Eliot Sumner Quotes

Even if my songs are quite sad or quite dark, I don't want my songs to make people sad. It's very important for me that all my songs have some kind of hope or light.

But I believe good things happen everyday. I believe good things happen even when bad things happen. And I believe on a happy day like today, we can still feel a little sad. And that's life, isn't it?

If I write a sad song, at the end it's gotta be like, 'Dude, things are looking up!'

I've always had a tendency to keep an emergency exit in a song. I can't remember ever writing a song that is completely and thoroughly depressing; there's always been a way out somehow. A sense of hope in song, regardless of the subject matter.

It's a weird dynamic - I guess there is a fine line between hope and sadness. Sometimes you can be feeling both at the same time.

I like to think I am a happy angry person, if that makes sense.

As a human being, I'm kind of a cheery melancholic. I have energy; I'm happy.

My favorite pieces that I've written, either for St. Lucia or for myself, have always had a transporting quality to them, where they take you out of the moment and somewhere positive that feels nostalgic and happy but sad at the same time.

Today's teardrops are tomorrow's rainbows.

Despite everything, life is full of beauty and meaning.

On that night after Phoebe had given her Pandora report, I thought about the Hope in Pandora's box. Maybe when everything seemed sad and miserable, Phoebe and I could both hope that something might start to go right.

A lament in one ear, maybe, but always a song in the other

All my work shares a kind of balance between black comedy and sad and despairing melancholy.

I've always been an optimistic guy, to tell you the truth.

I don't think tragic situations are necessarily devoid of beauty.

You may not know it, but at the far end of despair, there is a white clearing where one is almost happy.

I am an optimist. I think, as bad as life sometimes gets, there is so much joy and so much good stuff, that there is a balance.

I'm a generally optimistic person.

I seldom think about my limitations, and they never make me sad. Perhaps there is just a touch of yearning at times; but it is vague, like a breeze among flowers.

Some days are just bad days, that's all. You have to experience sadness to know happiness, and I remind myself that not every day is going to be a good day, that's just the way it is!

So far, at least, I haven't found a way to tell my kind of stories without making them both sad and funny.

My first instinct when I write songs is not a negative one. It's something positive... Everything I've ever done has some form of hope in it, I think.

Look, even bad years are pretty good years I think.

Even the most dismal and hopeless-sounding Wilco music, to my ears, has always maintained a level of hope and consolation.

I do believe that if you haven't learnt about sadness, you cannot appreciate happiness.