Kris McCracken

“The new government decided the best way to rectify this was to outlaw abortion and prohibit the sale or display of contraceptives in the Weimar constitution of 1919. During a time of unimaginable scarcity and fear, women were forced into motherhood. They were forced to make do, and the pressure to repopulate the nation, to birth and raise a new generation of mothers and soldiers, was enormous. It was the most important thing a woman could possibly do: Be the Good Mother.”
― Heinrich Böll, Billiards at Half-Past Nine

“History has no time for feelings, even less for trauma and pain, and least of all for dull helplessness, for the inability to grasp what is happening. One day you are a human being, and the next, despite the armband or perhaps precisely because of it, you are invisible. No, that is not history, it is a catastrophe of cosmic proportions, in which every individual is a separate cosmos. Nine thousand five hundred universes shift from a steady to a gaseous state, more than merely metaphorically, especially when you think of those five thousand souls who became acquainted with the back of Gotz and Meyer's truck.”
― David Albahari, Götz and Meyer

“So if you’re doing something with your free time other than writing a song, it’s because you really don’t want to write a song.”
― Jeff Tweedy, How to Write One Song

“you will hear something that you want to keep. Or hear something that reminds you of something else. Songwriters are just people who have claimed those things—who give themselves credit. Who say they invented rock and roll. And you can do it, too. You just invented a song. You just invented music.”
― Jeff Tweedy, How to Write One Song