Elie Wiesel Quotes

If you give a good performance, something that gets some feeling across to people, that's such a rare gift. It's underestimated at this point in history, when the music biz is inevitably turning into a kind of politics.

Years later, you can hear a song, and it brings you back right to that moment, what was happening at that time, whether it was a relationship or a difficult time, or maybe a great time in your life, and you had that album you were listening to. Twenty years later, you can put on that song you fell in love to or your heart was broken to, and you hear that song and it brings you right back there. I think music is the most powerful tool we have.

If there is one thing that is constant in this world, it is the power of music.

My architecture is easy to understand. And enjoy. I hope it also is hard to forget.

I'd seen the Led Zeppelin reunion and I've never been such a huge Led Zeppelin fan as much as the Doors or Beatles. I went and saw the reunion and watching them play "Stairway to Heaven," it was very breathtaking for one reason mostly. I can imagine these two guys looking at each other, Robert Plant and Jimmy Page. Not to compare us to Led Zeppelin, but I did miss the fact that I could look over at the guy, Twiggy Ramirez, that wrote "The Beautiful People" and "Dope Show." Emotionally, it's taken a long time to repair that.

[To the audience at her farewell concert:] You have always given me more than I gave to you ... You were the wings on which I soared.

Came to . . . see you.” “But I had to go home, remember? You were supposed to say good-bye.” “Don't know why you . . . say good-bye. I say . . . hello.” Her lip quivers between reactions, but she ends up with a reluctant smile. “God you're a cheeseball. But seriously, R—

I lay in my bed night after night staring at the ceiling and thinking, Why have I survived the war? Why was I the last person in my immediate family to be alive? I didn’t know.

I love you. I love you. I send this message through my fingers and into his, up his arm and into his heart. Hear me. I love you. And I'm sorry to leave you.

Then the challenge is, once you left brain it and build it, then when you're on stage you have to know it so well that you can get lost in it. I don't want to be onstage looking like a robot, I want to be at the end of the day very emotional and what feels like someone being up there rather than reciting things. That's always the challenge, to analyze and then somehow lose yourself in something you absolutely know backwards and forwards. And nothing's going to surprise you, but you have to be surprised by it and let it surprise you.

Once I was in the Blink-182, going to Iraq was really touching. It was kind of emo for me, going and meeting soldiers who were, like, 19 and hadn't even met their kids... Or dealing with depression. Just being with those soldiers and traveling with them in helicopters and people with M-16s. It was an eye-opener.

When I am most successful as a guitar player is when I'm able to just sort of lose myself. You stop thinking about technique or anything like that and just trying to evoke the emotion of that song brings, which is a very strong emotion for me.

Jon Krakauer had documented it very accurately and very well but this kid made a real impression on people, and likewise they on him. To talk to them was very moving in many cases because they talk about him like they saw him yesterday. In most cases they knew this kid for a couple of weeks in their whole life and he just lasted with them.

Adieu, adieu, adieu! remember me.

I was keenly conscious of the comrades-in-arms who had fallen with me. A bond surpassing by a hundredfold that which I had known in life bound me to them. I felt a sense of inexpressible relief and realized that I had feared, more than death, separation from them. I apprehended that excruciating war survivor's torment, the sense of isolation and self-betrayal experienced by those who had elected to cling yet to breath when their comrades had let loose their grip.

Certain songs have a life, and certain songs don't. A song is like a saddle: you ride it for a while, and if it's the right kind of song you can sing it for the rest of your life. And then other songs are only really important for certain periods of your life, and you move on from them and find yourself not necessarily needing to sing them anymore.

Dachau has been my own lifelong point of no return. Between the moment when I walked through the gate of that prison, with its infamous motto, 'Arbeit Macht Frei,' and when I walked out at the end of a day that had no ordinary scale of hours, I was changed, and how I looked at the human condition, the world we live in, changed ... Years of war had taught me a great deal, but war was nothing like Dachau. Compared to Dachau, war was clean.

When I performed the songs in front of an audience at the end of each project and I knew the storytellers were in the crowd listening, that was hard.

There are things and there are faces which, when felt or seen for the first time, stamp themselves upon the mind like a sun image on a sensitized plate and there remain unalterably fixed.

And, if you love me, as I think you do, let's kiss and part, for we have much to do

I'll tell you how you know when you're on something good: when everybody starts to tear up when they're leaving, when they're wrapping for the season. You know, when you say, "All right, we're done with McGillicuddy. That's a wrap for McGillicuddy!" And everybody applauds, but everybody's sad, because McGillicuddy's going to be gone! You know, it's like family going off to college or war. You have this intimate relationship with these people, and then - bam! - they're gone.

Let me feel your love one more time before I abandon it.

Moments. A couple of moments that people remember, that they can take with them, is what makes a good movie.

It is painful to recall a past intensity, to estimate your distance from the Belsen heap, to make your peace with numbers. Just to get up each morning is to make a kind of peace.