literary jukebox

Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them.

Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus

Song: "Myth" by Beach House

Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.

Bertrand Russell in Mysticism and Logic

Song: "Time" by Sean Hayes

Largeness is a lifelong matter – sometimes a conscious goal, sometimes not... You grow because you are not content not to. You are like a beaver that chews constantly because if it doesn’t, its teeth grow long and lock. You grow because you are a grower; you’re large because you can’t stand to be small.

Wallace Stegner in On Teaching and Writing Fiction

Song: "Grow" by Le Loup

Human beings must always be on the watch for the coming of wonders.

E.B. White (b. July 11, 1899) in Charlotte's Web

Song: "What a Wonderful World" by Louis Armstrong

Compassion emerges from imagining the world alive.

Alexandra Horowitz in On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes

Song: "Compassion" by Lucinda Williams

The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. Water is colorless, shallow water appears to be the color of whatever lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue.

[...]

The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains.

Rebecca Solnit in A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Song: "The Blue Distance" by Mary Chapin Carpenter

Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.

Bertrand Russell in "Mathematics and the Metaphysicians," published in Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays

Song: "The Calculation" by Regina Spektor

Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.

Neil Gaiman in The Graveyard Book

Song: "Escape Artist" by Zoë Keating

Suppose you had the revolution you are talking and dreaming about. Suppose your side had won, and you had the kind of society that you wanted. How would you live, you personally, in that society? Start living that way now!

Paul Goodman in Drawing the Line: Political Essays

Song: "Revolution" (Beatles cover) by La Res

Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn't ask ourselves what it says but what it means.

Umberto Eco (January 5, 1932–February 19, 2016) in The Name of the Rose

Song: "The Book of Right-On" by Joanna Newsom

In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

Albert Camus in Lyrical and Critical Essays

Song: "River" by Joni Mitchell

The power of music, whether joyous or cathartic, must steal on one unawares, come spontaneously as a blessing or a grace...

Oliver Sacks (July 9, 1933–August 30, 2015) in Musicophilia

Song: "Ode to Joy" from Symphony No. 9 in in D minor by Ludwig van Beethoven, performed by the London Symphony Orchestra

"I really don't want anything. Nothing at all." And then he realized how true that was; and how dreadful a thing it had become. "Have you ever got everything you ever wanted? And then realized it wasn't what you wanted at all? ... I thought I wanted a nice normal life. I mean, maybe I am crazy. I mean, maybe. But if this is all there is, then I don't want to be sane."

Neil Gaiman in Neverwhere

Song: "The Point of It All" by Amanda Palmer

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.

Helen Schucman in A Course in Miracles

Song: "This Must Be the Place" by Meklit Hadero & Quinn DeVeaux

WHEN DEATH COMES

When death comes

like the hungry bear in autumn;

when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;

when death comes

like the measle-pox

when death comes

like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:

what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything

as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,

and I look upon time as no more than an idea,

and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common

as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,

tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something

precious to the earth.

When it’s over, I want to say all my life

I was a bride married to amazement.

I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder

if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,

or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world

Mary Oliver in Blue Horses

Song: "Death with Dignity" by Sufjan Stevens

Each of us … constructs and lives a "narrative" and is defined by this narrative.

Oliver Sacks (b. July 9, 1933) in On the Move

Song: "Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in E minor Op. 64" by Mendelssohn, performed by Itzhak Perlman and the London Symphony Orchestra

Knowing more and more ... can block the passageways to feeling.

Elizabeth Alexander in The Light of the World

Song: "Believe (Nobody Knows)” by My Morning Jacket