When you're writing, you're conjuring. It's a ritual, and you need to be brave and respectful and sometimes get out of the way of whatever it is that you're inviting into the room.
Tom WaitsRead
Most vagabonds i knowed don't ever want to find the culprit that remains the object of their long relentless quest. The obsession's in the chasing and not the apprehending, the pursuit you see and never the arrest" - Tom Waits "Foreign Affairs
Interpretation
The journey of searching for meaning can often be more fulfilling than the actual discovery.
In this quote, Tom Waits reflects on the idea that many people are drawn to the pursuit of a goal or truth rather than the attainment of it. The 'vagabonds' represent those who seek but often find themselves more engaged in the chase, suggesting that the process and the experience of searching can be more valuable than reaching an endpoint or possessing the answer.
In practice
This quote can inspire people during a motivational speech about the value of perseverance.
When you're writing, you're conjuring. It's a ritual, and you need to be brave and respectful and sometimes get out of the way of whatever it is that you're inviting into the room.
If you're in the middle of the ocean with no flippers and no life preserver and you hear a helicopter, this is music. You have to adjust to your needs at the moment.
I knelt at the altar of Ray Charles for years. I worked at a restaurant, and that's all there was on the jukebox.
Don't plant your bad days. They grow into weeks. The weeks grow into months. Before you know it, you got yourself a bad year. Take it from me - choke those little bad days. Choke 'em down to nothing.
My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane.
Now its raining its pouring the old man is snoring now I lay me down to sleep I hear the sirens in the street all my dreams are made of chrome I have no way to get back home I’d rather die before I wake like Marilyn Monroe and throw my dreams out in the street and the rain make ‘em grow
One human life is deeper than the ocean. Strange fishes and sea-monsters and mighty plants live in the rock-bed of our spirits. The whole of human history is an undiscovered continent deep in our souls. There are dolphins, plants that dream, magic birds inside us. The sky is inside us. The earth is in us.
How horrible, fantastic, incredible, it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.
Children have the strangest adventures without being troubled by them. For instance, they may remember to mention, a week after the event happened, that when they were in the wood they had met their dead father and had a game with him.
Every time somebody speaks of my honesty, there is someone who quivers inside me.
Hate demands existence, and he who hates has to show his hate in appropriate actions and behaviors; in a sense, he has to become hate. That is why the Americans have substituted discrimination for lynching.
How smart does a chimpanzee have to be before killing him constitutes murder?
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