Sonic Youth Quotes

There's only so many small shows you can do. A lot of the smaller things are more side project things. Not everything is appropriate for Sonic Youth to do. ~ Kim Gordon

I've been into Sonic Youth since junior high school. I think I kind of have ADD, so it's good music for ADD because it just throws you in different directions all the time. I really like Kim Gordon's voice and Thurston Moore's voice, and I like the guitars going off on tangents. ~ Norman Reedus

Hardcore groups were singing songs about Ronald Reagan. I wasn't interested in this and preferred to sing about the darkness shimmering beneath the shiny quilt of American pop culture. I suppose you could say that Sonic Youth was always trying to defy people's expectations. ~ Kim Gordon

Lyric writing is an interesting process in Sonic Youth. There's three people writing now, and we've all had a lot of interest and involvement with expression through words. ~ Thurston Moore

I'm a little left of center, for sure, with Angels & Airwaves. But even when I get really weird, it's not that weird. It's not like some obscure Sonic Youth record or something. We don't take it quite that far. But what we do like are crescendos, and we do like when a song catches you off guard and it gives you the chills up and down your arms. ~ Tom DeLonge

The first one hundred pages were fueled by early Misfits ("Where Eagles Dare [fast version]," "Horror Business," "Hybrid Moments") and Blanck Mass ("Dead Format"). David Bowie is in every book, and I always put on Purple Rain and Daydream Nation when I write the final pages; so thanks to him and Prince and Sonic Youth. ~ Colson Whitehead

I've been trying to challenge myself to be more explicit. I've always liked punk rock and Sonic Youth. I make that music privately, but I've never released it. ~ Sufjan Stevens

A fantastic Riot Boy, Trash the Senses..
-Thurston Moore ~ David Rat

Pixies and Sonic Youth were so important to the eighties. ~ David Bowie

Pearl Jam is a band I have a lot of respect for. Nirvana and Sonic Youth I feel the same way about. Mumford & Sons, My Morning Jacket, Wilco, Givers, and Foo Fighters are just some of my favorites. I respect bands that give me something of themselves that I can feel. ("Posing" bands turn me off generally speaking.) It all has to do with a feeling I have about them. That is what music is to me, a feeling. It's similar with people too. ~ Neil Young

I can appreciate that," says Henry. He's adding to the list. I look over his shoulder. Sex Pistols, the Clash, Gang of Four, Buzzcocks, Dead Kennedys, X, the Mekons, the Raincoats, the Dead Boys, New Order, the Smiths, Lora Logic, the Au Pairs, Big Black, Pil, the Pixies, the Breeders, Sonic Youth ...
Henry, they're not going to be able to get any of that up here." He nods, and jots the phone number and address for Vintage Vinyl at the bottom of the sheet. "You do have a record player, right?"
My parents have one," Bobby says. Henry winces.
What do you really like?" I ask Jodie. I feel as though she's fallen out of the conversation during the male bonding ritual Henry and Bobby are conducting.
Prince," she admits. Henry and I let out a big Whoo! And I start singing "1999" as loud as I can, and Henry jumps up and we're doing a bump and grind across the kitchen. Laura hears us and runs off to put the actual record on and just like that, it's a dance party. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

In England, people had been loudly proclaiming the death of the guitar and the birth of the synthesizer, but Sonic Youth and other American guitar bands started to create a buzz. ~ Kim Gordon

I can't think about whether I'll disappoint Sonic Youth fans. It's not like I want people to be disappointed, but I just can't control that. ~ Kim Gordon

Sonic Youth, for better or worse, is/was a machine that carried me along through pregnancy, motherhood, and creative opportunities I never would have achieved on my own. I'm grateful and surprised that we were listened to, loved, ignored, and overrated. ~ Kim Gordon

I remember how the book talked about the pressure to please and be perfect that every woman falls into and then projects onto her daughter. Nothing is ever good enough. No woman can ever outrun what she has to do. No one can be all things - a mother, a good partner, a lover, as well as a competitor in the workplace. ~ Kim Gordon

At 18, I moved to L.A. with my heavy metal band Avant Garde, which was very much influenced by Metallica. At 19, I got a job at Tower Records, and everything started to change very quickly. I started listening to the Velvet Underground, Pixies, early Nirvana, Sonic Youth, and also earlier music like the Beatles. ~ Rivers Cuomo

