When I write lyrics, it's only ever because something frustrates me. And I love serious lyrics in general... but I'm also really grateful for people who just se

When I write lyrics, it's only ever because something frustrates me. And I love serious lyrics in general... but I'm also really grateful for people who just see the good in the world and sing about it, like Bob Ross, but for music. That's just not me though. > If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair. -- C. S. Lewis > Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book does not shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. [..] A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe. -- Franz Kafka > You don't write those books because you hope those things will happen. You write those books because you think they might happen.. but you'd rather they didn't. -- Margaret Atwood Such are the thoughts with which I console myself, but still, this is the kind of person I make my stuff, which is solely "against", for: > To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places — and there are so many — where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory. -- Howard Zinn