Profound music leads us beyond language...to the dark roots of our scream and the celestial heights of our silence.
Interpretation
Music transcends verbal communication, touching the deepest parts of human experience.
This quote by Cornel West highlights the unique ability of music to communicate profound emotions and experiences that often elude verbal expression. It suggests that music connects us to both our deepest struggles and our most transcendent moments, acting as a conduit for feelings that are too deep for words.
In practice
In a graduation speech, one might quote this to illustrate the power of music in moments of celebration and reflection.
King's response to our crisis can be put in one word: revolution. A revolution in our priorities, a reevaluation of our values, a reinvigoration of our public life and a fundamental transformation of our way of thinking and living that promotes a transfer of power from oligarchs and plutocrats to everyday people and ordinary citizens.
You've got to love yourself enough, not only so that others will be able to love you, but that you'll be able to love others.
And when I talk about love, I'm talking about something that's great, though, brother. I'm talking about something that will sustain you.
Clever gimmicks of mass distraction yield a cheap soulcraft of addicted and self-medicated narcissists.
I feel as if I have been blessed to undergo a transformation from 'gangster' to 'redeemed sinner with gangster proclivities.'
Never before has the seductive market way of life held such sway in nearly every sphere of American life. This marketing way of life promotes addictions to stimulation and obsessions with comfort and convenience ... centered primarily around bodily pleasures and status rankings. ... The common denominator is a rugged and ragged individualism and rapacious hedonism in quest of a perennial "high" in body and mind.
You're only reduced to a cliche if you don't humanize a character.
Language leads a double life - and so does the novelist. You chat with family and friends, you attend to your correspondence, you consult menus and shopping lists, you observe road signs, and so on. Then you enter your study, where language exists in quite another form - as the stuff of patterned artifice.
The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne, Burnt on the water.
Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions.
I come from a mixed family, where my mother is art house cinema and my father is B-movie genre cinema. They're estranged, and I've been trying to bring them together for all of my career to one degree or another.
Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music, without the idea, is simply music; the idea, without the music, is prose, from its very definitiveness.
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