In Bruce Springsteen songs, you can either say and rot or you can escape and burn. That's OK; he's a songwriter, after all, and he needs simple choices like that in his songs. But nobody ever writes about how it is possible to escape and rot--how escapes can go off at half-cock, how you can leave the suburbs for the city but end up living a limp surban life anyway. That's what happened to me; that's what happens to most people.

-Nick Hornby; High Fidelity

Me, I'm unmarried--at the moment as unmarried as it's possible to be--and I'm the owner of a failing record shop. It seems to me that if you place music (and books, probably, and films, and plays, and anything that makes you feel) at the center of your being, then you can't afford to sort out your love life, start to think of it as the finished product. You've got to pick at it and unravel it until it all comes apart and you're compelled to start all over again. Maybe we all live life at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as a consequence we can never feel merely content; we have to be unhappy, or ecstatically, head-over-heels happy, and those states are difficult to achieve within a stable, solid relationship.

-Nick Hornby; High Fidelity

I dreamt I saw you, baby, it was just the other night. Most of you was naked and some of you was light.

-Lenoard Cohen; "Waiting for the Miracle"

He'd started calling me Mr. Responsibility in the fall of '61, when we were engaged in that senior-year agony commonly called college-entrance applications and interviews; because I'd applied to only the state university, Owen said I'd taken zero responsibility for my own self-improvement.

-John Irving; A Prayer for Owen Meany

If you have to go, go quickly
Cause my ego's on the fence
It's hard to know you won't miss me

-Stephen Kellogg; "If You Have to Go "

"Why does she drink so much?" I asked Owen.
"HESTER's AHEAD OF HER TIME," he said.
"What's that mean?" I asked him. "Do we have a generation of drunks to look forward to?"
"WE HAVE A GENERATION OF PEOPLE WHO ARE ANGRY TO LOOK FORWARD TO," Owen said. "AND MAYBE TWO GENERATIONS OF PEOPLE WHO DON'T GIVE A SHIT," he added.

-John Irving; A Prayer for Owen Meany

What we witnessed with the death of Kennedy was the triumph of television; what we saw with his assassination, and with his funeral, was the beginning of television's dominace of our culture--for television is at its most solemnly self-serving and at its mesmerizing best when it is depicting the untimely deaths of the chosen and the golden. It is a witness to the butchery of heroes in their prime--and of all holy-seeming innocents--that television achieves its deplorable greatness. The blood on Mrs. Kennedy's clothes and her wrecked face under her veil; the fatherless children; LBJ taking the oath of office; and brother Bobby--looking so very much the next in line.

-John Iriving; A Prayer for Owen Meany

I preferred to think that the rooms we searched were more haphazard and less revealing than Own imagined--after all, they were supposed to be the monastic cells of transient scholars; they were something between a nest and a hotel room, they were not natural abodes, and what we found there was a random disorder and a depressing sameness. Even the pictures of the sports heroes and the movie stars were the same, from room to room; and from boy to boy, there was often a similar scrap of something missed from the life at home: a picture of a car, with the boy proudly at the wheel (Gravesend boarders were not allowed to drive, or even ride in, cars); a picture of a perfectly plain backyard, or even a snapshot of such a deeply private moment--an unrecognizable figure shambling away from the camera, back turned to our view--that the substance of the picture was locked in a personal memory. The effect of these cells, with the terrible sameness of each boy's homesickness, and the chaos of travel, was what Owen had meant when he'd told my mother that dormitories were EVIL.

-John Irving; A Prayer for Owen Meany

Mrs. Hoyt was the first person I remember who said that to criticize a specific American president was not anti-American; that to criticize a specific American policy was not antipatriotic; and that to disapprove of our involvement in a particular war against the communists was not the same as taking the communists' side. But these distinctions were lose on most of the citizens of Gravesend; they are lost on many of my former fellow Americans today.

-John Irving; A Prayer for Owen Meany

I believe that president Reagan can say these things only because he knows that the American people will never hold him accountable for what he says; it is history that holds you accountable, and I've alreadyexpressed my opinion that Americans are not big on history.

