It's funny: Your relationship changes with a song over time. After a year or so, you're a different person, so your songs, you don't connect with them like you did.
Sexuality, and sexual orientation - regardless of orientation - is just natural. An act of sex is one of the most human things. But an organization like the church, say, through its doctrine, would undermine humanity by successfully teaching shame about sexual orientation - that it is sinful, or that it offends God. The song is about asserting yourself and reclaiming your humanity through an act of love.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the naturalness of sexuality and the importance of reclaiming humanity against shame imposed by societal norms.
Hozier's quote explores the idea that sexuality and sexual orientation are inherent aspects of human nature, which should be embraced rather than shamed. He argues that organizations, such as the church, often impose doctrines that foster guilt and shame about one's sexual identity, ultimately undermining the beauty of human connection through love. The quote is a call to assert one's identity and embrace love, highlighting that such expressions are essential to reclaiming our humanity.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
During a pride event, to inspire self-acceptance.
More from Hozier
All quotes →To be honest, the biggest reason I write music and became a musician was to create the amount of joy that I felt about music to anyone else. To me, that's a job well done.
Love isn't any one good thing; it's a very, very strange mishmash of emotions. Your love for somebody is, oftentimes, informed by the terrible things you might believe about yourself, and comparatively, the person you see them as is everything that you're not.
I found the experience of falling in love or being in love was a death, a death of everything. You kind of watch yourself die in a wonderful way, and you experience for the briefest moment – if you see yourself for a moment through their eyes – everything you believed about yourself gone. In a death-and-rebirth sense.
I know I'm not the kind of music that's going to have tons of screaming fans, and I'm not gonna be everyone's cup of tea. I just want to do as good a job as I can.
Either somebody has equal rights, or they don't. And certainly in the Irish constitution, marriage is genderless. There's no mention of a man and a woman.
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I think, a lot of times, people just want to be cool, and to be in love is not cool. But I think it's the coolest. I think love is the coolest thing that there is.
And Father said, "Christopher, do you understand that I love you?" And I said "Yes," because loving someone is helping them when they get into trouble, and looking after them, and telling them the truth, and Father looks after me when I get into trouble, like coming to the police station, and he looks after me by cooking meals for me, and he always tells me the truth, which means that he loves me.
Something in your eyes captured my soul, and every night I see you in my dreams. You're all I know. I can't let go.
What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with this extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was.