"We didn't invent the Grateful Dead, the crowd invented the Grateful Dead. We were just in line to see what was going to happen."
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Quote collection
Jerry Garcia quotes (page 3 of 9)
163 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"And when you don't have to talk to the person next to you, that's real clean. Takes a certain thing not to try to keep anything up, not to have to entertain one another."
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"We were very fortunate to have a a little time in history when LSD was still legal and were able to experiment with drugs just like we were doing with music."
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"If you assume you haven't learned anything yet, there's no reason your playing can't stay dynamic all your life."
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"If you think of music as a universal language, it still has some very powerful dialects."
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"In folk music, I've always been fond of the fragment. The song that has one verse. And you don't know anything about the characters, you don't know what they're doing, but they're doing something important. I love that. I'm really a sucker for that kind of song."
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"We are experiencing a real confusion here in the United States, you know. Why is it OK to drink, but it's not OK to take drugs? Blah, blah, blah. What's a crime? What's criminality? What can you do, what can't you do, and so forth. All these things are really confusing. A lot of it is really contradictory; it doesn't really make sense."
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"I read somewhere that 77 per cent of all the mentally ill live in poverty. Actually, I'm more intrigued by the 23 per cent who are apparently doing quite well for themselves."
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"It's not enough to be the best at what you do. You must be perceived as the only one who does what you do."
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"What a long strange trip it's been."
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"Hunter can write a melody and stuff like that, but his forte is lyrics. He can write a serviceable melody to hang his lyrics on, and sometimes he comes up with something really nice."
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"You can't repeat things because each time is different. The universe has changed. Everything has changed."
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"Stuff that's hidden and murky and ambiguous is scary because you don't know what it does."
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"You have to be ready, and also you have to discard notions that are fondly held by a lot of musicians, about sequences and notes and about scales and musical systems as a whole. If you think of music as a language, the space part is where you throw out all the syntax."
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"Everybody needs adventure, and everybody needs something to enlarge his or her lives."
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"... Grateful Dead - that's it !! ... nobody in the band liked it, (the name) I didn't like it, either, but it got around that that was one of the candidates for our new name, and everyone else said, 'Yeah, that's great.' It turned out to be tremendously lucky. It's just repellent enough to filter curious onlookers and just quirky enough that parents don't like it."
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"Every silver lining has a touch of grey."
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"And as far as I'm concerned, it's like I say, drugs are not the problem. Other stuff is the problem."
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"For me, I think the only danger is being too much in love with guitar playing. The MUSIC is the most important thing, and the guitar is only the instrument."
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"I mean, whatever kills you kills you, and your death is authentic no matter how you die."
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