"That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over, lest you should think he never could recapture the first fine careless rapture!"
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Song quotes
Song
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Song quotes (page 44 of 536)
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"Pippa's Song The year's at the spring The day's at the morn Morning's at seven, The Hill side's dew-pearled The lark's on the wing The snail's on the thorn God's in his heaven- All's right with the world"
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"The invention of Bob Dylan with his guitar belongs in its way to the same kind of tradition of something meant to be heard, as the songs of Homer."
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"A song has a life of its own. It's an autonomous thing, separate from your own experience, almost. And the mere repetition of it means it's subject to change; it means approaching it differently, expressing different emotional aspects of it. It doesn't feel like wallowing."
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"River gonna take me, Sing me sweet and sleepy, Sing me sweet and sleepy all the way back home, It's a far gone lullaby sung many years ago Mama, Mama, many worlds I've come since I first left home"
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"I hardly ever listen to any of our old stuff now. Once the songs have been recorded and put on to vinyl they become someone else's entertainment, not mine."
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"When I'm lying in my bed, I think about life and I think about death. And neither one particularly appeals to me."
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"I think a lot of my interest in history now isn't so much in places and names and texts and public figures, but more in examining all the nuances and idiosyncrasies of particular stories of everyday people. And if that doesn't happen, then I usually transplant myself and my own stories to a particular historical event. Which is why you'll see me, the first person pronoun, interacting in a song about Carl Sandburg, or you'll find my [sic] interacting with Saul Bellow. It's sort of a re-rendering of history and making it my own."
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"People have said to me, 'You can't write songs. You can't play an instrument.' But I've got 10 gold records."
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"Thinking about what songs are coming next instead of just relaxing, breathing and playing from my heart. Sometimes it can get to be almost like the enemy."
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"I had always wanted to write a song called 'The Vicious Circle'. I always thought it was like, the kids are born there, they grow up there, they die there."
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"There was a chance for me to write one song for the section where Elvis sat in his black leather outfit and sang the old hits. At eight oclock the next morning I had written Memories."
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"One of my real goals was to hear someone whistling a song I'd written."
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"All this role model bullshit; you don't have any extra responsibilities because you made some good songs! Your only responsibility is to make good songs."
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"There are a million things out there every single day that trigger me - songs, smells, even the season that we're in, fall. Something about the air."
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"Morrissey wrote a really gorgeous song for me. I'm crazy for that man. And he thinks I'm hip!"
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"Morrissey wrote to me and said, I have a song for you and if we release it as a single, you'll be on the charts for the first time since 1972, I said, what time, where?"
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"The one hit song that I have tremendous gratitude for is Boots, because it has a life of its own. It's like being identified with a brand name."
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"Our works in stone, in paint, in print, are spared, some of them, for a few decades or a millennium or two, but everything must finally fall in war, or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash - the triumphs, the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life: we're going to die. "Be of good heart," cry the dead artists out of the living past. "Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing." Maybe a man's name doesn't matter all that much."
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"I am already so popular that anyone who vilifies me becomes more popular than I am."
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