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“BELOVED, gaze in thine own heart,
The holy tree is growing there;
From joy the holy branches start,
And all the trembling flowers they bear.
The changing colours of its fruit
Have dowered the stars with merry light;
The surety of its hidden root
Has planted quiet in the night;
The shaking of its leafy head
Has given the waves their melody,
And made my lips and music wed,
Murmuring a wizard song for thee.
There the Loves a circle go,
The flaming circle of our days,
Gyring, spiring to and fro
In those great ignorant leafy ways;
Remembering all that shaken hair
And how the wingèd sandals dart,
Thine eyes grow full of tender care:
Beloved, gaze in thine own heart.

Gaze no more in the bitter glass
The demons, with their subtle guile,
Lift up before us when they pass,
Or only gaze a little while;
For there a fatal image grows
That the stormy night receives,
Roots half hidden under snows,
Broken boughs and blackened leaves.
For all things turn to barrenness
In the dim glass the demons hold,
The glass of outer weariness,
Made when God slept in times of old.
There, through the broken branches, go
The ravens of unresting thought;
Flying, crying, to and fro,
Cruel claw and hungry throat,
Or else they stand and sniff the wind,
And shake their ragged wings; alas!
Thy tender eyes grow all unkind:
Gaze no more in the bitter glass.

- The Two Trees”
― William Butler Yeats

“You can run from the truth. You can run and hide from the truth.
You can deny and avoid the truth. But you cannot destroy the truth. Nor can you make the lie true. You must know that love will always uncover the truth.”
― Delano Johnson, Love Quotes

“To encapsulate the notion of Mardi Gras as nothing more than a big drunk is to take the simple and stupid way out, and I, for one, am getting tired of staying stuck on simple and stupid.

Mardi Gras is not a parade. Mardi Gras is not girls flashing on French Quarter balconies. Mardi Gras is not an alcoholic binge.

Mardi Gras is bars and restaurants changing out all the CD's in their jukeboxes to Professor Longhair and the Neville Brothers, and it is annual front-porch crawfish boils hours before the parades so your stomach and attitude reach a state of grace, and it is returning to the same street corner, year after year, and standing next to the same people, year after year--people whose names you may or may not even know but you've watched their kids grow up in this public tableau and when they're not there, you wonder: Where are those guys this year?

It is dressing your dog in a stupid costume and cheering when the marching bands go crazy and clapping and saluting the military bands when they crisply snap to.

Now that part, more than ever.

It's mad piano professors converging on our city from all over the world and banging the 88's until dawn and laughing at the hairy-shouldered men in dresses too tight and stalking the Indians under Claiborne overpass and thrilling the years you find them and lamenting the years you don't and promising yourself you will next year.

It's wearing frightful color combination in public and rolling your eyes at the guy in your office who--like clockwork, year after year--denies that he got the baby in the king cake and now someone else has to pony up the ten bucks for the next one.

Mardi Gras is the love of life. It is the harmonic convergence of our food, our music, our creativity, our eccentricity, our neighborhoods, and our joy of living. All at once.”
― Chris Rose, 1 Dead in Attic: Post-Katrina Stories

“We are mosaics. Pieces of light, love, history, stars... Glued together with magic and music and words.”
― Anita Krizzan

“Do you really like to read that much?” she asked as we ambled our way casually in the dark toward the piazzetta. I looked at her as if she had asked me if I loved music, or bread and salted butter, or ripe fruit in the summertime. “Don’t get me wrong,” she said. “I like to read too. But I don’t tell anyone.” At last, I thought, someone who speaks the truth. I asked her why she didn’t tell anyone. “I don’t know…” This was more her way of asking for time to think or to hedge before answering, “People who read are hiders. They hide who they are. People who hide don’t always like who they are.” “Do you hide who you are?” “Sometimes. Don’t you?” “Do I? I suppose.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it. The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be. Being alive is the meaning.

Love is a friendship set to music.”
― Joseph Campbell

“Sitting up all night would be pointless if somebody you loved wasn't sitting up with you, picking out music to play and helping you kill the bourbon. Walking by yourself in the rain is for college kids who think loneliness makes poets.”
― Peter S. Beagle, A Fine and Private Place

“Is it not love that knows how to make smooth things rough and rough things smooth?”
― Vikram Seth, An Equal Music

“You suck, Meatball," he called out a second before I knew the music was about to start. But I love you, his lips formed.”
― Mariana Zapata, From Lukov with Love

“A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless'...”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Life as it should be: all friends, all art, all music, all love, all the time.”
― Amanda Palmer

“Why wait any longer for the one you love
When he’s standing in front of you”
― Bob Dylan

“Who are you, Martin Eden? he demanded of himself in the looking-
glass, that night when he got back to his room. He gazed at
himself long and curiously. Who are you? What are you? Where do
you belong? You belong by rights to girls like Lizzie Connolly.
You belong with the legions of toil, with all that is low, and
vulgar, and unbeautiful. You belong with the oxen and the drudges,
in dirty surroundings among smells and stenches. There are the
stale vegetables now. Those potatoes are rotting. Smell them,
damn you, smell them. And yet you dare to open the books, to
listen to beautiful music, to learn to love beautiful paintings, to
speak good English, to think thoughts that none of your own kind
thinks, to tear yourself away from the oxen and the Lizzie
Connollys and to love a pale spirit of a woman who is a million
miles beyond you and who lives in the stars! Who are you? and what
are you? damn you! And are you going to make good?”
― Jack London, Martin Eden

