David James Duncan Quotes

Blues is easy to play, but hard to feel.

Music, I feel, must be emotional first and intellectual second.

Beyoncé and pathos are strangers. Amy Winehouse and pathos are flatmates, and you should see the kitchen.

Poems are a hotline to our hearts, and we forget this emotional power at our peril

Music touches us emotionally, where words alone can't.

Hands are the heart's landscape.

Songs have some kind of structure that connects with people's hearts.

The real actor - like any real artistj- has a direct line to the collective heart.

My heart is fluid and soaring. There's no longer any space between heartbeats.

When did "sentimental" become a pejorative barb? I do not at all share the notion that a piece of music, or a poem, or a film that bypasses the brain and aims straight for the heart . . . should automatically be heaped with scorn. I think it is symptomatic of a sad and dangerous impoverishment of spirit.

Music is a language that doesn’t speak in particular words. It speaks in emotions, and if it’s in the bones, it’s in the bones.

I thought of the infinitely many points that can divide the space between two human hearts.

Words can never fully say what we want them to say, for they fumble, stammer, and break the best porcelain. The best one can hope for is to find along the way someone to share the path, content to walk in silence, for the heart communes best when it does not try to speak.

Eyes which have lost their tears have lost their most beautiful, their most glorious treasure.

Why is it that you can sometimes feel the reality of people more keenly through a letter than face to face?

I knew then that the person on the outside was only a shell, a presence to be seen and provoked. Inside was the real me, where my tears joined the tears of all the sad people to form the three waterfalls in the night country.

Would you have your songs endure? Build on the human heart.

You need emotional content.

Because a real kiss, a kiss that two real people choose to give each other - it's something that can't be filmed or photographed or drawn, or even described with words. Because a kiss isn't what it looks like or how it feels. A real kiss happens down deep inside of two hearts at the same time. It's hidden away. A real kiss is invisible.

Music is the inarticulate speech of the heart, which cannot be compressed into words, because it is infinite.

Do you know, André, I sometimes think that you have no heart.' 'Presumably because I sometimes betray intelligence.

A sentence is not emotional a paragraph is.

The thing that bothers me is that it seems like all the sensitive stuff I write just goes unnoticed . . . the media doesn't get who I am at all. Or maybe they just can't accept it. It doesn't fit into those negative stories they like to write. I'm the kind of guy who is moved by a song like Don McLean's "Vincent," that one about Van Gogh. The lyric on that song is so touching. That's how I want to make my songs feel. Take "Dear Mama" - I aimed that one straight for my homies' heartstrings.

The fact that music can induce Goosebumps draw a tear inspire and connect is one of my favorite parts of being human