A very tall bearded guy was standing in a doorway, smoking a cigarette. "Hey", he said.
"Hi," I said. "Excuse me, do you rehearse here?"
"Yeah," he said, extending his hand and saying, almost formally, "Gibby Haynes. I'm in the Butthole Surfers."
I shook his hand. "Moby," I said. "I just moved upstairs."
"Are you an artist?"
"No, a musician."
"Oh, cool. Welcome to the building."
"Do you know who else has spaces here?" I asked.
"Well, there's us and Iggy and Sonic Youth and Helmet and Sean Lennon and the Beastie Boys and some other people," he said as someone behind him started making a wall of feedback. ~ Moby

Each member does whatever they want with the song and it totally changes it from whatever idea I hear around it. It turns it into a Sonic Youth song and completely away from it being a solo song. ~ Thurston Moore

What defines you isn't how many times you crash but the number of times you get back. ~ Sarah Dessen

He hoped it would snow recklessly and bring to the island the impossible winter purity, so rare and precious, he remembered fondly from his youth. ~ David Guterson

A tory youth is a youth speculating on his future. ~ Christina Stead

There may come a day
Which crowns Desire with gift, and Art with truth,
And Love with bliss, and Life with wiser youth! ~ Bayard Taylor

Those who would live beyond their nature-given span lose their framework, and with it lose a proper sense of relationship to those who are younger, gaining only the resentment of youth for encroaching on its careers and resources. The fact that there is a limited right time to do the rewarding things in our lives is what creates the urgency to do them. Otherwise, we might stagnate in procrastination. The very fact that at our backs, as the poet cautions his coy mistress, we "always hear / Time's winged chariot hurrying near" enhances the world and makes the time priceless. ~ Sherwin B. Nuland

Don't laugh at a youth for his affectations; he is only trying on one face after another to find his own. ~ Logan Pearsall Smith

Only a drummer-boy in a ballad or a story could have been so in the thick of the fight. She was taken into the confidence of passions on which she fixed just the stare she might have had for images bounding across the wall in the slide of a magic-lantern. Her little world was phantasmagoric - strange shadows dancing on a sheet. It was as if the whole performance had been given for her - a mite of a half-scared infant in a great dim theatre. She was in short introduced to life with a liberality in which the selfishness of others found its account, and there was nothing to avert the sacrifice but the modesty of her youth. ~ Henry James

Youth looks good in anything; unpleasant details lose themselves against the unabating vigour of youth ... ~ Franz Kafka

I've been sleeping through my life Now I'm waking up And I want to stand in the sunshine I have never been ecstatic Had a flower but it never bloomed In the darkness of my wasted youth It was hiding in the shadows Learning to become invisible Uncover me ~ Juliana Hatfield

The Squire's life was quite as idle as his sons', but it was a fiction kept up by himself and his contemporaries in Raveloe that youth was exclusively the period of folly, and that their aged wisdom was constantly in a state of endurance mitigated by sarcasm. ~ George Eliot

In thy youth wast as true a lover, As ever sighed upon a midnight pillow ~ William Shakespeare

To be clear, I'm not, like, a drag queen. I'm not trans. I just like how I look with my eyes outlined in dark colors, or sometimes some color on my eyelids or lips. Call me femme if you want, or a queen, but whatever it is, it's just me. And after sitting in a room with a dozen other kids and knowing thousands of other kids are also sitting in rooms, taking the same test, making us all anonymous little filled-in dots on answer sheets, I desperately want to feel like me again. I deserve to. So I buy me, or at least the things that make me feel like me. Capitalism must be so proud of what it's made me into. ~ Lev AC Rosen

As the young leaders of tomorrow, you have the passion and energy and commitment to make a difference. What I'd like to really urge you do is to have a global vision. Go beyond your country; go beyond your national boundaries ~ Ban Ki-moon

It is harder to be philosophical when you are young. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

Cynicism is a boring and dull old man's disease people have no business getting when they're young. ~ Erika Lopez

Old people always exaggerate the danger and lawlessness of their youth, thought Cam, because their adult lives have become so boring. ~ Wendy Wunder

Fitzgerald never got rid of anything; the ghosts of his adolescence, the failures of his youth, the doubts of his maturity plagued him to the end. He was supremely a part of the world he described, so much a part that he made himself its king and then, when he saw it begin to crumble, he crumbled with it and led it to death. ~ John Aldridge

Up rose the ghosts of parties, of themselves when they were younger, too dumb to understand they were ecstatic. ~ Lauren Groff

Age and youth look upon life from the opposite ends of the telescope; it is exceedingly long,
it is exceedingly short. ~ Henry Ward Beecher

