HERE ARE A FEW STATEMENTS that I fancied when I read them. I originally placed them in the sidebar on the homepage of this site but in 2022, sidebars are no longer hip. In fact, most online experts about things online suggest doing away with sidebars completely! Me, I like sidebars but I compromised with the pros by drastically reducing the length of mine.
But not wanting to simply delete the quotes that I had collected, I moved them here. They’re in no order and they certainly don’t make some kind of cohesive statement. So it goes . . .
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“In all jazz, and especially the blues, there is something tart and ironic, authoritative and double-edged. White Americans seem to feel that happy songs are happy and sad songs are sad, and that, God help us, is exactly the way most white Americans sing them—sounding, in both cases, so helplessly, defenselessly fatuous that one dare not speculate on the temperature of the deep freeze from which issue their brave and sexless little voices.”
– James Baldwin
“I’ve said that playing the blues is like having to be black twice.”
– B.B. King
“When Robert Johnson started singing, he seemed like a guy who could have sprung from the head of Zeus in full armor.”
– Bob Dylan
“Write a short story every week. It’s not possible to write fifty-two bad short stories in a row.”
– Ray Bradbury
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble—it’s what you know that just ain’t so.”
– Mark Twain
“I have lived with several Zen masters, all of them cats.”
– Eckhart Tolle
The piece above was drawn “randomly” by a contraption explained in “Draw Abstract Art with a Random Number Generator” by Larry Cotton for the Makezine website. It has nothing to do with any of the quotes that precede it—I just like it.