But if you're gonna dine with them cannibals Sooner or later, darling, you're gonna get eaten . . .
Interpretation
Engaging with negative influences can eventually lead to negative consequences.
This quote by Nick Cave metaphorically suggests that associating with harmful or toxic individuals can lead to one's own downfall or harm. The imagery of dining with 'cannibals' serves as a stark reminder that one's environment and the people we surround ourselves with can significantly impact our well-being and choices, ultimately leading to unwanted outcomes if one is not cautious.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of choosing friends wisely.
The idea of songwriting is a transformative thing, and what I do with songwriting is take situations that are quite ordinary and transform them in some way. Apart from things like the murder ballads, the songs I write, at their core, are quite ordinary human concerns, but the process of writing about them transforms them into something else.
The writer who refuses to explore the darker regions of the heart will never be able to write convincingly about the wonder, the magic and the joy of love for just as goodness cannot be trusted unless it has breathed the same air as evil.
Music is storming, driving, relentless, devotional, slinky, subtle, heartbreakingly-beautiful sounds that, lyrically, switch from the cynical to the sanguine, the defeated to the defiant, dealing in love, war, beauty, children, romance, rejection, Pethedine, poetry, panties, God, Auden, Johnny Cash, cold potatoes, too-much-money, not enough money, writer’s block, flowers, animals and more flowers. But maybe I’m projecting here.
Who knows their own story? It certainly makes no sense when you’re in the middle of it
And I wish that I was made of stone So that I would not have to see A beauty impossible to define A beauty impossible to believe A beauty impossible to endure The blood imparted in little sips The smell of you still on my hands As I bring the cup up to my lips No God up in the sky No devil beneath the sea Could do the job that you did, baby Of bringing me to my knees
I was about 12 years old and I was sitting watching the television and it was some kind of talent show, you know, and on marches this monkey, this ape, in a pair of red-checked trousers with a little matching jacket holding a ukelele and it started jigging around playing it, and it was looking straight into the camera, straight at me, and I remember thinking, that's it, that'll be me, you know, that'll be me.
Life is so uncertain: you never know what could happen. One way to deal with that is to keep your pajamas washed.
I don't think it's the most important thing in life to fit it. I think it's the most important thing in life to dance to the beat of your own drum and to look like you're having more fun than the people who look cool like they fit in.
When doctors tell you that you have three weeks to live, you try to live a lifetime of moments in three weeks. But you say, 'To hell with three weeks.'
Life wouldn’t be worth living if I worried over the future as well as the present. When things are at their worst I find something always happens.
It is so easy to presume that while your own world has ground to an absolute halt, so has everyone else's.
They are not long, the days of wine and roses. Out of a misty dream, our path emerges for a while, then closes, within a dream.
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