Eric > Eric's Quotes

“I’m certain, as we filed down the great staircase, that I appeared the same as ever, a moping twelve-year-old, all arms and legs. But secretly I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revelation that human beings create art, that to be an artist was to see what others could not.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“Rimbaud held the keys to a mystical language that I devoured even as I could not fully decipher it. My unrequited love for him was as real to me as anything I had experienced. At the factory where I had labored with a hard-edged, illiterate group of women, I was harassed in his name. Suspecting me of being a Communist for reading a book in a foreign language, they threatened me in the john, prodding me to denounce him. It was within this atmosphere that I seethed. It was for him that I wrote and dreamed. He became my archangel, delivering me from the mundane horrors of factory life. His hands had chiseled a manual of heaven and I held them fast. The knowledge of him added swagger to my step and this could not be stripped away. I tossed my copy of Illuminations in a plaid suitcase. We would escape together.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“My mother, who was a waitress, gave me white wedgies and a fresh uniform in a plain wrapper. “You’ll never make it as a waitress,” she said, “but I’ll stake you anyway.” It was her way of showing her support.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“I can only thank, as I have within myself many times through the years, this unknown benefactor. She was the one who gave me the last piece of encouragement, a thief’s good-luck sign.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“The air was heavy with unstable chemicals, mold, and the earthy stench of hashish. The fat of candles burned, great tears of wax spilling onto the sidewalk.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“It was exciting just to stand in front of the hallowed ground of Birdland that had been blessed by John Coltrane, or the Five Spot on St. Mark’s Place where Billie Holiday used to sing, where Eric Dolphy and Ornette Coleman opened the field of jazz like human can openers.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“Like Jean Genet, Robert was a terrible thief. Genet was caught and imprisoned for stealing rare volumes of Proust and rolls of silk from a shirt maker. Aesthetic thieves. I imagined his sense of horror and triumph as bits of Blake swirled into the sewers of New York City.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“Most of the time, it seemed as if the piece was fully formed in his mind. He was not one for improvising. It was more a question of executing something he saw in a flash.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“Robert had little patience with these introspective bouts of mine. He never seemed to question his artistic drives, and by his example, I understood that what matters is the work: the string of words propelled by God becoming a poem, the weave of color and graphite scrawled upon the sheet that magnifies His motion. To achieve within the work a perfect balance of faith and execution. From this state of mind comes a light, life-charged.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“I didn’t feel for Warhol the way Robert did. His work reflected a culture I wanted to avoid. I hated the soup and felt little for the can. I preferred an artist who transformed his time, not mirrored it.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“I open doors, I close doors,” he wrote. He loved no one, he loved everyone. He loved sex, he hated sex. Life is a lie, truth is a lie. His thoughts ended with a healing wound. “I stand naked when I draw. God holds my hand and we sing together.” His manifesto as an artist. I let the confessional aspects fall away, and I accepted those words as a communion wafer. He had cast the line that would seduce me, ultimately bind us together. I folded the letter and put it back in the envelope, not knowing what would happen next.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“I never knew whether his speedy speech patterns reflected amphetamine use or an amphetamine mind. He would often lead me up blind alleys or through an endless labyrinth of incomprehensible logic. I felt like Alice with the Mad Hatter, negotiating jokes without punch lines, and having to retrace my steps on the chessboard floor back to the logic of my own peculiar universe.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“Yet you could feel a vibration in the air, a sense of hastening. It had started with the moon, inaccessible poem that it was. Now men had walked upon it, rubber treads on a pearl of the gods.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs were all my teachers, each one passing through the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel, my new university.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“Similar forms of trickery eventually evolved into a ritual of drunken trade negotiations that often ended with Native Americans giving away huge tracts of land for little in return. Years later, one settler put it bluntly: “When the object is to murder Indians, strong liquor is the main article required, for when you have them dead drunk, you may do to them as you please, without running the risk of losing your life.”
― Reid Mitenbuler, Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America's Whiskey

“John Steinbeck many years later would write in East of Eden, “The names of places carry a charge of the people who named them, reverent or irreverent, descriptive, either poetic or disparaging.” The Scotch-Irish gave the American places where they made whiskey names like Gallows Branch, Cutthroat Gap, or, in one instance, Shitbritches Creek. In Lunenburg County, Virginia, they even named two streams Tickle Cunt Branch and Fucking Creek. They often called themselves “rednecks,” an old Scots border term for Presbyterians. Another title they used for themselves was “crackers,” a term that came from the Scots word craik, which literally means “talk,” but was typically used to describe the kind of loud bragging that usually leads to a fight.”
― Reid Mitenbuler, Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America's Whiskey

“John Steinbeck many years later would write in East of Eden, “The names of places carry a charge of the people who named them, reverent or irreverent, descriptive, either poetic or disparaging.” The Scotch-Irish gave the American places where they made whiskey names like Gallows Branch, Cutthroat Gap, or, in one instance, Shitbritches Creek. In Lunenburg County, Virginia, they even named two streams Tickle Cunt Branch and Fucking Creek. They often called themselves “rednecks,” an old Scots border term for Presbyterians. Another title they used for themselves was “crackers,” a term that came from the Scots word craik, which literally means “talk,” but was typically used to describe the kind of loud”
― Reid Mitenbuler, Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America's Whiskey

