I've been told that my voice is very distinctive. I've been told people feel extremely connected to it.
I found a lot of fairy tales scary. They really didn't sit well with me.
Every cancer is different. The symptoms and treatments are different, and every human body deals with it differently. There are no formulas to it. That, I think, was the biggest takeaway for me.
If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until you can hardly bear to look at it.
Nothing shocks our moral feelings so deeply as cruelty does. We can forgive every other crime, but not cruelty. The reason for this is that it is the very opposite of compassion.
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!
We are much harder on people who betray us in small ways than on people who betray others in great ones.
A smile costs nothing in money, time, or effort but it is literally true that it can be of supreme importance in ones life.
Raw love, like raw heartache, could blindside you.
Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.
Fear is stronger than love
With the death of my father, it wasn't just the objects of everyday life that had changed; even the most ordinary street scenes had become irreplaceable mementos of a lost world whose every detail figured in the meaning of the whole.
The swine who stole my dog doesn't realize what he did to me!
No one can make me cry Make me laugh Make me smile Or drive me mad like she does
Sometimes there's these things in life that hit at the right time, and it connects with people in the right way.
Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.
The resentment that criticism engenders can demoralize employees, family members and friends, and still not correct the situation that has been condemned.
I don't like comedy that makes me feel worse about the world than I already felt before I turned it on.
Indifference is the strongest force in the universe. It makes everything it touches meaningless. Love and hate don't stand a chance against it.
I saw a great many men die afterwards, some suffering horribly, but I do not recall any death that affected me quite so much as that of this first victim in my platoon.
What happened with cancer was that I just became a body. There was nothing else but body for a month. I was chemo'd and operated on and cut and poked. At first it was really horrifying and scary, and then it was just,Wow. You're in your body. This is body!
I think the mixture of pressure and elation after winning the world title took some getting used to and that impacted on my personal life big-time.
John Prine in particular... just the chord changes combined with the words. He definitely can make you cry a little bit. Just a little bit.
Now I began to understand art as a kind of black box the reader enters. He enters in one state of mind and exits in another. The writer gets no points just because what's inside the box bears some linear resemblance to "real life" -- he can put whatever he wants in there. What's important is that something undeniable and nontrivial happens to the reader between entry and exit.
Music seems hard-wired into our very being. It moves us, stirs us to action, sets us in motion, sticks in our memories and minds.