-John Irving; A Prayer for Owen Meany

Live without the conflict of knowing you're fucking it up.

-Molly Shanahan

It's raining out, smells like pure joy.

-Laura Tennal

At one time I had given much thought to why men were so very rarely capable of living for an ideal. Now I saw that many, no, all men were capable of dying for one.

-Hermann Hesse; Demian

At times I was dissatisfied with myself and tortured with desire: I believed I could no longer bear to have her near me without taking her in my arms. She sensed this, too, at once. Once when I had stayed away for several days and returned bewildered she took me aside and said: "You must not give way to desires which you don't believe in. I know what you desire. You should, however, either be capable of renouncing these desires or feel wholly justified in having them. Once you are able to make your request in such a way that you will be quite certain of its fulfillment, then fulfillment will come. But at present you alternate between desire and renunciation and are afraid all the time. All that must be overcome."

-Hermann Hesse; Demian

The things we do here, the smallest things, really do matter, not because of any eternal rewards or punishments that might be awaiting us, but rather becaues they're all we've got. While we're here, the shattered days as wall as the glorious ones add up. While we're here, they mean something--like this moment, with my gal on the beach at Coney.

-Jim Knipfel; Runing it for Everybody

I didn't stop to think that we were at a fancy party in a fancy club full of fancy people, and that perhaps killing somebody wasn't appropriate.

-Jim Knipfel; Runing it for Everybody

I remembered civil servants in my home town, worthy old gentlemen who clung to the memories of their drunken university days as to keepsakes from paradise and fashioned a cult of their "vanished" student years as poets or other romantics fashion their childhood. It was the same everywhere. Everywhere they looked for "freedom" and "luck" in the past, out of sheer dread of their present responsibilities and future course. They drank and caroused for a few years and then they slunk away to become serious-minded gentlemen in the service of the state. Yes, our society was rotten, and these student stupidities were not too stupid, not so bad as a hundred other things.

-Hermann Hesse; Demian

He spoke about the spirit of Europe and the signs of the times. Everywhere, he said, we could observe the reign of the heard instinct, nowhere freedom and love. All this false communion--from the fraternities to the choral societies and the nations themselves--was an inevitable development, was a community born of fear and dread, out of embarrassment, but inwardly rotten, outworn, close to collapsing.

-Hermann Hesse; Demian

From then on I occasionally sat outside the church of paced up and down before it during the evening hours. Once I even found the door open and sat for half an hour in a pew, shivering against the cold, yet happy as long as the organist played in the loft. I not only distinguished his personality in the music he played--every piece her performed also had affinity with the next, a secret connection. Everything he played was full of faith, surrender, and devotion. Yet not the devout after the fashion of churchgoers and pastors, devout the way pilgrims and mendicants were in the Middle Ages, devout with that unconditional surrender to a universal feeling that transcends all confessions. He also played music composed prior to Bach, and the old Italians. And all this music said the same thing, all of it expressed what was in the musician's soul: longing, a most intimate atonement with the world and a violent wrenching loose, a burning hearkening to one's own dark soul, an intoxicating surrender and deep curiosity about the miraculous.

-Hermann Hesse; Demian

No, it's not weird to want to play Magic now. You did miss out on something. You missed out on cards and competition, late nights and comradery and deck-shaking marathon trading sessions. You missed out on the absolute best of all the kinds of fun we forgot how to have after we learned how to drink. You missed out on Mountain Dew.

-Todd Presson

Those who are too lazy and comfortable to think for themselves and be their own judges obey the laws. Others sense their own laws within them; things are forbidden to them that every honorable man will do any day in the year and other things are allowed to them that are generally despised. Each person must stand on his own feet.

