The meaning of song goes deep. Who in logical words can explain the effect music has on us? A kind of inarticulate, unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of the infinite, and lets us for a moment gaze into that!
Music is a religion to me and my friends.
What is real is not the external form, but the essence of things... it is impossible for anyone to express anything essentially real by imitating its exterior surface.
The Gospel gives human suffering deep, personal, and cosmic meaning, by connecting our pain to the pain of others and, finally, by connecting us to the very "pain of God".
The simplest questions are the hardest to answer.
There must be something strangely sacred about salt. It is in our tears and in the sea.
So if somebody writes a song that appears to have some meaning then everybody thinks that it's a really heavy song.
There aren't any magical words, really. Words just hold the magic.
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.
I want to start where language ends.
poets are privileged to utter more than they can always quite explain, bringing up from the mind's unplumbed depths tokens of the nature of the world we carry within us.
If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.
Is the opposite of light entertainment meant to be dark and heavy?
Photography concentrates one's eye on the superficial. For that reason it obscures the hidden life which glimmers through the outlines of things like a play of light and shade. One can't catch that even with the sharpest lens.
It's very hard to deal with true subject matter, especially when you're writing about such weighty issues.
If you don't have any Coltrane, 'A Love Supreme' will do it for you. It will explain everything. Even if you don't get it, it will still explain everything. That's how deep it is.
Books are often far more than just books.
Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
There is not a single outward mark of courtesy that does not have a deep moral basis.
The summit sings what is being spoken in the depths.
All that passes is raised to the dignity of expression; all that happens is raised to the dignity of meaning. Everything is either symbol or parable.
To most people who look at a mobile, it's no more than a series of flat objects that move. To a few, though, it may be poetry.
The whole of life is symbolic because the whole of it has meaning.
The thing I always found about the gospel music was that it reached further into your being if you like, your mind. It takes hold of you - especially if you sing it and play it.
The truly great books are the few books that are over everybody's head all of the time.
