Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Some of the wise boys who say my music is loud, blatant and that's all should see the faces of the kids who have driven a hundred miles through the snow to see the band... to stand in front of the bandstand in an ecstasy all their own.
You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
'Blue Velvet' changed my life forever. It was like I'd always read Chaucer and suddenly discovered Charles Bukowski. It made me understand that there is poetry of sublime ecstasy and dark terror, and it spoke to a side of me that hadn't been reached before.
Why does an iPhone cost only a couple hundred dollars? Because, as the stage performer Mike Daisey depicted in an arresting one-man show called 'The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,' Apple's shiniest products are made by a shadowy company in China called Foxconn.
Don't you think it would be great to do a bunch of Nicorette commercials? Just, like, me in the desert, kind of Marlboro Man-style, driving a fast car, pulling over, looking at the sunset. Dissolving in ecstasy. Can't you see it? Me blowing huge Nicorette bubbles.
You know, my mom, who inspired me to be a novelist, I remember her reading 'The Agony and the Ecstasy,' about Michelangelo, and saying, 'No mother would want that for her child, no matter how great the artist.' I have my share of demons, but I am a gregarious sort.
If 'ecstasy' means to stand outside ourselves, then what better ambition can there be as we wait in the wings of the Royal Albert Hall: to leave self-obsession behind and take the audience on a journey across the high wire of Beethoven or the flying trapeze of Liszt.
It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet.
A soccer game is a Wagner opera. The narrative sets up, the tension builds, the music ebbs and flows, the strings, the horns, more tension, and suddenly a moment of pure bliss, trumpet-tongued Gabriel sings, and gods descend from Olympus to dance - this peak of ecstasy.
The belief that we can rely on shortcuts to happiness, joy, rapture, comfort, and ecstasy, rather than be entitled to these feelings by the exercise of personal strengths and virtues, leads to legions of people who, in the middle of great wealth, are starving spiritually.
And I have been able to give freedom and life which was acknowledged in the ecstasy of walking hand in hand across the most beautiful bridge of the world, the cables enclosing us and pulling us upward in such a dance as I have never walked and never can walk with another.
Even spiritually advanced people are often confused. They feel an inner ecstasy which comes from the vital world, and they think this is the real delight. But it is not so. Real delight comes from the highest world to the soul, and from the soul it saturates the whole being.
Although the events we appear to perceive in dreams are illusory, our feelings in response to dream content are real. Indeed, most of the events we experience in dreams are real; when we experience feelings, say, anxiety or ecstasy, in dreams, we really do feel anxious or ecstatic at the time.
My early colleagues and myself helped create the life styles of Americans and, by osmosis, of the rest of the world. I found it difficult to reconcile success with humility. I tried it first, but it meant avoiding the very essence of my career - total exhilaration and the ecstasy of creativity.
I always thought the point of life was something richer than that. Something full of great tragedy or comedy, reversal of fortune, ecstasy, that kind of thing. But no, contemporary urban theorists seem satisfied with the merely livable, which always sounds to me like the merely survivable, the not so bad.
My wife Martha used to call me Ol' Lemon Face because of my facial contortions when I play Lucille. I squeeze my eyes and open my mouth, raise my eyebrows, cock my head and God knows what else. I look like I'm in torture, when in truth, I'm in ecstasy. I don't do it for show. Every fiber of my being is tingling.
The anorexic body is held in the grip of will alone; its meaning is far from stable. What it says - 'Notice me, feed me, mother me' - is not what it means, for such attentions constitute an agonising test of that will, and also threaten to return the body to the dreaded 'normality' it has been such ecstasy to escape.
Nature best teaches how to pray, and how to reverence all the gifts the Almighty has given us. She is like a vast outspread handkerchief, embroidered with God's eternal name, on which we may dry alike our tears of sorrow and of joy; she turns weeping into ecstasy, and fills our hearts with speechless, quiet reverence and resignation.
What I absolutely want is to suggest that before it's anything else, redemption is God mending the bicycle of our souls; God bringing out the puncture repair kit, re-inflating the tires, taking off the rust, making us roadworthy once more. Not so that we can take flight into ecstasy, but so that we can do the next needful mile of our lives.
