Lou Vaughn

“Watcha doin? If you're like me, you're doin nothin, but you're doin it so well that everybody thinks you're doin somethin.”
― Richard Brautigan, The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings

“For when you realized that God is Everything you know that you've got to love everything no matter how bad it is, in the ultimate sense it was neither good nor bad (consider the dust), it was just what was, that is, what we made to appear.”
― Jack Kerouac, Lonesome Traveler

“Music lives only in performance; only then does what we hear become real. Performing reveals everything we are able to show, and yet for this reason, the first time through, we often perform badly. And we yearn so deeply to go back again and correct our mistakes. Few yearnings are as profound in us, because the truth is, we cannot go back. Yet the fiction of practicing makes it seem as if we can, and this is enough to change our lives. Practice lets us grow in our own time, protected from the demands, the vitality and mortality, of each moment. Within the practice-room walls it often seems as if time really does stand still, as if we could always remain protected, practicing and improving forever. This illusion holds transformative power—but also a dangerous seduction. Practice, by itself, is a dream of perfection. Only performing can turn practice into shared life, where our own time may join with others’, becoming musical. Yet practicing is the necessary lie that lets us pause to collect ourselves. It is the inner life of performance, the inward turn that allows us to develop, to grow, to move forward having learned.”
― Glenn Kurtz, Practicing: A Musician's Return to Music

“Warm fog swirled in the canyon as we gradually descended. A hundred feet in front of us everything was lost in the fog and a hundred feet behind us everything was lost in the fog. We were walking in a capsule between amnesias.”
― Richard Brautigan, Revenge of the Lawn: Stories 1962-1970