Seeds and Songs

The Tom Waits edition

Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

“I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.”
― Tom Waits

“There ain't no devil, only God when he's drunk.”
― Tom Waits

“We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness.
We are monkeys with money and guns.”
― Tom Waits

“The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.”
― Tom Waits

“A gentleman is someone who can play the accordion, but doesn't.”
― Tom Waits

“T’ain’t no sin to take off your skin, and dance around in your bones.”
― Tom Waits

“Oh, I'm not a percussionist, I just like to hit things.”
― Tom Waits

“It's very hard to stop doing things you're used to doing. You almost have to dismantle yourself and scatter it all around and then put a blindfold on and put it back together so that you avoid old habits.”
― Tom Waits

“You got to tell me the brave captain
Why are the wicked so strong?
How do the angels get to sleep
When the devil leaves the porch light on?”
― Tom Waits

“I worry about a lot of things, but I don’t worry about achievements. I worry primarily about whether there are nightclubs in Heaven.”
― Tom Waits

“I've never been a fan of personality-conflict burgers and identity-crisis omelets with patchouli oil. I function very well on a diet that consists of Chicken Catastrophe and Eggs Overwhelming and a tall, cool Janitor-in-a-Drum. I like to walk out of a restaurant with enough gas to open a Mobil station.”
― Tom Waits

“Children make up the best songs, anyway. Better than grown-ups. Kids are always working on songs and throwing them away, like little origami things or paper airplanes. They don't care if they lose it; they'll just make another one.”
― Tom Waits

“It's the same with men as with horses and dogs, nothing wants to die.”
― Tom Waits

“Bringing up children was like living with a bunch of drunks...you really have to be on your toes all the time.”
― Tom Waits

“She’s got the whole dark forest living inside of her.”
― Tom Waits

“He likes a day in the studio to end, he says, "when my knees are all skinned up and my pants are wet and my hair's off to one side and I feel like I've been in the foxhole all day. I don't think comfort is good for music. It's good to come out with skinned knuckles after wrestling with something you can't see. I like it when you come home at the end of the day from recording and someone says, "What happened to your hand?" And you don't even know. When you're in that place, you can dance on a broken ankle.”
― Tom Waits

“When you are writing, you're conjuring. It's a ritual, and you need to be brave and respectful and sometimes get out of the way of whatever it is that you're inviting into the room.”
― Tom Waits

“Everything is explained now. We live in an age when you say casually to somebody 'What's the story on that?' and they can run to the computer and tell you within five seconds. That's fine, but sometimes I’d just as soon continue wondering. We have a deficit of wonder right now.”
― Tom Waits

“You know, people only travel really with their seeds, and with their songs. In Bosnia they interviewed a lot of refugees... they'd left with nothing and they asked them what they had, and they had seeds in their pockets from their gardens and their songs. That was it. Once you're nourished in that most fundamental way, everything else follows.”
― Tom Waits

“Singing is just doing interesting things to the air. Elongating it and twisting it into shapes.”
― Tom Waits

“There is no such thing as nonfiction. There is no such thing as truth. People who really know what happened aren't talking. And the people who don't have a clue, you can't shut them up.”
― Tom Waits

“And the earth died screaming, while I lay dreaming...”
― Tom Waits

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