Steve

“The totality of human endeavor is nothing when set against the stars.”
― Tom Sweterlitsch, The Gone World

“A moth was a caterpillar, once, but it no longer is a caterpillar. It cannot break itself back down, cannot metamorphose in reverse. To try to eat leaves again would mean starvation. Crawling back into the husk would provide no shelter. It is a paradox – the impossibility of reclaiming that which lies behind, housed within a form comprised entirely of the repurposed pieces of that same past. We exist where we begin, yet to remain there is death.”
― Becky Chambers, To Be Taught, If Fortunate

“That is why fiction existed, as a way to look at the world without being broken by it.”
― Olen Steinhauer, The Middleman

“Jazz is a strange music. Jazz is where you find it. You dig all day in the mine, handling those big lumpy dead rocks; that’s the popular music, the dead stuff. And then all of a sudden you come on a bright gleaming streak embedded in the dead rock; it’s alive, it’s gold. That’s how you find jazz. So many people have never heard jazz, because they’ve found nothing but the slag, the dead ore in which it’s cased. They hear the raw material, the nondescript popular song; they may never be lucky enough to be present when inspired musicians strike away the lumpy death and bring out the life. The trumpet states a theme; it isn’t a hell of a good theme and in the song it means little or nothing. He strips it down to its bare chords, throws its thin line of melody out there for a start. The clarinet invents a counter-melody for himself, an invention as carefully wrought, as musicianly, as anything Bach ever wrote down. And then the trombone sings; there is a complete perfection, coming close to the unbearable, in the addition of that third voice to the polyphony of true jazz. Out of nothing something of beauty has been created; you have heard jazz, and you are lucky. You are even more lucky if you have created jazz, if you can sit with the gut-searing vibrations of a trombone mouthpiece kicking back against your face and feel the music down into your feet.”
― Dale Curran, Dupree Blues