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When talking about Nirvana, it pretty quickly devolved into, “Oh, how was Kurt feeling? What were his drug problems like?” But when Nirvana was onstage, that was not what it was about. It was not about drugs and depression and angst and death. It was about rock and roll as a great big joke.
- Craig Montgomery

The loser ethic is an anti-ethic, and grunge fashion is an antifashion. It’s basically taking all things and putting them on their heads and pretending they’re cool, like the emperor’s wearing no clothes. In this case, we’re saying that the emperor is wearing a flannel shirt.
- Kurt Danielson

I’m not a rock star, I don’t like rock stars, and I don’t want to be around them. That word rock star is really derogatory to me. There seems to be a malicious factor in calling someone that. It’s a put-down.
- Ben Shepherd

The next time I saw those guys, probably a few months later at the Moore Theatre, Eddie was climbing of the P.A. speakers up the side of the wall and jumping headlong into the audience off the balcony. He had acquired his wings. The next show I saw him at, I waded through the people and found him and said, “Hey, Eddie, I hear you can fly!” He just got this big sunshine grin.
- Nancy Wilson

Grunge was an adjective; it was never meant to be a noun. If I was using it, it was never meant to coin a movement, it was just to describe raw rock and roll. Then that term got applied to major-label bands putting out slick-sounding records. It’s an ill fit.
- Mark Arm

We were all starstruck by Kurt even before he was famous because you could tell that he was so gifted. Plus, you kind of just wanted to take him home and take care of him, he just looked so sad and lost at the same time.
- Kelly Canary

Soundgarden had this intensity—the best bands to me just are…in seeing them I thought, the die is cast. This is a band that’s gonna take over the world. Because even at that show, where there were maybe 40 people, you could tell there was a chemistry and a sense of inevitability.
- Jonathan Poneman

People made records entirely to please themselves because there was nobody else to please, there was no one paying attention to Seattle. It was like a little, isolated germ culture.
- Jack Endino

A little further and Granada, the Vega and the Alhambra, were shut from my view and thus ended one of the pleasantest dreams of a life which the reader perhaps may think has been but too much made up of dreams.

How was I to encounter its toils and turmoils, after such a life of repose and reverie? How was I to endure its commonplace, after the poetry of the Alhambra?

The peculiar charm of this old dreamy palace is its power of calling up vague reveries and picturings of the past, and thus clothing naked realities with the illusions of the memory and the imagination.

From earliest boyhood when on the banks of the Hudson I first pored over the pages of an old Spanish story about the wars of Granada, that city has ever been a subject of my waking dreams, and often have I trod in fancy the romantic halls of the Alhambra.

To the traveller imbued with a feeling for the historical and poetical, the Alhambra of Granada is as much an object of veneration as is the Kaaba or sacred house of Mecca to all true Moslem pilgrims. How many legends and traditions, true and fabulous, how many songs and romances, Spanish and Arabian, of love and war and chivalry are associated with this romantic pile!

Much as it spoke to a limited audience, la movida was part of the reinvention of Madrid as a dynamic and expansive capital, one the thousands of children of migrants from other parts of Spain could proudly call their home. Madrid was no longer the remedy to their parents’ lives, but the starting point for their own.

“From the very first moment, Madrid was the city I had been looking for.”
- Julio Llamazares

Fighting against traitors within and invaders without, as Antonio Machado put it; Madrid as heroic city of resistance was not a myth but a tradition, dating back to the times of Napoleon.

During the opening months of the war, its defiant role—Madrid as the international front line against fascism—had been an inspiration to thousands around the world: a capital city destined to fall had refused to do so and, as support for the city gathered and its resistance hardened, the effects of its stubborn, courageous first months under siege ripped out across the world.

From the reign of Carlos III to the death of Franco are two centuries of enormous upheaval and conflict, of change and suffering, and of the survival and reinvention of a great city. These are remarkable years, at the end of which Madrid emerged, with a shout and a scream, and came roaring back into the world.

Image and reality battled together in baroque Madrid, a constant interplay of truth and falsehood: the world as theatre, in which nothing was quite as it seems, and theatre as a representation of the world.

“I told myself I was going to Madrid where nobody knew me…and I would get on through my own merits…in Madrid you can find all types, half-wits and sharp minds, the very rich and the very poor. The city hides criminals and a good man’s qualities are not appreciated…We live by our wits.”
- Francisco de Quevedo, The Swindler

“It was right that so great a Monarchy should have a city which could function as its heart—a vital centre in the midst of the body, which ministered equally to every State in time of peace and war.”
- Luis Cabrera de Córdoba

“Madrid is a strange place…I do not believe anyone much likes it when he first goes there. It has none of the look that you expect of Spain…when you get to know it, it is the most Spanish of all cities, the best to live in, the finest people, month in and month out the finest climate.”
- Ernest Hemingway

“In the process of walking away one by one…millions of African-American southerners have altered the course of their own, and all of America’s, history.”
- Lawrence R. Rodgers

Perhaps the most significant measure of the Great Migration was the act of leaving itself, regardless of the individual outcome. Despite the personal disappointments and triumphs of any individual migrant, the Migration, in some ways, was its own point. The achievement was in making the decision to be free and acting on that decision, wherever that journey led them.

She put the disappointments in a lockbox in the back of her mind and lived in the moment, which is all anybody has for sure. She had learned long ago, when things were so much harder in the Old Country she left behind, that, after all she had been through, every day to her was a blessing and every breath she took a gift.

As hard as the going has been up in Harlem, he has been free to live out his life as he chooses, been free to live, period, something that he had not been assured of in Florida in the 1940s. He has made his mistakes, plenty of them, but he alone has made them and has lived with the consequences of exercising his own free will, which could be said to be the very definition of freedom.

The parents had come from the Old Country, had been happy to have made it it alive and make a few dollars an hour. What did they know of the frustration of the young people who had grown up in the mirage of equality but a whole different reality, in a densely packed world of drugs and gangs and disorder, with promises that seemed to have turned to dust?

Blacks in the North could already vote and sit at a lunch counter or anywhere they wanted on an elevated train. Yet they were hemmed in and isolated into…overcrowded sections of the city…restricted in the jobs they could hold and the mortgages they could get, their children attending segregated and inferior schools, not by edict as in the South but by circumstance in the North.

There were no colored or white signs in New York. That was the unnerving and tricky part of making your way through a place that looked free. You never knew when perfect strangers would remind you that, as far as they were concerned, you weren’t equal and might never be.

She decided to keep the things that made her feel like home deep within herself, where nobody could judge her, and inside the walls of their kitchenette apartment where she made turnip greens and peach cobbler and sweet potato pie flecked with nutmeg and sang spirituals like in Mississippi as often as she liked.