Robert Johnson Quotes

I'm a hard workin' man, have been for many long years. ~ Robert Johnson

The terrible loop began on a Tuesday and didn't end until the day I saw a skullcracker swallow the brain of a bank-hired assassin. ~ Jeremy Robert Johnson

History has always been a series of pendulum swings, but the individual doesn't have to get caught in that. ~ Robert Johnson

He's just a guy who got caught up in a bad habit and made a few mistakes at work." "He's ~ Jeremy Robert Johnson

Zachary looked down into the swirling morass that was his beer as the man walked onto the stage and started to play a solo piece, the band respectfully allowing him to start off his set by staking his claim. Zachary would give him staking his claim. He had his guitar nestling close by his side, as always, the leather of the case gently touching his calf, sending an almost erotic charge through his body every time he moved like the less than innocent brush of a future lover's hand on a bare arm. ~ Pete Langman

My guitar heroes are Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck and people like that - so I've tried to make an album of Robert Johnson covers that, well, while not totally faithful for blues purists, is faithful for people like me that grew up with the '60s and the electric blues-rock versions of Johnson's songs. ~ Todd Rundgren

I was 22 years old when I met Robert Johnson. I was there the night he was poisoned. ~ David Edwards

The blues is a low down achin' chill, ~ Robert Johnson

With this blistering salvo of poetic gutshots Lawson has proven himself Bizarro's true bard, its mad laureate. Switching from dark whimsy to retina-blast shock to political outrage without missing a beat, The Troublesome Amputee is a powerful collection of pitch-black verse. ~ Jeremy Robert Johnson

Don't worry. These cowboys are all in line. Nice, law-abiding batch here, only want to help you reach your dreams. They're nothing like that last group who rolled through town with branding irons and rape-trusses and shotguns. These are the good guys. ~ Jeremy Robert Johnson

You must understand the immense power of self-serving delusion." I ~ Jeremy Robert Johnson

I wasn't a hoarder, but I knew my place gave off a Feral Child Hidey Hole vibe. ~ Jeremy Robert Johnson

Actually, I guess I shouldn't be so hard on myself. 2:23:11 is a very good time - a very good time for a woman that is. ~ Robert Johnson

I've taken Eco drink everyday for a year and I can tell you that it works!!!! I definitely can tell when I miss a day ... ~ Robert Johnson

The night was vibrating with new potential, the beautiful after-haze of adrenaline and bad ideas fully embraced. Ugly thoughts crept in, forcing me to write off a growing list of concerning data: My old dealer gone mad and roaming the sewers; Egbert's hand - notably short on its middle and ring fingers - reaching out to me with three tiny pill baggies; gas-masked kids dodging conscious thought like a plague; a trafficked tranny more concerned with evading cops than finding love. ~ Jeremy Robert Johnson

When Johnson started singing, he seemed like a guy who could have sprung from the head of Zeus in full armor. ~ Bob Dylan

The time will come when this luscious golden tomato, rich in nutrition, a delight to the eye, a joy to the palate whether fried, baked, broiled or even eaten raw will form the foundation of a great garden industry. ~ Robert Johnson

But I've got to think of myself as the luckiest guy. Robert Johnson only had one album's worth of work as his legacy. That's all that life allowed him. ~ David Bowie

I'm not trying to emulate or imitate. But I do believe that I embody that spirit from Robert Johnson on up. ~ CeeLo Green

At first the music almost repelled me, it was so intense, and this man made no attempt to sugarcoat what he was trying to say, or play. It was hard-core, more than anything I had ever heard. After a few listenings I realized that, on some level, I had found the master, and that following this man's example would be my life's work. ~ Eric Clapton

A man will treat a woman almost exactly the way he treats his own interior feminine. In fact, he hasn't the ability to see a woman, objectively speaking, until he has made some kind of peace with his interior woman. ~ Robert Johnson

