Anger is a cousin of intelligence. If you are not revolted by certain things, you have no boundaries. If you have no boundaries, you have no self-knowledge. If you have no self-knowledge, you have no taste, and if you have no taste, why are you here?
-- Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People, p. 133
... real literature, like love, comes from a desire to be known.
-- Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People, p. 122
It's unpredictable, this stage of grief. Just when you think you have a handle on it, a crack opens up where the crazy gets in. The pain is a weather system that builds and expands, occasionally touching down, like lightning.
-- Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People, p. 93
The person who has not at some point accepted with ultimate resolve and even rejoiced in the absolute horror of life will never take possession of the unspeakable powers vested in our existence.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke
No one is obliged to learn something from loss. This is a horrible thing we do to the newly stricken, encouraging them to remember the good times while they're still in the fetal position. Like feeding steak to a baby.
-- Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People, p. 5-6
This evening, I met author/activist/archivist Jeff Smith, who spoke at Out on the Lakeshore about his latest book, A People's History of Grand Rapids.
It was always the music that explained things. What it is that takes you out of being just a kid and thinking it's all adventure, and you find there's a lesson underneath all that adventure. You come into life alone and you go out of it alone, and you're gonna be alone a lot of the times when you're on this earth, and what tells it all? It's the music.
-- Sidney Bechet
The depth of your pain will always be equal to the depth of your love.
-- Shannon L. Alder
I can't think of Billie Holiday without tears coming to my eye. There was always something of pain, always something that was heartbreaking in her rendition. And she wasn't only talking about her own heartbreak. She was talking about yours, too. The thing that joined us, you know, was the common concept that the misery she was singing, you know, was one that included us and embraced us all.
-- Ossie Davis, Jazz
And for some reason I rather thought that black people actually captured that very well in music was this kind of loneliness in the human condition that no matter how much you yearn for community and yearn for community, in the end there is this loneliness and there's no way you can escape it. And that's to me, what the best jazz when you hear a soloist often, especially in a slow piece or a ballad piece, that's sort of what the best jazz, to me has always felt like.
-- Gerald Early, Jazz
When you hear Billie Holiday sing, you hear the spirit of Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong together in a person. So you have the fire of the blues shouter. You have the intelligent choice of notes like a great jazz musician like Louis Armstrong. But you have, with her, a very profound sensitivity to the human condition. She tells you something about the pain of the blues, of life, but inside of that pain is a toughness and that's what you're attracted to.
-- Wynton Marsalis, Jazz
