Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story

by Bono

Someone has likened prayer to being on a rough sea in a small boat with no oars. All you have is a rope that, somewhere in the distance, is attached to the port. With that rope you can pull yourself closer to God. Songs are my prayers.

It takes great faith to have no faith. Great strength of character to resist the ancient texts that suggest an afterlife.

Isn’t it true that we turn the world into the shape of our pain?

I’m a follower of Christ who can’t keep up.

I was discovering that adventures in the wider world are often attempts to discover who we are, when we’re alone in our room with the lights off.

Bullies have run the world since we had one. Countries are mostly run by gangs. “Elites” are another word for gangs. There’s hardly a history of a country that mattered that was not engaged in some kind of geopolitical bullying. And the bully can take on many faces.

The lives of the poorest people are at the heart of Christianity, but sometimes religion seems to be what happens when Jesus, like Elvis, has left the building. It becomes a bless me club for the Holy Rollers and navel gazers.

Music for me has always been a lifeline in times of turbulence. It still is. That’s enough to justify its existence; the sacred service of getting a soul from there to here is not to be underestimated. Just giving someone a reason to get out of bed in the morning counts for so much. Music as the love that drives out all fear. Music is its own reason to exist.

When we promised “till death do us part,” we understood both its literality and its poetics, that this marriage thing was a grand madness: jumping off a cliff believing you can fly. Only in the air to discover you might actually be able to do this.

Make us useful, dear God. We’re available. How can we be useful in this world where we find ourselves?

I wonder if writing is a kind of life underwater; you have to surface, but if it’s going well, you don’t really want to.

I ask the local Orthodox priest about the Orthodox patriarch of Moscow. Why has he colluded with the lies spewed out daily, lies that mutilate the truth, that mutilate a people. “What God does he pray to?” I wonder. “Vladimir Putin,” he replies.

Arrogance is the exit and entry point to the humiliation that art requires.

William Gibson, who wrote, “The future is here. It’s just not widely distributed yet.”

Edge has always said that I look at my body as if it were an inconvenience.

Illumination is the experience we all reach for in chapels and churches, in mosques and synagogues. We search for a light without which we only half see ourselves. My mind takes me to the apostle Paul and his letter to the early Christians in Corinth and why he thinks love is more important than faith and even hope.

I’m drawn to conversation because in the best kind you don’t know where you’re going, only that you will get somewhere good.

the job of art is making the instant eternal.

the hardest thing to be on a stage is yourself.

Self-consciousness is the enemy. Insecurity is not. On an unconscious level, an audience needs to know you need them.

the moment I know a show is really working is when I feel that the song is singing me, rather than me singing the song.

In our band the show is where we finish our songs because without our audience they feel incomplete.

Give someone a mask, as Wilde put it, and they will tell you the truth.

I’ve always revered the concept of a Sabbath, even if it’s just a Sabbath hour. And on a Tuesday. I’ll always try to make some time in the week that is sacred. A time to stop doing and start being.

“There’s a line in one of Martin Luther King’s sermons in Strength to Love,” I told him. “Courage faces fear and thereby masters it.”

controlled Congress? “Not by hanging out with a Kennedy,” says the Kennedy. Bobby thinks his brother-in-law, later elected governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, may have some suggestions. “Go see John Kasich from Ohio,” Arnold tells

It’s hard to imagine a force as great as romantic love, but friendship comes close.

Listen to me now I need to let you know You don’t have to go it alone

I’ve heard it said that when somebody close dies, they leave you a kind of passing gift, some invisible will where you inherit a special blessing.

French proverb “No man is great in the eyes of his valet,”

The search for common ground starts with a search for higher ground. Even with your opponents. Especially with your opponents.

you don’t have to agree on everything if the one thing you do agree on is important enough.

Senegalese proverb, “If you want to cut a man’s hair, be sure he is in the room.”

Beneath the noise Below the din I hear your voice It’s whispering In science and in medicine I was a stranger You took me in.

Holding these three pills in my hand, I felt the gelatinous surface that contained life or death, and the showman/salesman in me knew that we had the visual props to win the argument. As with Jubilee 2000, this was an argument about justice rather than charity. If access to ARVs really came down to your geographical address, “an accident of longitude or latitude,” as I used to put it, then I believed we could win that case in the court of public opinion. If we could do that, we could win the politics.

I would put the thought in “Crumbs from Your Table,” which we recorded a couple of years later: Where you live should not decide Whether you live or whether you die Three to a bed Sister Anne, she said Dignity passes by. —“Crumbs from Your Table”

Americans, it seemed, have the same problem with firearms that we Irish have with alcohol. The problem being that we don’t think we have a problem.

Warren Buffett,

On giving his fortune away: “I’m not giving away anything that means anything to me. A personal fortune has no utility for me.”

“People don’t trust you if you ask them to do stuff that’s too easy. Ask them to do more difficult things, and you’ll increase your chances.”

Unlike Europeans, and especially Irish people, Americans are not motivated by attempts to guilt them into action. But offer them the role of the cavalry, and they’re right there with you.

we ended the tour at Wheaton College, in part because it was alma mater to so many influential evangelicals, including Mike Gerson, speechwriter for President Bush.

Mandela made one of the most spellbinding speeches I’d ever heard. “Like slavery and apartheid,” he said, “poverty is not natural. It is man-made, and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings. And overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice. It is the protection of a fundamental human right, the right to dignity and a decent life.”

Power Corrupts Make daylight the detergent. Transparency is the vaccine for corruption. The rules of governance work when citizens can see who’s breaking them. In countries, companies, communities.

as John Stuart Mill put it, “One person with a belief is equal to a force of ninety-nine who have only interests.”

Simone Weil is right, that “imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life,”

I was already coming to understand that Trump is not the problem. He’s the symptom of the problem. He’s not the virus. He’s the super-spreader. The virus is populism, and it’s deadly as the plague. The real host is fear.

I found myself returning to some words of Martin Luther King’s, about how “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” I did not believe them anymore. The arc of the moral universe does not bend toward justice. It has to be bent, and this requires sheer force of will. It demands our sharpest focus and most concentrated effort. History does not move in a straight line; it has to be dragged, kicking and screaming, all the way down the line.

genius is no reason for arrogance.

I’ve come to accept some of the orthodoxies of the free market, but I don’t accept that it comes “free.”