Those original, black, spirited, defiant, rebellious musical masters. Chuck Berry was one of the first masters of Les Paul's new electric guitar; he pretty much laid down the gauntlet, and I don't think anybody's ever beat him since. Way before the British Invasion, I was tuned into the black guys that created the British Invasion. Without Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, Lightnin' Hopkins, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry and the Motown hits, there would be no Beatles. ~ Ted Nugent

For his sake I'm sorry that Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil, but for our sake and the sake of music I'm glad he did. ~ Moby

It's your opinion, friend-girl, I may be right or wrong
It's yo'y opinion friend-girl, I may be right or wrong
But when you watch your close friend, baby,
then your enemies can't do you no harm ~ Robert Johnson

I got ramblin', I got ramblin' on my mind. I got ramblin', I got ramblin' all on my mind. Hate to leave my baby, but you treats me so unkind. ~ Robert Johnson

If you can't be happy at the prospect of lunch, you are unlikely to be happy about anything ~ Robert Johnson

A sense of reverence is necessary for psychological health. If a person has no sense of reverence, no feeling that there is anyone or anything that inspires awe, it cuts the personality off completely from the nourishing springs of the unconscious. ~ Robert Johnson

Took to typing as quickly and loudly as possible and yelling, "I'm in!" when accessing basic programs. Made me feel like a hacker. ~ Jeremy Robert Johnson

The money buys the drugs, the drugs work harder and harder to trick your blackened dopamine receptors into giving a damn about living. At some point you make a choice: fight your need the rest of your goddamned long-suffering life, or fill your need until it disappears into the grave with you. ~ Jeremy Robert Johnson

All business is personal ... Make your friends before you need them. ~ Robert Johnson

The bodies of a man and his dog fused together, skin and fur melded. Nobody wanted to die alone. ~ Jeremy Robert Johnson

I had a patient once who dreamed she kept her husband in the deep freeze except for mating. Lots of men feel that way. ~ Robert Johnson

Measure yourself by your best moments, not by your worst. We are too prone to judge ourselves by our moments of despondency and depression. ~ Robert Johnson

It's not too difficult to get the skeletons out of the closet with people, but to get the gold out is a different matter. That is therapy. Psychology is the Art of finding the gold of the spirit. ~ Robert Johnson

I mistakenly believed that my life had finally reached the peak of Crazy Bullshit Mountain. Hindsight ~ Jeremy Robert Johnson

I have pains in my hearts, they have taken my appetite. ~ Robert Johnson

Whenever I see an opportunity and a chance to change something, I go at it and I lay out all the facts to everybody. And when I come to this space, I'm going to come with talent, I'm going to come with focus. And I'm going to do the job as competitively as the next guy. ~ Robert Johnson

But my social circle had dwindled. Hell, all I had was a social dot - just me on a one man continuum. ~ Jeremy Robert Johnson

I considered going off grid, but where was "off grid" anymore that didn't require me to know how to kill an elephant seal and live off its blubber? ~ Jeremy Robert Johnson

And his dick looks like a hot dog that got hit with a sledgehammer and sewn back together by a blind lady."
"Thanks, Port."
"You're welcome, D. ~ Jeremy Robert Johnson

History seems to be so clumsy. ~ Robert Johnson

Anything that has to do with money, I want to be in that business. ~ Robert Johnson

Man, Books & Booze is cool, right?. That's the most fun I've had in an interview this year. Definitely the most singing I've done. ~ Jeremy Robert Johnson

Ten glorious years at Pingfang, a sea of bodies brought to you by train. War as immunity from man's laws. Before, you'd worked in the shadows. During the ten years you worked for Division 4 there were no such hindrances. Dr. Masaki ran the inventory, cataloguing prisoners as non-descript units referred to only as "Materials Used." You preferred to call the prisoners "logs," each destined for the incinerator after they'd been of use. ~ Jeremy Robert Johnson

They'd insert a probe into the patient's head to press the nodule and the patient's immediate response would be to shout out, "FUCK IT! WHY NOT? ~ Jeremy Robert Johnson

