such a charm To make bad good, and good provoke to harm."
-Shakespeare
"God giveth speech to all, song to the few."
-Walter Chalmers Smith
"Song is man's sweetest joy."
-Aristotle
"The accordion is an instrument with the sentiments of an assassin."
-Ambrose Bierce
"The horn is perhaps the least efficient instrument of the brass family, but it produces the most beautiful sound of all."
-Barry Tuckwell
"The saxophone is the embodied spirit of beer."
-Arnold Bennett
"...For we must have music, We must have music To drive our fears away."
-Noel Coward
"You must have the score in your head, not your head in the score."
-Hans von Bulow
"If you're in jazz and more than ten people like you, you're labelled commercial."
-Herbie Mann
"Chamber music concerns itself as a world of sound that has exernal boundaries but no internal ones."
-Hans Werner Henze
"There are two golden rules for an orchestra: start together and finish together."
-Thomas Beecham
"Orchestral music is one of the glories of the world."
-Georg Solti
"Musicke is said to be the rejoycing of the heart: Musicke comforteth the mynde and feareth the enimie."
-John Florio
"Music is the reaching out towards the utmost realities by means of ordered sound."
-Ralph Vaughan Williams
From Reader's Digest:
The new composers' dictionary:
Adagio Frommagio-To play in a slow and cheesy manner.
Angus Dei-To play with a divine, beefy tone.
A Patella-Unaccompanied knee-slapping.
Frugalhorn-A sensible, inexpensive brass instrument.
Dill Piccolino-A wind instrument that plays only sour notes.
Approximento-A musical entrance that is somewhere in the vicinity of the correct pitch.
"Listening to music is a psychosomatic experience that, as well as promoting harmony and peace, holds a power for inner reassurance and satisfaction which stems from deep within the human spirit. Many people would count themselves the poorer without it. We do not have to go into the science and philosophy of music to find the answer to our question; we simply need to go into our own souls, for that is where music belongs."
The Encyclopedia of Music
"...that is happiness, to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep."
My Antonia by Willa Cather
"Few can foresee whither their road will lead them, till they come to its end."
The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien
"Where there are so many, all speech becomes a debate without end. But two together may perhaps find wisdom."
The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien
"Why do you call it music?"
"What would you call it?"
Jodi thought about that and realized music was as close a word as could come to describing it. Except for perhaps--
"What about mystery?"
"Or magic. It has a hundred thousand names and is sought after in a hundred thousand ways, but it can't be named. That is its magic.
The Little Country by Charles de Lint
...It's madness. It has no heart--no care for the spirit, be it ours, or that of the earth itself. Thousands of acres of rainforest are destroyed every day--every single day--the ozone layer is being rapidly worn away, yet our world leaders are more concerned to argue about how many weapons they can stockpile.
They remind me of primary school bullies, vying for domination of the school yard, while an entire world--a real world--lies just beyond its confines. A world of far more sacred importance that they cannot see for their blindness.
The Little Country by Charles de Lint
...She supposed a person could be practical and still have a fey streak.
That was what music was like, she'd always thought...You didn't try to understand it. You just appreciated it.
Music.
Magic.
The Little Country by Charles de Lint
Maybe it's just enough to know that there's something marvellous still in the world, that all the mystery hasn't been drained out of it by those who like to take a thing apart to understand it, then stand back all surprised because it doesn't work anymore.
The Little Country by Charles de Lint
Home, James!
