The most despairing songs are the most beautiful, and I know some immortal ones that are pure tears.
Interpretation
Beauty often emerges from pain and sorrow.
This quote suggests that the most profound and beautiful musical compositions often arise from deep emotions of despair. It highlights the idea that embracing and expressing sorrow can lead to the creation of art that resonates with the human experience, evoking strong emotions and connecting with listeners on a deeper level.
In practice
In a speech about the power of music to heal, one might quote this to illustrate how beauty can arise from painful experiences.
Alas, everything that men say to one another is alike; the ideas they exchange are almost always the same, in their conversation. But inside all those isolated machines, what hidden recesses, what secret compartments! It is an entire world that each one carries within him, an unknown world that is born and dies in silence! What solitudes all these human bodies are!
You’re like a lighthouse shining beside the sea of humanity, motionless: all you can see is your own reflection in the water. You’re alone, so you think it’s a vast, magnificent panorama. You haven’t sounded the depths. You simply believe in the beauty of God’s creation. But I have spent all this time in the water, diving deep into the howling ocean of life, deeper than anyone. While you were admiring the surface, I saw the shipwrecks, the drowned bodies, the monsters of the deep
What I need is a woman who is something, anything: either very beautiful or very kind or in the last resort very wicked; very witty or very stupid, but something.
The blood of my motherland waters a magic plant that cures all ills. That plant is art, and sometimes art needs corruption as a kind of fertilizer
life is a deep sleep of which love is the dream
The only true language in the world is a kiss.
At all ages, if [fantasy and myth] is used well by the author and meets the right reader, it has the same power: to generalize while remaining concrete, to present in palpable form not concepts or even experiences but whole classes of experience, and to throw off irrelevancies. Bat at its best it can do more; it can give us experiences we have never had and thus, instead of 'commenting on life,' can add to it.
Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.
I belong to this notebook and this pencil.
I work for ABC. If the thing that ABC is paying me for is storytelling - not to make sure that a costume is exactly right or all those other things - then it is up to me to find the most creative space possible so that that function of my job can happen.
I don't mind being classified as a jazz artist, but I do mind being restricted to being a jazz artist. My foundation has been in jazz, though I didn't really start out that way. I started in classical music, but my formative years were in jazz, and it makes a great foundation.
I'm a poet, and I spent my life in poetry.
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