You are surprised that the world is losing its grip, that the world is grown old? Think of a man: he is born, he grows up, he becomes old. Old age has its many complaints: coughing, shaking, failing eyesight, anxious, terribly tired. A man grows old; he is full of complaints. The world is old; it is full of pressing tribulations. . . . Do not hold onto the old man, the world; do not refuse to regain your youth in Christ, who says to you, 'The world is passing away, the world is losing its grip, the world is short of breath. Do not fear. Thy youth shall be renewed as an eagle ~ Augustine Of Hippo

I was reading a poem by my idol, Wallace Stevens, in which he said, 'The self is a cloister of remembered sounds.' My first response was, Yesss! How did he know that? It's like he's reading my mind. But my second response was, I need some new sounds to remember. I've been stuck in my little isolation chamber for so long I'm spinning through the same sounds I've been hearing in my head all my life. If I go on this way, I'll get old too fast, without remembering any more sounds than I already know now. The only one who remembers any of my sounds is me. How do you turn down the volume on your personal-drama earphones and learn how to listen to other people? How do you jump off one moving train, marked Yourself, and jump onto a train moving in the opposite direction, marked Everybody Else? I loved a Modern Lovers song called, 'Don't Let Our Youth Go to Waste,' and I didn't want to waste mine. ~ Rob Sheffield

When I had the youth I had no money, now I have the money I have no time, and when I get the time, if I ever do, I shall have no health to enjoy life. ~ Louisa May Alcott

Youth, balancing itself upon hope, is forever in extremes: its expectations are continually aroused only to be baffled, and disappointment, like a summer shower, is violent in proportion to its brevity. ~ Letitia Elizabeth Landon

I would say there's always a movement of music and fashion in youth culture - every decade inspires the new one. ~ Maripol

It is the privilege of youth to believe and hope, but old men see death more clearly. ~ Alexandre Dumas

My faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened. ~ Mark Twain

I had writers block for months afterwards because I was just so taken aback by all of the sounds I was hearing. It's almost like hearing the most beautiful music you've ever heard, so you're like, "What's the point of me making anything?" It was this living sonic organism so the idea of recording something just seemed like taking this living thing and mummifying it. ~ Taraka Larson

Dancing is the real plastic surgery," Uma loved to say. "It's what keeps you young. ~ Sonali Dev

Marcelina loved that miniscule, precise moment when the needle entered her face. It was silver; it was pure. It was the violence that healed, the violation that brought perfection. There was no pain, never any pain, only a sense of the most delicate of penetrations, like a mosquito exquisitely sipping blood, a precision piece of human technology slipping between the gross tissues and cells of her flesh. She could see the needle out of the corner of her eye; in the foreshortened reality of the ultra-close-up it was like the stem of a steel flower. The latex-gloved hand that held the syringe was as vast as the creating hand of God: Marcelina had watched it swim across her field of vision, seeking its spot, so close, so thrillingly, dangerously close to her naked eyeball. And then the gentle stab. Always she closed her eyes as the fingers applied pressure to the plunger. She wanted to feel the poison entering her flesh, imagine it whipping the bloated, slack, lazy cells into panic, the washes of immune response chemicals as they realized they were under toxic attack; the blessed inflammation, the swelling of the wrinkled, lined skin into smoothness, tightness, beauty, youth.

Marcelina Hoffman was well on her way to becoming a Botox junkie.

Such a simple treat; the beauty salon was on the same block as Canal Quatro. Marcelina had pioneered the lunch-hour face lift to such an extent that Lisandra had appropriated it as the premise for an entire series. Whore. ~ Ian McDonald

Mr. Alsworthy!" exclaimed Letty's mother. "How can you laugh at such a matter! Although, I must say, I would have thought if a pirate were to kidnap anyone, he would kidnap Mary. She looks quite as I did in my youth, and I'm sure a pirate would have wanted to kidnap me."
"Don't taunt me with lost opportunities, my dear. ~ Lauren Willig

I want to learn something from my atheistic brothers and sisters, even though I'm a Christian. I want to learn something from my right-wing brothers and sisters, even though I'm a progressive. I want to learn something from the elderly, even though I'm middle-aged or tilting toward the elderly. I want to learn especially something from the youth. That's why I spend a lot of time in hip-hop studios. ~ Cornel West

I want to use film to tell stories that need to be told to spark discussions that will lead to change. I really want to see a change in the mindset of youth, how they see themselves and how they value life. Young audiences will be able to see themselves in this film and older audiences will gain an understanding of what their kids are dealing with on a daily basis. Kids discuss what they see on TV, social media, film so I want to create content that they will discuss and will change the way they think. ~ Jamie Hector

