Grief is about a communication of ideas and feelings,’ I wrote, ‘a dialogue suddenly stopping, becoming a monologue when you didn’t want it to.’ I said grief was the process of wanting to share more and be more with people who are no longer here, and I still believe that. Music gives us a path to them, and at the same time it appears to sit outside mortality, offering us songs which, when we want them to, appear frozen in time.
The Sound of Being Human by Jude Rogers
“Sergeant Colon had had a broad education. He’d been to the School of My Dad Always Said, the College of It Stands to Reason, and was now a postgraduate student at the University of What Some Bloke In the Pub Told Me.”
Terry Pratchett, Jingo
“Gilles Deleuze in Negotiations: We’re riddled with pointless talk, insane quantities of words and images. Stupidity’s never blind or mute. So it’s not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves; what a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying.”
Quoted from How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy By Jenny Odell
“The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night
And his affections dark as Erebus:
Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.”William Shakespeare, The Merchant Of Venice.
For the enjoyment of a faintly literary melancholy there is no place like a train. One sits back, effortlessly casting away the tired landscape of an undesired world. Every sight is succulent food for bitterness: those suburbs like trenches with the wireless entanglements above them, the pillar boxes, the concrete, the sap heads of red London angling into the green country, the jab of a builder’s advertisement, some creamy-domed cinema, eight municipal trees. Beauty one wipes out of the mind before it can soak there and stain all, as one wipes tears from the eyes; but the ugly things, what a vicious pleasure they give, for they enhance the exquisite bitterness of one’s loneliness.
V.S. Pritchett, Marching Spain
“Give me your hungry, your tired, your poor, I’ll piss on ’em
That’s what the Statue of Bigotry says
Your poor huddled masses, let’s club ’em to death
And get it over with and just dump ’em on the boulevard”Lou Reed (Dirty Boulevard)