Billion dollar bonuses turned rules into polite suggestions. ~ Jeremy Robert Johnson

Believe in yourself and have confidence that you can compete against all odds. Have a vision of what you'd like to accomplish and be able to articulate that vision. ~ Robert Johnson

The TSA holds its screener work force to the highest standards of security and professionalism, .. and will continue to focus on these principles as critical elements in the ongoing effort to provide the traveling public with world-class security and world-class customer service. ~ Robert Johnson

Exactly how long can you stand on a street corner showing two drug dealers your scar-tissue-induced radical penis curvature? The answer is twelve seconds. After that it feels weird. ~ Jeremy Robert Johnson

Don't ever knock a bottle out of my hand. ~ Robert Johnson

In terms of scale or stature, I believe that if Robert Johnson was reincarnated, he is probably BB King. Maybe it would be worth investigating the appropriate dates to see if this is even a remote possibility. ~ Eric Clapton

collected promotional mugs for all eight of the banks which collapsed beneath me. I lined them up in each new cubicle like heads on poles outside of a cannibal village. My resume was a graveyard of once powerful institutions. ~ Jeremy Robert Johnson

Hello there," he said to me. "My name is Buddy Ray. What's yours?" He had a faint lisp. I swallowed. "Robert Johnson." Buddy Ray's smile would make small children flee to their mamas. "Nice to meet you, Robert." Buddy Ray - I didn't know if that was a double first name or a first and last name - looked me over as though I were a bite-size snack. Something was off with this guy - you could just see it. He kept licking his lips. I risked a glance back at the big bouncer. Even he looked jittery in Buddy Ray's presence. As Buddy Ray approached, a pungent stench of cheap cologne failing to mask foul body odor wafted off him, the foul smell taking the lead like a Doberman he was walking. Buddy Ray stopped directly in front of me, maybe six inches away. I held my breath and stood my ground. I, too, had a foot on him. The bouncer took another step backward. Buddy ~ Harlan Coben

I got mean things on my mind. ~ Robert Johnson

All of this took about a minute, but time stretches out when you're witnessing an abomination. ~ Jeremy Robert Johnson

I mean, I had my turtle Deckard, but his lifestyle consisted of sunbathing, eating goldfish, and - somehow I just knew this - silently judging me while I masturbated. I'd taken to covering his tank with a thin blanket, but still…he knew. ~ Jeremy Robert Johnson

Somewhere, floating in a muddled abstraction beyond your existence as a generally good person, are the Externalities. Fuck 'em and God Bless 'em. ~ Jeremy Robert Johnson

For Delta blueman Robert Johnson and his contemporaries, the train was the eternal metaphor for the travelling life, and it still holds true today. There is no travel like it. Train lines carve through all facets of a nation. While buses stick to major highways and planes reduce the unfolding of lives to a bird's eye view, trains putter through the domains of the rich and the poor, the desperate and the idle, rural and urban, isolated and cluttered. Through train windows you see realities rarely visible in the landscaped tourist areas. Those frames hold the untended jungle of a nation's truth. Despite my shredded emotions, there was still no feeling like dragging all your worldly possessions onto a carriage, alone and anonymous, to set off into the unknown; where any and all varieties of adventures await, where you might meet a new best friend, where the love of your life could be hiding in a dingy cafe. The clatter of the tracks is the sound of liberation. ~ Patrick O'Neil

Once I catch a serious FUCK IT wave, I ride that thing right up to the sand. ~ Jeremy Robert Johnson

Blues fallin' down like hail And the day keeps on worryin' me There's a hell hound on my trail. ~ Robert Johnson

Well, Hindsight, have you ever heard of the term Busy Idiot? ~ Jeremy Robert Johnson