Faust has spent his youth and manhood,
not as others do, in the sunny crowded paths of profit,
or among the rosy bowers of pleasure, but darkly and alone in the search of Truth; is it fit that Truth
should now hide herself, and his sleepless pilgrimage
towards Knowledge and Vision end in the pale
shadow of Doubt? To his dream of a glorious higher
happiness, all earthly happiness has been sacrificed;
friendship, love, the social rewards of ambition were
cheerfully cast aside, for his eye and his heart were
bent on a region of clear and supreme good ; and now,
in its stead, he finds isolation, silence, and despair.
What solace remains ? Virtue once promised to be
her own reward ; but because she does not pay him in
the current coin of worldly enjoyment, he reckons her
too a delusion; and, like Brutus, reproaches as a
shadow what he once worshipped as a substance.
Whither shall he now tend 1 For his loadstars have
gone out one by one ; and as the darkness fell, the
strong steady wind has changed into a fierce and
aimless tornado. Faust calls himself a monster,
" without object, yet without rest. ~ Thomas Carlyle

Have you come over time to think that you know more now than you did when you were young, know less now than when young, know now there is so much more to know than you knew there was to know when young that it is moot whether you think you knew more then than now or less, or do you now know that you never knew anything at all and never will and only the bluster of youth persuaded you that you did or would? ~ Padgett Powell

My God, is this a date?" Jeff had asked when I asked if I could bring her along.
"I don't know," I said. "She might still be happily lesbian. ~ Jefferson Bass

They had lied. Time was not a friend that healed all wounds ;it was the enemy that ravaged and murdered youth. ~ Sidney Sheldon

Genius goes around the world in its youth incessantly apologizing for having large feet. What wonder that later in life it should be inclined to raise those feet too swiftly to fools and bores. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

By the margin of fair Zurich's waters Dwelt a youth, whose fond heart, night and day, For the fairest of fair Zurich's daughters In a dream of love melted away. ~ Charles Dance

Youth is thy gift, - the youth that baffles Time. ~ Louise Chandler Moulton

That age is best which is the first
When youth and blood are warmer. ~ Robert Herrick

I look back upon my youth and realize how so many people gave me help, understanding, courage – very important things to me – and they never knew it. They entered into my life and became powers within me. All of us live spiritually by what others have given us, often unwittingly, in the significant hours of our life. At the time these significant hours may not even be perceived. We may not recognize them until years later when we look back, as one remembers some long-ago music or a boyhood landscape. We all owe to others much of the gentleness and wisdom that we have made our own; and we may well ask ourselves what will others owe to us. ~ Albert Schweitzer

I was reading some complex books in my own youth-and no, I didnt always understand every word, let alone every concept-but I got the main thrust, which was like a lifeline in a fluctuating world. ~ Tanith Lee

It must be an industrious youth that provides against age; and he that fools away the one must either beg or starve in the other. ~ Heath L'Estrange

At nineteen, one lives in the utter idolatry, therefore the extreme superstition, of sex. Monstrously exaggerated tales about sexual feats, which we listen to greedily, determine our expectations. The disappointments are correspondingly great. ~ Gregor Von Rezzori

There were three or four of us, counting me. My working place was established in a corner of the warehouse, where Mr. Quinion could see me, when he chose to stand up on the bottom rail of his stool in the counting-house, and look at me through a window above the desk. Hither, on the first morning of my so auspiciously beginning life on my own account, the oldest of the regular boys was summoned to show me my business. His name was Mick Walker, and he wore a ragged apron and a paper cap. He informed me that his father was a bargeman, and walked, in a black velvet head-dress, in the Lord Mayor's Show. He also informed me that our principal associate would be another boy whom he introduced by the - to me - extraordinary name of Mealy Potatoes. I discovered, however, that this youth had not been christened by that name, but that it had been bestowed upon him in the warehouse, on account of his complexion, which was pale or mealy. Mealy's father was a waterman, who had the additional distinction of being a fireman, and was engaged as such at one of the large theatres; where some young relation of Mealy's - I think his little sister - did Imps in the Pantomimes. ~ Charles Dickens

I think sports are extremely beneficial for our youth. They parallel life in so many ways. ~ Kerri Strug

The democratic youth lives along day by day, gratifying the desire that occurs to him, at one time drinking and listening to the flute, at another downing water and reducing, now practicing gymnastic, and again idling and neglecting everything; and sometimes spending his time as though he were occupied in philosophy. ~ Plato

Don't you think that the Beatles gave every sodden thing they've got to be the Beatles? That took a whole section of our youth - that whole period - when everybody else was just goofin' off we were workin' 24 hours a day! ~ John Lennon