← Literature

The Sick Bag Song

by Nick Cave · 2015

The Sick Bag Song is an exploration of love, inspiration and memory shaped around the events of Cave’s 2014 tour of North America. It began life scribbled on airline sick bags during Cave’s 22-city tour of North America in… more

10 quotes ★ 4.02 (2,753) Literature

Quotes from the Book

Memory is imagined; it is not real. Don't be ashamed of its need to create; it is the loveliest part of your heart. Myth is the true history. Don't let them tell you that there are no monsters. Don't let them make you feel stupid, just because you are happy to play down in the dark with your flashlight. The mystical world depends on you and your tolerance for the absurd. Be strong, my darling ones, and believe!
17
Well, I said, if the past don't get you, the fucking future sure will.
17
Wanting everything is the thing that eventually tears you apart.
16
The boy will grow older, and over time there will be other songs – not many – ten or maybe twenty in a lifespan, that stand apart from the rest of the music he will discover. He will realise as he grows older still, and crosses the Canadian border and drives down into Seattle, that not only are these songs holy or sacred, they are hiding songs – what the Aztec Indians call carrion songs – that deal exclusively in darkness, obfuscation, concealment and secrecy. He will realize that, for him, the purpose of these songs has been to shut off the sun, to draw a long shadow down and protect him from the corrosive glare of the world.
10
am the guy with the flies. I am the one that dies.
10
I saw a sick man pick up his instrument and be well
9
I look down at the city again. From here the city resembles a severed head, incinerated and discarded by the side of the river; its cavernous eye sockets are empty, bundles of dead nerves dangle from its neck, its shattered mouth gapes, a few desolate wires hang from its stark, scorched skull and, suddenly and incomprehensibly and so foreign to my body I could weep, I feel my heart expand with what I can only describe as a sensation of hope. Is there a word for that? Hope in the face of grand calamity.
8
There are those who work so they can stop. Stopping is the why of work. There are those who stop so they can work. Working is the why of work.
7
Everything is happening and has happened and will happen again. Everything that exists has always existed and will continue to exist. Memory is imagined; it is not real. Don’t be ashamed of its need to create; it is the loveliest part of your heart. Myth is the true history. Don’t let them tell you that there are no monsters. Don’t let them make you feel stupid, just because you are happy to play down in the dark with your flashlight. The mystical world depends on you and your tolerance for the absurd.
6
No dejéis que os digan que no hay monstruos.
5

About Nick Cave

We have collected 53 quotes from 4 books by Nick Cave on BookQuoters.

More about the author →

About the book

The Sick Bag Song is an exploration of love, inspiration and memory shaped around the events of Cave’s 2014 tour of North America. It began life scribbled on airline sick bags during Cave’s 22-city tour of North America in 2014. It soon grew into a restless full-length contemporary epic. Spurred by encounters with modern day North America, and racked by romantic longing and exhaustion, Cave teases out the significant moments, the people, the books and the music that have influenced and inspired him, and drops them into his Sick Bag.

The Sick Bag Song blends poetry, lyrics, memories, musings, flights of fancy and journal entries. Both mythic and contemporary, it lies somewhere between The Wasteland and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and explores and develops the imaginative universe of Nick Cave.

The sumptuous physical edition reproduces in full colour twenty-two sick bags, each han

Book details

First published
2015
Author
Nick Cave
Goodreads rating
4.02 (3k ratings)

Keep reading