Icarus flew too close to the sun, but at least he flew. ~ Jeremy Robert Johnson

It never was about the musician or the instrument - it was about the laser notes in a hall of mirrors, the music itself. It was going to change the world for the better and it has. Maybe not as fast or as much as we wanted, but it has and it still will. Whether your name is Mozart, or Django Reinhardt, or Robert Johnson, or Jimi Hendrix, or whoever is next; who you are doesn't matter so long as you can open that conduit and let the music come through. It is the burning edge, whatever it sounds like and whoever is playing it. It is the noisy, messy, silly, invincible voice of life that comes through the LP on the turn-table, the transistor radio, or the Bose in your new Lexus that makes you want to get up out of whatever you are stuck in and dance. It is Dionysus and the Maenads all over again. No one can control it and I pity whoever tries. I am old now and only a house cat sunning herself in the window - but I was a tigress once, and I remember. I still remember. ~ G.J. Paterson

Leadership is the ability to influence people and motivate them to do what needs to be done to accomplish a goal, vision, or mission. ~ Robert Johnson

Well, you put a gun to my head."
"No. I put a suggestion in your mind and a gun in your hands. ~ Jeremy Robert Johnson

You may bury my body down by the highway side. So my old evil spirit can catch a Greyhound bus and ride. ~ Robert Johnson

My thought was I should try to stick with names that people may recognize like Robert Johnson, Son House, and Hoagy Carmichael, so if somebody cared to research, they would find a wealth of material. ~ John Mellencamp

Hello Satan, it's time to go. Me and the devil, walkin' side by side. ~ Robert Johnson

This is a jury of your peers. They watch the same TV movies. They belong to Oprah's Book Club. You can take any monster, slap a bad dad into his past, and all of a sudden he's just another lost soul, lashing out. And you were the poor lady that got in the way. They'll argue you lacked compassion. You were the one who took things too far. ~ Jeremy Robert Johnson

If she has a good, strong, reliable father image, which is hard to find these days, that will be her image of men, probably for the rest of her life. She'll look for a husband who embodies those qualities. ~ Robert Johnson

I liked blues from the time my mother used to take me to church. I started to listen to gospel music, so I liked that. But I had an aunt at that time, my mother's aunt who bought records by people like Lonnie Johnson, Robert Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and a few others. ~ B.B. King

The marvelous thing is that for thousands of years people have continued questioning and searching and ultimately concluding that reasons for certain occurrences are not given to man to know. ~ Robert Vaughn

A lot of people have already labeled me the Savior. ~ Robert Griffin III

What a waste of time it would be to insist that everyone develop each of the specialties we call upon to an equal level. We'd get bogged down in remedial training programs, trying to get the cornet players up to speed with the computer programmers, sacrificing the tends to be exceptional in so many individual situations in order to be average in all of them. ~ Robert Watson

I'm a Christian guy, and when it comes to my priorities, it's the utmost. For me, just to calm myself down, to keep my perspective when I'm playing, to not make too big a deal of it ... that's where I go to. The peace that comes with that allows me to play free golf. ~ Zach Johnson

Quod volimus credimus libenter
we always believe what we want to believe ~ Robert Harris

You trip and lance
Your finger at a crab. It strikes. You rub
It inch-meal to a bilge of shell. You dance
Child-crazy over tub and gunnel, grasping
Your pitchfork like a trident, poised to stab
The greasy eel-grass clasping and unclasping
The jellied iridescence of the crab. ~ Robert Lowell

This kind of certainty comes but once in a lifetime. ~ Robert Kincaid Bridges Of Madison County

Gladys had seen all of this, and she made it his to know. She'd lost her future to death, and lost her child to life. ~ Denis Johnson

Like I always say, it's not how many great plays you make; it's how few bad ones you make. I know fans, and even some losing coaches, are enamored with long pass completions or the great run plays, but that doesn't offset the interception or the fumble. ~ Jimmy Johnson

Holly was playing the concerned relative, the devoted sister, and if it was a ham performance Robin was experienced enough, now, to know that there were usually nuggets of truth to be sifted from even the most obvious dross. ~ Robert Galbraith

