Things started to go downhill. Instead of singing about taking tea wit — Lester Bangs

"I was in high school (oh, I told you — that was kind of where they put you when they didnt know what to do with you — when you were too big for the Kiddie Kokoons and too young to go out an hafta assume what we used to call Manhood, which involved going at the same time every day to some weird building and doing some totally useless shit for hours on end just so you could get some bread and have everybody respect you)."

"The trend toward narcissistic flair has been responsible in large part for smiting rock with the superstar virus, which revolves around the substituting of attitudes and flamboyant trappings, into which the audience can project their fantasies, for the simple desire to make music, get loose, knock the folks out or get em up dancin. Its not enough just to do those things anymore; what you must do instead if you want success on any large scale is figure a way of getting yourself associated in the audiences mind with their pieties and their sense of "community," i.e., ram it home that youre one of THEM; or, alternately, deck and bake yourself into an image configuration so blatant or outrageous that you become a culture myth."

"The top rockers have a mythic aura about them, the "superstar," and thats a basically unhealthy state of things, in fact its the very virus thats fucking up rock, a subspecies of the virus I spoke of earlier that infests our culture from popstars to politics."

"John Lennon at his best despised cheap sentiment and had to learn the hard way that once youve made your mark on history those who cant will be so grateful theyll turn it into a cage for you."

"The extravagant and ostentatious lifestyles that pass for charisma in a time when almost anybody talks about charisma but if you think about it theres precious little to be seen."

"By the end of the decade it had become obvious that perhaps the one constant of our variegated and strung-out peer groups was a pervasive sense of self-consciousness that sent us in grouchy packs to ugly festivals just to be together and dig ourselves and each other, as if all of this meant something greater than that we were kids who liked rock n roll and came out to have a good time, as if our very styles and trappings and drugs and jargon could be in themselves political statements for any longer than about fifteen stoned seconds, even a threat to the Mother Country! So we loved and loved and doted on ourselves and our reflections in each other even as the whole thing got out of hand and turned into mud and disaster areas and downs and death."

"The wound is the place where the Light enters you."

"yes is a pleasant country... love is a deeper season than reason"

"true lovers in each happening of their hearts live longer than all which and every who"

"What concerns me fundamentaly is a meteoric burlesk melodrama, born of the immemorial adage love will find a way."

"Who made you glorious as the gates of heaven Beneath the keen full moon? Who bade the sun Clothe you with rainbows? Who, with living flower Of loveliest blue, spread garlands at your feet? God! let the torrents, like a shout of nations, Answer! and let the ice-plains echo, God! God! sing, ye meadow-streams, with gladsome voice! Ye pine-groves, with your soft and soul-like sounds! And they too have a voice, yon piles of snow, And in their perilous fall shall thunder, God!"

"Unchanged within, to see all changed without, Is a blank lot and hard to bear, no doubt. Yet why at others Wanings shouldst thou fret? Then only mightst thou feel a just regret, Hadst thou withheld thy love or hid thy light In selfish forethought of neglect and slight."