-Hermann Hesse; Demian

At the end of class Demian said to me thoughtfully: "There's something I don't like about this story, Sinclair. Why don't you read it once more and give it the acid test? There's something about it that doesn't taste right. I mean the business with the two thieves. The three crosses standing next to each other on the hill are most impressive, to be sure. But now comes this sentimental little treatise about the good thief. At first he was a thorough scoundrel, had committed all those awful things and God knows what else, and now he dissolves in tears and celebrates such a tearful feast of self-improvement and remorse! What's the sense of repenting if you're two steps from the grave? I ask you. Once again it's nothing but a priest's fairy tale, saccharine and dishonest, touched up with sentimentality and given a highly edifying background. If you had to pick a friend from between the two thieves or decide which of the two you had rather trust, you most certainly wouldn't select that sniveling convert. No, the other fellow, he's a man of character. He doesn't give a hoot for 'conversion,' which to a man in his position can't be anything but a pretty speech. He follows his destiny to it's appointed end and does not turn coward and forswear the devil, who has aided and abetted him until then. He has character, and people with character tend to receive the short end of the stick in biblical stories. Perhaps he's even a descendant of Cain. Don't you agree?"

-Hermann Hesse; Demian

I realize today that nothing in the world is more distasteful to a man than to take the path that leads to himself.

-Hermann Hesse; Demian

Many people experience the dying and rebirth--which is our fate--only this once during their entire life. Their childhood becomes hollow and gradually collapses, everything they love abandons them and they suddenly feel surrounded by the loneliness and mortal cold of the universe. Very many are caught forever in this impasse, and for the rest of their lives cling painfully to an irrevocable past, the dream of the lost paradise--which is the worst and most ruthless of dreams.

-Hermann Hesse; Demian

"I know," he said in a resigned tone of voice, "it's the same old story: don't take these stories seriously! Bit I have to tell you something: this is one of the very places that reveals the poverty of this religion most distincly. The point is that this God of both Old and New Testaments is certainly an extraordinary figure but not what he purports to represent. He is all that is good, noble, fatherly, beautiful, elevated, sentimental--true! But the world consists of something else besides. And what is left over is ascribed to the devil, this entire slice of world, this entire half is supressed and hushed up. In exactly the same way they praise God as the father of all life but simply refuse to say a word about our sexual life on which it's all based, describing it whenever possible as sinful, the work of the devil. I have no objection to worshiping this God Jehovah, far from it. But Imean we ought to consider everything sacred, the entire world, not merely this artificially separated half! Thus alongside the divine service we should also have a service for the devil. I feel that would be right. Otherwise you must create for yourself a God that contains the devil too and in front of which you needn't close your eyes when the most natural things in the world takes place."

-Hermann Hesse; Demian

Until you stop putting just your talent out there and put your soul on that canvas then you're just a painter.

Curl my lips and crawl up to you.

-Wilco; Company in My Back

Being an American today is like being a toe on a bully's foot. Sure, the shot is comfortable, and you don't get stepped on very often, but you always live in fear of kicking the wrong person.

"Look, I like working with you, and I'd like to continue to work with you. But you've got to bring your brain with you. Today you haven't had your brain with you and it makes me furious. And I don't like working with people that make me furious."

-Margaret Nelson

As rock 'n' roll trips go, DeKalb isn't the most glamorous of destinations. The city's nightlife, such as it is, centers on a stretch of Highway 38. At one end of the strip is Sullivan's Tavern, with a sign trumpeting an upcoming Jagermeister party; at the other is Sergeant Pepper's, which bills itself as "The Restraunt That Rocks."

-Bob Mehr; from The Reader

Everyone here thinks you're pretty damn cool. I told them you were comin on the 18th, and they nearly threw a party that you were coming.

-Chris Wright

Your CDs have been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

A team of 50 employees inspected your CDs and polished them to make sure they were in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CDs into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved 'Bon Voyage!' to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Monday, June 7th.

I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did. Your picture is on our wall as "Customer of the Year". We're all exhausted but can't wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

Thank you once again,

Derek Sivers, president, CD Baby
he little CD store with the best new independent music
phone: 1-800-448-6369 email: cdbaby@cdbaby.com
http://www.cdbaby.com