Greil Marcus Quotes
Words that in their everyday surrealism have no parallel in contemporary writing... Music that mines the deep veins of fatalism in the Appalachian voice
We make the oldest stories new when we succeed, and we are trapped by the old stories when we fail
Patriotism in America, as I understand it, is a matter of suffering, when the country fails to live up to its promises, or actively betrays them.
No failure in America, whether of love or money, is ever simple; it is always a kind of betrayal, of a mass of shadowy, shared hopes.
Every youth movement presents itself as a loan to the future, and tries to call in its lien in advance, but when there is no future all loans are canceled.
It may be that the most interesting American struggle is the struggle to set oneself free from the limits one is born to, and then to learn something of the value of those limits
It is a sure sign that a culture has reached a dead end when it is no longer intrigued by its myths.
If Bob Dylan really is an historian in and of himself in his work, in his performances, he is also an historian with a unique sense of humor. There's always been a bit of a stand-up comic in him.
I never find myself even catching lyrics until something in the sound has taken me captive. Thinking about anything else is just the pleasurable byproduct of wow.
I had tremendous fun fooling around with the way people talked about songs, just the way that became another way of understanding the world.
Van Morrison remains a singer who can be compared to no other in the history of modern popular music.
