“Love is not sufficient. It never has been. Stories that claim otherwise are lies. There's always SOMETHING after happily ever after.”
― Arthur Phillips, quote from The Song Is You
“How much of life could he spend aching? Aching is not a stable condition; it must resolve into something”
― Arthur Phillips, quote from The Song Is You
“He fell in love with Manhattan's skyline, like a first-time brothel guest falling for a seasoned professional. He mused over her reflections in the black East River at dusk, dawn, or darkest night, and each haloed light-in a tower or strung along the jeweled and sprawling spider legs of the Brooklyn Bridge's spans-hinted at some meaning, which could be understood only when made audible by music and encoded in lyrics.”
― Arthur Phillips, quote from The Song Is You
“The truth is, anyone who puts so much of herself and her life into art as you do must naturally fear any failure in that art as a potential threat to your life. And so you protect your art more than you protect your health or the common forms of happiness the rest of us have. And you probably have this in common with every artist you admire.”
― Arthur Phillips, quote from The Song Is You
“She had burned through a fair sampling of manhood trying to find someone, not to make her "happy" - that wasn't the point - but to cauterize her relentlessly dripping wounds.”
― Arthur Phillips, quote from The Song Is You
“The strangest thing. I came to the end of other people so quickly. Each new person was like a glass of water, and at the beginning I was parched, but then each glass tasted a little worse, the water was grittier, and by the end even the first sip was enough to make me gag, you know?”
― Arthur Phillips, quote from The Song Is You
“All of this vain heartbreak that we cling to as important or tragic would one day be revealed - by TV scientists - for what it is: just behavior.”
― Arthur Phillips, quote from The Song Is You
“He considered her ruthless, in his moments of pain, but also in moments of happiness, experienced mere feet from her but bound right wrist to left ankle by her rules: nothing could evolve, nothing could be consummated, nothing repressed could surface, nothing previously accepted could be ignored. One must not speak of it, in case one could no longer sing of it. Instead, she only kept directing his attention to the wondrously charged air they could tame and make dance between them.”
― Arthur Phillips, quote from The Song Is You
“Offstage, she fixed him in place with compliments and ironic bossiness, and he tended not to look at her at all when they spoke. He was the only one in the band she called by name, implying a permanence to his position that was professionally reassuring but personally debilitating. When they wrote together or when one presented the other with something prepared in private, with no audience to absorb the excess, he felt the room crowding with their other selves, lives unled and correspondences unwritten, happiness opted against, and he could not believe she did not see it, too. He sweated to ornament her fears and tall tales and fake portraits, and with the remnants of his energy he hid the rest of himself from her. The best of him was a child's drawing of her on an off day.”
― Arthur Phillips, quote from The Song Is You
“He had no illusion that this was bittersweet or somehow necessary to make art. It just burned. Anyone who felt this would take their hand off the stove at once, but he was locked in position, inches from the source of his pain, for as far into the future as he could see, because if he was going to be a musician, if he was going to protect the one profound and real thing about himself, the one thing he loved besides her (but which only she made appear at its strongest), then he would be a fool to leave a singer who so obviously was going to go all the way.”
― Arthur Phillips, quote from The Song Is You
“But music is, at the very minimum, inflammatory, exclusionary, divisive, encouraging of snobbery and solipsism. ”
― Arthur Phillips, quote from The Song Is You
“But no, music lasted longer than anything it inspired. After LPs, cassettes, and CDs, when matrimony was about to decay into its component elements—alimony and acrimony—the songs startled him and regained all their previous, pre-Rachel meanings, as if they had not only conjured her but then dismissed her, as if she had been entirely their illusion. He listened to the old songs again, years later on that same dark promenade, when every CD he had ever owned sat nestled in that greatest of all human inventions, the iPod, dialed up and yielding to his fingertip’s tap. The songs now offered him, in exchange for all he had lost, the sensation that there was something still to long for, still, something still approaching, and all that had gone before was merely prologue to an unimaginably profound love yet to seize him. If there was any difference now, it was only that his hunger for music had become more urgent, less a daily pleasure than a daily craving.”
― Arthur Phillips, quote from The Song Is You
“Charm, amuse, inspire, tempt, overwhelm, dazzle. Will you earn reward? (195)”
― Arthur Phillips, quote from The Song Is You
“If music can ever restore a lost past, then this was the moment. Redemption! We do crave it. But music is different: we tolerate songs without redemption.”
― Arthur Phillips, quote from The Song Is You
Arthur Phillips
Born place: in The United States
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“Political writers argue in regard to the love of liberty with the same philosophy that philosophers do in regard to the state of nature; by the things they see they judge of things very different which they have never seen, and they attribute to men a natural inclination to slavery, on account of the patience with which the slaves within their notice carry the yoke; not reflecting that it is with liberty as with innocence and virtue, the value of which is not known but by those who possess them, though the relish for them is lost with the things themselves. I know the charms of your country, said Brasidas to a satrap who was comparing the life of the Spartans with that of the Persepolites; but you can not know the pleasures of mine.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, quote from Discourse on the Origin of Inequality
“Helping people better manage their upsetting feelings—anger, anxiety, depression, pessimism, and loneliness—is a form of disease prevention. Since the data show that the toxicity of these emotions, when chronic, is on a par with smoking cigarettes, helping people handle them better could potentially have a medical payoff as great as getting heavy smokers to quit.”
― Daniel Goleman, quote from Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ
“Understanding the simple fact that morality differs around the world, and even within societies, is the first step toward understanding your righteous mind.”
― Jonathan Haidt, quote from The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
“Basketball Rule #8
Sometimes
you have to
lean back
a little
and
fade away
to get
the best
shot.”
― Kwame Alexander, quote from The Crossover
“Everything’s awful,” said Jessie, picking at a corner of her bedroom wallpaper that was peeling. She explained to her grandmother about the trial yesterday and the basketball game and Scott kicking the ball into the swamp. She told her how Evan had to hunt for the ball for half an hour before finally finding it, and how he told all his friends to just go home, he’d find it himself, just go home. So they did. And how Evan and Jessie were left to look for the ball, and how Evan didn’t talk the whole time they did. “And today he’s not even eating, or anything,” said Jessie. “Did you know that it’s Yom Kippur?” “Yom Kippur, is that the one where the kids dress up?” asked Jessie’s grandmother. “No, that’s Purim.” Grandma was always mixing up things like that, things that sounded kind of the same, but were different. During their last phone call, she was talking with Jessie about the sequoia trees in California, but she kept using the word sequester instead. “Yom Kippur is the day when the Jewish people ask for forgiveness and they don’t eat.” “Is Evan Jewish now?” asked Grandma. “No, but he’s not eating. He says he’s not hungry,” said Jessie. “Sometimes that happens to me,” Grandma said. “I practically forget to eat.” “But Evan’s always hungry,” said Jessie. “Mom says he’s a bottomless pit.” “He’ll eat when he’s ready,” said Grandma. “Let it go.” Jessie hated it when her grandmother said that. She was always telling Jessie to let it go and be the tree. Crazy yoga grandma. How could anyone be a tree? “But”
― Jacqueline Davies, quote from The Lemonade Crime
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