“Music, I think, he makes me feel like music.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“The earth turned to bring us closer,
it spun on itself and within us,
and finally joined us together in this dream
as written in the Symposium.
Nights passed by, snowfalls and solstices;
time passed in minutes and millennia.
An ox cart that was on its way to Nineveh
arrived in Nebraska.
A rooster was singing some distance from the world,
in one of the thousand pre-lives of our fathers.
The earth was spinning with its music carrying us on board;
it didn't stop turning a single moment
as if so much love, so much that's miraculous
was only an adagio written long ago
in the Symposium's score.”
― Eugenio Montejo, The Trees: Selected Poems 1967-2004

“What - what - what are you doing?" he demanded.
"I am almost six hundred years old," Magnus claimed, and Ragnor snorted, since Magnus changed his age to suit himself every few weeks. Magnus swept on. "It does seem about time to learn a musical instrument." He flourished his new prize, a little stringed instrument that looked like a cousin of the lute that the lute was embarrassed to be related to. "It's called a charango. I am planning to become a charanguista!"
"I wouldn't call that an instrument of music," Ragnor observed sourly. "An instrument of torture, perhaps."
Magnus cradled the charango in his arms as if it were an easily offended baby. "It's a beautiful and very unique instrument! The sound box is made from an armadillo. Well, a dried armadillo shell."
"That explains the sound you're making," said Ragnor. "Like a lost, hungry armadillo."
"You are just jealous," Magnus remarked calmly. "Because you do not have the soul of a true artiste like myself."
"Oh, I am positively green with envy," Ragnor snapped.
"Come now, Ragnor. That's not fair," said Magnus. "You know I love it when you make jokes about your complexion."
Magnus refused to be affected by Ragnor's cruel judgments. He regarded his fellow warlock with a lofty stare of superb indifference, raised his charango, and began to play again his defiant, beautiful tune.
They both heard the staccato thump of frantically running feet from within the house, the swish of skirts, and then Catarina came rushing out into the courtyard. Her white hair was falling loose about her shoulders, and her face was the picture of alarm.
"Magnus, Ragnor, I heard a cat making a most unearthly noise," she exclaimed. "From the sound of it, the poor creature must be direly sick. You have to help me find it!"
Ragnor immediately collapsed with hysterical laughter on his windowsill. Magnus stared at Catarina for a moment, until he saw her lips twitch.
"You are conspiring against me and my art," he declared. "You are a pack of conspirators."
He began to play again. Catarina stopped him by putting a hand on his arm.
"No, but seriously, Magnus," she said. "That noise is appalling."
Magnus sighed. "Every warlock's a critic."
"Why are you doing this?"
"I have already explained myself to Ragnor. I wish to become proficient with a musical instrument. I have decided to devote myself to the art of the charanguista, and I wish to hear no more petty objections."
"If we are all making lists of things we wish to hear no more . . . ," Ragnor murmured.
Catarina, however, was smiling.
"I see," she said.
"Madam, you do not see."
"I do. I see it all most clearly," Catarina assured him. "What is her name?"
"I resent your implication," Magnus said. "There is no woman in the case. I am married to my music!"
"Oh, all right," Catarina said. "What's his name, then?"
His name was Imasu Morales, and he was gorgeous.”
― Cassandra Clare, The Bane Chronicles

“Its hard to stay up. Its been a long long day
And you've got the sandman at your door.
But hang on, leave the TV on and lets do it anyway.
Its ok.
You can always sleep through work tomorrow. Ok?
Hey, Hey, Tomorrow's just your future yesterday.
Tell the clock on the wall, "Forget the wake up call."
Cause the night's not nearly through.
Wipe the sleep from your eyes. Give yourself a surprise.
Let your worries wait another day.
And if you stay too late at the bar,
At least you made it out this far.
So make up your mind and say, "Let's do it anyway!"
Its Ok
You can always sleep through work tomorrow, ok?
Hey, Hey, Tomorrow's just your future yesterday.
Life's too short to worry about
the things that you can live without
And I regret to say,
the morning light is hours away.
The world can be such a fright,
But it belongs to us tonight.
What's the point of going to bed?
You look so lovely when your eyes are red.
Tomorrow's just your future yesterday.”
― Craig Ferguson

“There's so much destruction all over the world - and all you can do is complain about ME!”
― Morrissey

“You have made me ashamed of the wasted years. You have made me acknowledge that no darkness has ever been deep enough to extinguish my personal knowledge of love. And all around me in this world I see evidence of love. I see love. I see it in the human struggle. I see its undeniable penetration in all that humans have accomplished in their poetry, their painting, their music, their love of one another and refusal to accept suffering as their lot.”
― Anne Rice, Pandora