Great Throughts Treasury

"It is a sure sign that a culture has reached a dead end when it is no longer intrigued by its myths."

"We make the oldest stories new when we succeed, and we are trapped by the old stories when we fail."

"No failure in America, whether of love or money, is ever simple; it is always a kind of betrayal, of a mass of shadowy, shared hopes"

"Applause that comes thundering with such force you might think the audience merely suffers the music as an excuse for its ovations."

"Elvis transcends his talent to the point of dispensing with it altogether."

"Farber had a huge effect on me as a writer. I don't mean I write like him. Farber is, first of all, a great stylist, a great writer. Anyone can read Manny Farber's film criticism, whether that person is a novelist, a poet, another critic, a historian, and learn a lot about writing by reading him."

"He sounds like he's been doing it for years. In his head he probably has."

"Hearing things like 'Wake Up' by Lora Logic, or the Raincoats' 'In Love' - that was something I wasn't prepared for. I couldn't hear anything that came before it in the music, and I didn't want to. I was absolutely in love with its out-of-nowhereness."

"I had tremendous fun fooling around with the way people talked about songs, just the way that became another way of understanding the world."

"I learned that when something just has to be said to move the discussion along, or broaden it or deepen it, if I can just keep my mouth shut for five minutes a student will say it. So for me a lot of teaching is about keeping my mouth shut."

"I never find myself even catching lyrics until something in the sound has taken me captive. Thinking about anything else is just the pleasurable byproduct of wow."

"I want another idea, another project, but you can't make them up. They show up."

"It may be that the most interesting American struggle is the struggle to set oneself free from the limits one is born to, and then to learn something of the value of those limits."

"If you're lucky, at the right time you come across music that is not only great, or interesting, or incredible, or fun, but actually sustaining. Though some elusive but tangible process, a piece of music cuts through all defenses and makes sense of every fear and desire you bring to it. As it does so, it exposes all you've held back, and then makes sense of that, too. Though someone else is doing the talking, the experience is like a confession. Your emotions shoot out to crazy extremes; you feel both ennobled and unworthy, saved and damned. You hear that this is what life is all about, that this is what it is for. Yet it is this recognition itself that makes you understand that life can never be this good, this whole. With a clarity life denies for its own good reasons, you see places to which you can never get."

"It draws a line in the sand. Once you cross it, you can't go back,"

"I'm not even close to being sick of 'Like a Rolling Stone'... Every time I hear it it's like the first time. I find that's even more true now than before. Now I don't just smile. I'm astonished."

"Patriotism in America, as I understand it, is a matter of suffering, when the country fails to live up to its promises, or actively betrays them."

"It works on its own terms. It puts you on the spot. It asks of you the fear and courage that it asks of its subject."

"Records that were the sound of somebody - more often than not, a she - speaking with a voice that had never been heard before. Somebody who'd never had the nerve to speak up before. I felt: 'I wanna meet these people.' Which is unusual for me: I don't usually want to meet the people who are making music that I like. But they sounded interesting."

"Rock 'n Roll is a combination of good ideas dried up by fads, terrible junk, hideous failings in taste and judgment, gullibility and manipulation, moments of unbelievable clarity and invention, pleasure, fun, vulgarity, excess, novelty and utter enervation."

"We fight our way through the massed and leveled collective safe taste of the Top 40, just looking for a little something we can call our own. But when we find it and jam the radio to hear it again it isn't just ours -- it is a link to thousands of others who are sharing it with us. As a matter of a single song this might mean very little; as culture, as a way of life, you can't beat it."

"The Sixties are most generously described as a time when people took part - when they stepped out of themselves and acted in public, as people who didn't know what would happen next, but who were sure that acts of true risk and fear would produce something different from what they had been raised to take for granted."

"You're going to react to a painting in a way that the painting demands you react."