“Jefferson denounced whiskey as a “poison.” He wrote, “No nation is drunken where wine is cheap, and none sober where the dearness of wine substitutes ardent spirits as the common beverage. It is, in truth, the only antidote to the bane of whiskey.” Jefferson was merely expressing the attitudes of his social class toward whiskey. He was a friend of the workingman, but didn’t care much for the workingman’s unrefined drink, although he did occasionally allow his slaves to drink it.”
― Reid Mitenbuler, Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America's Whiskey

“By the twenty-first century, whiskey producers had figured out that Jefferson’s vision sells: all those small, distinct labels project the romantic image of the independent out on his own. But producers had also figured out something else: Hamilton’s vision was a good way to get that whiskey into bottles efficiently and at an affordable cost. Jefferson’s vision is on the outside of bottles, but Hamilton’s vision often defines the whiskey within. Many brands seem small and distinct, and therefore more personal, which is important for marketing, but much of this is an illusion.”
― Reid Mitenbuler, Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America's Whiskey

“The label for Knob Creek bourbon might state “Distilled and Bottled by Knob Creek Distillery, Clermont, Kentucky,” making it seem like a freestanding outfit, but it is made at the same plant as many other brands made by Jim Beam. “Knob Creek Distillery” is simply what’s called an assumed business name, otherwise known as a DBA, which is the legal shorthand for “doing business as,” and is a method that can be used to make one company seem like many. But drinkers who sleuth out the origins of most brands will find their whiskey traced back to one of just a few places.”
― Reid Mitenbuler, Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America's Whiskey

“In bourbon marketing, stories like Craig’s are the rule rather than the exception. For many years, the companies behind the brands were the only sources explaining the history of the industry, and there is no advantage whatsoever in telling the boring version of the story. Don’t believe 90 percent of the tales you read on whiskey bottles, but don’t forget to enjoy them either. The stories are just like the whiskey itself. They start as a vapor, condense, and then sit unseen in a barrel for years. Finally they emerge, transformed into something entirely different and enchanting.”
― Reid Mitenbuler, Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America's Whiskey

“Every whiskey barrel is a sort of medieval alchemist’s laboratory, a dark and sooty place from which a clear spirit poured inside emerges years later, golden and transformed. Barrels first started as humble shipping containers for whiskey, but over the centuries were promoted into something else: an ingredient as well as a vessel.”
― Reid Mitenbuler, Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America's Whiskey

“A few hours later, she was back. As she slipped off her slingback heels and rubbed her ankles, she said, “Boy, when he says, ‘Come up and see my etchings,’ he means ‘Come up and see my etchings.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“After Standard Oil Company founder John D. Rockefeller became the richest man in the world, he offered gardening advice to a group of young men at a Brown University Bible study. He told his admiring audience, “The American Beauty Rose can be produced in the splendor and fragrance which bring cheer to its beholder only by sacrificing the early buds which grow up around it. This is not an evil tendency in business. It is merely the working-out of a law of nature and a law of God.” Rockefeller's audacious winner-take-all metaphor about the American Beauty rose was a description of how Standard Oil had bested its competitors. The clumsy reference to God at the end of the remarks was a meager attempt to morally sanction the ideas of philosopher Herbert Spencer, who had recently seduced the robber baron community by adapting scientific ideas like “survival of the fittest” into a loose form of Social Darwinism that defined Gilded Age business.”
― Reid Mitenbuler, Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America's Whiskey

“Henry George had warned of back in 1879 in his book Progress and Poverty, which claimed that the Industrial Revolution’s advancements in wealth and comfort had come at the expense of the working class.”
― Reid Mitenbuler, Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America's Whiskey

“The crosshairs also found their way onto other minorities. Temperance was a way to control the Irish, Italian, German, and Jewish immigrants who had been arriving since the Civil War. Rural Republican strongholds like Wheeler’s Ohio feared these immigrants landing in coastal cities, taking up all the jobs, and then voting for Democratic candidates who were backed by political machines.”
― Reid Mitenbuler, Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America's Whiskey

“In 1905, the ASL’s strategy started reaching a groundswell when it effortlessly ousted Ohio governor Myron Herrick, a Republican who had been elected just two years earlier with the largest plurality in the state’s history. Ohio started going dry. “Never again,” Wheeler crowed, “will any political party ignore the protests of the church and the moral forces of the state.”
― Reid Mitenbuler, Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America's Whiskey

“But things for Four Roses would eventually come full circle. In 1945, Four Roses had been a part of America’s most famous image of victory over Japan in World War II. A giant neon advertisement for the brand is present in the background of Alfred Eisenstadt’s Life magazine photo of a sailor and a woman kissing in Times Square during the celebration of the war’s end. Over the next decades, Japan was rebuilt and brought into the fold of worldwide economic integration. Today Four Roses is owned by Japan’s Kirin Brewery Company, another consortium that lovingly retooled the brand’s recipe to make it a straight whiskey and return it to respectability. In a twist of irony, Kirin today happens to sit under Mitsubishi, the global conglomerate that made the A6M Zero fighter planes used by kamikaze pilots in the war that the Life magazine couple had just endured when caught by Eisenstadt in the middle of their kiss.”
― Reid Mitenbuler, Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America's Whiskey

“Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage. Truth and courage aren't always comfortable, but they're never weakness.”
― Brené Brown, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead

“Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity. It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity. If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper and more meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path.”
― Brené Brown, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead