More Quotes I Like

People look for themselves in books and movies. They count on those touchstones, not so much for gospel as affirmation that others have walked the same path.
--Lily Burana

And still -- he was happy. For happiness, he told himself, is not in being loved -- which is a satisfaction of the vanity and mingled with disgust. Happiness is in loving, and perhaps in snatching little fugitive approaches to the beloved object.
--Thomas Mann, “Tonio Kruger”

I stand between two worlds. I am at home in neither, and I suffer in consequence. You artists call me a bourgeois, and the bourgeois try to arrest me... I don't know which makes me feel worse.
--Tonio Kruger in Thomas Mann's “Tonio Kruger”

I have taken Caliban's advice. I have stolen their books. I will have some run of this isle.
--Richard Rodriguez, The Hunger of Memory

Through my reading, however, I developed a fabulous and sophisticated sexual imagination. At seventeen, I may not have known how to engage a girl in small talk, but I had read Lady Chatterley's Lover.
--Richard Rodriguez, The Hunger of Memory

Why I Love Country Music

Okay, the Dresden Dolls isn't exactly country music, but then neither is a lot of the music I listen to. And yet more and more the radio stations I turn to most are those which play country music and the CDs I'm most likely to buy are by country artists.

Author Lily Burana once explained the appeal of country music with this quote:

“I've come to love country-and-western. I used to hate it, but now between the deft storytelling and open-heartedness, I'm hooked.”

And this quote:

“I need the formula for conveying heartache that country does best. A world-weary voice, stark and plaintive against the weeping of the fiddle, a steel guitar coming in to address the grievances of the strings, and then a crescendo that brings the three together, pulsing with emotion and blood -- taste and restraint be damned.”

No doubt that's one reason I'm also a Lily Burana fan...