Silicon Valley builds its bridges on abundance. Abundant bits of information floating out there, writing great programs to process it, then giving people a lot of useful tools to use it. ~ Robert Kyncl

One of the easiest things in the world to do is to tell other people how to raise their children. This is especially easy if you have no children of your own. ~ Robert Stacy McCain

Whoever makes something having bought or contracted for all other held resources used in the process (transferring some of his holdings for these cooperating factors), is entitled to it. The situation is not one of something's getting made, and there being an open question of who is to get it. Things come into the world already attached to people having entitlements over them. ~ Robert Nozick

It's OK to quote from your past. But I'm more interested in quoting from my present and pointing towards the future. ~ Robert Plant

I liked working in a series, going to work every day and not having to leave town for long locations. I was producing them and building an audience. ~ Robert Wagner

No one is much pleased with a companion who does not increase, in some respect, their fondness for themselves. ~ Samuel Johnson

Who would have thought that a tap-dancing penguin would outpoint James Bond at the box office? And deserve to? Not that there's anything wrong with 'Casino Royale.' But 'Happy Feet' - written and directed by George Miller - is a complete charmer, even if, in the way of most family fare, it can't resist straying into the Inspirational. ~ Robert Gottlieb

Utopia is a meta-utopia: the environment in which Utopian experiments may be tried out; the environment in which people are free to do their own thing; the environment which must, to a great extent, be realized first if more particular Utopian visions are to be realized stably. ~ Robert Nozick

Man cannot be content in his riches even if he has the whole world, there must be a frivolous extra desire. ~ Michael Bassey Johnson

Was there ever yet anything written by mere man that was wished longer by its readers, excepting Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, and the Pilgrim's Progress? ~ Samuel Johnson

People need symbols, something greater than their own lives. ~ Robert Ferrigno

It's all right if you grow your wings on the way down. ~ Robert Bly

Do not be surprised when those who ignore the rules of grammar also ignore the law. After all, the law is just so much grammar. ~ Robert Breault

I didn't like anti-Vietnam War art. I didn't like feminist art. I thought it was heavy-handed and stupid - as art. ~ Robert Barry

There is absolutely no one, apart from yourself, who can prevent you, in the middle of the night, from sneaking down to tidy up the edges of that hunk of cheese at the back of the fridge. ~ Boris Johnson

But one of the great tragedies of life is that you cannot force people to read what they ought, as good as it might be for them.
- Roland Gardner
"Query ~ Robert Boyczuk

According to a new survey, women say they feel more comfortable undressing in front of men than they do undressing in front of other women. They say that women are too judgmental, where, of course, men are just grateful. ~ Robert De Niro

Art in Nature is rhythmic and has a horror of constraint. ~ Robert Delaunay

Summer Between Terms"

The day's so calm and muggy I sweat tears,
the summer's cloudcap and the summer's heat...
surely good writers write all possible wrong--
are we so conscience-dark and cataract-blind,
we only blame in others what they blame in us?
(The sentence writes we, when charity wants I...)
It takes such painful mellowing to use error...
I have stood too long on a chair or ladder,
branch-lightening forking through my thought and veins--
I cannot hang my heavy picture straight.
I can't see myself...in the cattery,
the tomcats doze till the litters are eatable,
then find their kittens and chew off their breakable heads.
They told us by harshness to win the stars.

Planes, trains, lorries simmer through the garden,
the reviewer sent by God to humble me
ransacking my bags of dust for silver spoons--
he and I go on typing to go on living.
There are ways to live on words in England--
reading for trainfare, my host ruined on wine,
my ear gone bad from clinging to the ropes.
I'd take a lower place, eat my toad hourly;
even big frauds wince at fraudulence,
and squirm from small incisions in the self--
they live on timetable with no time to tell.
I'm sorry, I run with the hares now, not the hounds.
I waste hours writing in and writing out a line,
as if listening to conscience were telling the truth ~ Robert Lowell