Jonathan Carroll Quotes

Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.

As artists, we are eternally heartbroken.

Why'd you want to sing about sad things?" Candy had asked him. "Because any fool can be happy," he'd said to her. "It takes a man with real heart" —he'd made a fist and laid it against his chest— "to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.

I suppose I'm interested in sorrow, which is very different from depression or despair. Sorrow is continuous with the world; it allows for creativity.

I think I've lived a pretty hard life. What I mean by hard is that... I've been kind of reckless with things. I'm a passionate person. I'm a super passionate person. I think there's definitely been sorrow in my life, good and bad. I think it comes through. I hope it comes through in my writing because to me that's what artistry is.

I think good art does come from a dark place.

D'ye think I don't know?" he asked softly. "It's me that has the easy part now. For if ye feel for me as I do for you-then I'm asking you to tear out your heart and live without it.

Marvin Gaye said there's a song inside of me and I can't get it out. And I know it's in there, and I can feel that it's in there, and I can't get it out. There's so much that I want to say, and I haven't been able to figure out how to say it in my art. I can only say it in ham-fisted, clumsy, nonpoetic ways, and I'm trying to figure out how to talk about life and talk about love and talk about pain and trials and tribulation in an artistic form.

My heart's been torn wide open, just like I feared it would be, and I have no willpower to close it back up.

Only love can break your heart.

I think all the boys that write the screaming stuff would write the best love songs... because they have the most to hide. The guys that are in the most pain are usually the ones with the biggest hearts.

Who are you and what breaks your heart?

Great art can only be created out of love.

Unless it hurts, unless there’s some vulnerability there, I don’t think you’re going to get good photographs.

That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.

Isn't it better to have your heart broken than to have it wither up? Before it could be broken it must have felt something splendid. That would be worth the pain.

Now that my ladder's gone, I must lie down where all my ladders start, In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

I always imagined music trapped inside my clarinet, not trapped inside of me. But what if music is what escapes when a heart breaks?

To become romantic artists, we must pierce the armor that hides our hearts, and the piercing is not comfortable.

Her heart felt as if it were breaking in her breast, bleeding and bleeding, young and fierce. From grief over the warm and ardent love which she had lost and still secretly mourned; from anguished joy over the pale, luminous love which drew her to the farthest boundaries of life on this earth. Through the great darkness that would come, she saw the gleam of another, gentler sun, and she sensed the fragrance of the herbs in the garden at world's end.

I think I'd rather have my heart broke than do the breaking. —Lena

To make great art, you had to expose your soul, and some things should be left safely in the dark.

There is something about writing poetry that brings a man close to the cliff's edge.

This is how your heart gets snagged, like a balloon on a barbed-wire fence, this is where pieces of you get torn away.

The best work is done with the heart breaking, or overflowing.