I don’t know any sad songs. Except for the funny ones.
The world is vicious, too huge to care about even its own survival
Our father knew more than any living person about the secret of time, except how to live in it. His time did not travel; it was a block of persisting nows.
The job of taste was to thin the insane torrent of human creativity down to manageable levels. But the job of appetite was never to be happy with taste.
Music forecasts the past, recalls the future. Now and then the difference falls away, and in one simple gift of circling sound, the ear solves the scrambled cryptogram. One abiding rhythm, present and always, and you’re free.
Sooner or later, all men will do and know all things.
She saw how the mind makes forever, in order to store the things it had already lost.
Information may travel at light speed, but meaning spreads at the speed of dark.
The thing about music was that you never knew the shape of anyone’s desire.
Silence: the motor drive of nothingness underneath all rhythm – threatened to last forever, a spell of sleep cast over the entire kingdom of listeners.
He stayed inside his perfect silence, hung on the stopped, forward edge of nowhere
It had to be U. U. was the only town I could still bear, the one spot in the atlas I’d already absorbed head-on. When you take too many of your critical hits in one place, that place can no longer hurt you.
Feeling for the first time what it meant to kick open doors that kept closing, no matter how many legends had already passed through.
We’d drifted too far to rely on the old boyhood telepathy anymore.
Chance was just an order that you hadn’t yet perceived.
Science is not about control. It is about cultivating a perpetual condition of wonder in the face of something that forever grows one step richer and subtler than our latest theory about it. It is about reverence, not mastery.
I write the way you might arrange flowers. Not every try works, but each one launches another. Every constraint, even dullness, frees up a new design.