We were actually going out before we started doing music together. I h — Love Spirals Downwards

"I compartmentalize my music. Its something I do as a hobby and a side thing, and I dont really mix it with my life. Even my everyday emotions I dont think I mix with it. But every so often, I think it seeps in. Its interesting, because it truthfully makes me uncomfortable. In some ways, I think its kind of sappy and too expressionist to put your life in your music like that."

"People try to decipher a meaning in our name, but honestly, there isn’t one. It’s pure aestheticism. Beauty matters to us for its own sake. We’re aware that Love Spirals Downwards sounds like “LSD” to some people, but our music isn’t meant to “alter consciousness” or be psychedelic. It’s just music with an emphasis on beauty and feeling."

"As far as vocals go, Ill usually listen to a completed - or near completed - instrumental and just start humming some catchy notes into the microphone, find some that I like, then do a rough recording of them and see how they sound. If I wait a day or two and see if the notes stick to me, Ill sometimes try to write some words or phoentics to them. We get a mood for a song and if I think it has an Italian or Latin mood to it, Ill try to almost mimic that language to evoke that sort of mood. The songs in that way, at least on Idylls are more thematic. I tried to do something different with Ardor where I thought Id maybe write some words to it. There are definitely more actual words on Ardor."

"What it was, was that we were coming to the end of the summer and we had set ourselves a deadline. We did 3 songs and sent them out to 3 places and figured if no one called us on it, wed just keep making music."

"Weve got our own home recording studio. In fact, the way we write, we have to do it at home. We dont make up 10 or 11 songs and say, Okay! Time to go to the studio and record all the songs! Ill have some rough sounds or ideas and Ill record them down on tape or into the sampler, and from there Ill start getting more ideas. It will build from what I previously recorded. That would be a very costly, practically impossible, thing to do in the studio. We would be racking up the kind of budget like Sgt. Peppers or something!"

"Some of them are in English and they make some sense, and some are in English and they make no sense. And there are others that are in a "make-believe" Italian, and then theres a kind of "make-believe" Latin, but I dont know Latin or Italian. And theres some French too... and some Indian, too, make-believe Indian. Most of it doesnt make any sense. Some of the new stuff actually does have a little meaning. Still, even if it does, I dont pronounce it well enough so that you can tell. When Im singing it, Im not concerned with pronouncing it so that you could understand it. I guess its not meant to be understood."

"How seldom, Friend! a good great man inherits Honour or wealth, with all his worth and pains! It sounds like stories from the land of spirits, If any man obtain that which he merits, Or any merit that which he obtains.   . For shame, dear Friend! renounce this canting strain! … Greatness and goodness are not means, but ends! Hath he not always treasures, always friends, The good great man? Three treasures, and , And , regular as infants breath; And three firm friends, more sure than day and night, , his , and the Angel ."

"Chronology, the time which changes things, makes them grow older, wears them out, and manages to dispose of them, chronologically, forever. Thank God there is kairos too: again the Greeks were wiser than we are. They had two words for time: chronos and kairos. Kairos is not measurable. Kairos is ontological. In kairos we are, we are fully in isness, not negatively, as Sartre saw the isness of the oak tree, but fully, wholly, positively. Kairos can sometimes enter, penetrate, break through : the child at play, the painter at his easel, Serkin playing the Appassionata are in kairos. The saint in prayer, friends around the dinner table, the mother reaching out her arms for her newborn baby are in kairos. The bush, the , is in kairos, not any burning bush, but the particular burning bush before which Moses removed his shoes; the bush I pass by on my way to the brook. In kairos that part of us which is not consumed in the burning is wholly awake."

"Besides inventing quantum theory, Planck had made another great contribution to science by welcoming and generously supporting the young Albert Einstein. In 1905, when Einstein, then an unknown employee of the Swiss patent office in Bern, sent five revolutionary papers to the physics journal that Planck edited in Berlin, Planck immediately recognized them as works of genius and published them quickly without sending them to referees. He did not agree with all of Einstein’s ideas, but he published all of them. He helped Einstein to move ahead in the academic world, and in 1913 invited him to a full professorship in Berlin. For twenty years Planck and Einstein were friends and colleagues in Berlin, leaders of a scientific community that remained creative and vibrant, in spite of the political and economic disarray that surrounded them. Planck was the rock-solid central figure of German science, with the vision to promote the unorthodox and unpatriotic citizen-of-the-world Einstein."

"One day I was filled with longing To behold in human form the splendours of the Friend, To witness the ocean gathered up into a drop, The sun compressed into a single atom."

"Our friends from the Trade Federation have pledged their support. And when their battle droids are combined with yours, we shall have an army greater than any in the galaxy. The Jedi will be overwhelmed. The Republic will agree to any demands we make."

"Although my heart may be weak, its not alone. Its grown with each new experience. And its found a home with all the friends Ive made. Ive become a part of their heart, just as theyve become a part of mine. And if they think of me now and then, if they dont forget me, then our hearts will be one. I dont need a weapon. My friends are my power!"