Quotes from Rob Sheffield

It's not human to let go of love, even when it's dead.

The Rubber Soul woman stays up late drinking wine on her rug after midnight, until it's time for bed. She speaks languages he can't translate. She's not impressed by the Beatle charm—when you say she's looking good, she acts as if it's understood. She's cool. She makes the Rubber Soul man feel like a real nowhere boy.

Being a husband is scary....We have everything to lose. We have made promises. We have given hostages to fortune and challenged fate to a dance-off. We have chosen a future full of loss....when you marry somebody, you are guaranteeing that you will have real problems, a future full of them, the kind that involve death and disease and grief. As husbands, we have *planned* on major anguish. We can't afford to use up all our patience at once, or over things that aren't all that important.

It started off as a playful fantasy we talked about. Then the fantasy became a plan, the way fantasies sometimes do, and the plan became a future. It didn't hit us as the climax of anything, just the celebration of something that had already happened to us. I guess we hoped the celebration would help us understand what had happened.

I try to stay in touch with my friends who are far away, and I do a bad job of that, but I carry them with me.

IF ALL MUSIC DID WAS bring the past alive, that would be fine. You can hide away in music and let it recapture memories of things that used to be. But music is greedy and it wants more of your heart than that. It demands the future, your future. Music wants the rest of your life. So you can't rest easy. At any moment, a song can come out of nowhere to shake you up, jump-start your emotions, ruin your life.

You lose a certain kind of innocence when you experience this type of kindness. You lose your right to be a jaded cynic. You can no longer go back through the looking glass and pretend not to know what you know about kindness. It's a defeat, in a way.

My ancestors spent centuries in the hills of County Kerry, waist-deep in sheep shit, getting shot at by English soldiers, and my grandparents crossed the ocean in coffin ships to come to America, just so I could get possum rabies?

It was a smashing time, and then it ended, because that's what times do.

When you want to start living, what do you do? How do you start? Where do you go?

I believe that when you're making a mix, you're making history. You ransack the vaults, you haul off all the junk you can carry, and you rewire all your ill-gotten loot into something new. You go through an artist's entire career, zero in on that one moment that makes you want to jump and dance and smoke bats and bite the heads off drugs. And then you play that one moment over and over.

A whole generation of southern girls, raised on the promise of Michael Stipe.

God bless Mother Nature, she's a single woman, too.

Everything was changing, that was obvious. The world was so full of music, it seemed we could never run out. 'Twas bliss in that dawn to be alive, but to be young and overworked and underexposed and stuck in a nowhere town was very heaven. It was our time, the first one we had to ourselves. It was a smashing time, and then it ended, because that's what times do.

As the old saw goes, the Irish songs are full of happy wars and unhappy lovers.

I often took the bus to her apartment, where we drank bourbon and ginger ale, listened to the music we wanted to impress each other with, which eventually turned into listening to the music we actually liked.

There are two schools of thought about Ringo: (1) he was a brilliant drummer who made the Beatles possible, or (2) he was a clod who got lucky, the biggest fool who ever hit the big time.

Irish people marry late, as a rule. We have that potato-famine DNA from the old country, that mentality where you don't give birth to anything until you have the potatoes all stored up to feed it. My ancestors were all shepherds who got married in their thirties and then stayed together for life, who had long and happy marriages, no doubt because they were already deaf. My grandparents courted for nine years before they married in 1933.

Prince, "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" (2004)

I was just one of those graves that pretty girls make.

When George was a kid he used to follow me and my first girlfriend, Cynthia—who became my wife—around. We'd come out of art school, and he'd be hovering around like those kids at the gate of the Dakota now.

it was just another temporary technological mutation designed to do the same thing music always does, which is allow emotionally warped people to communicate

And being a husband made me helpless, because I had somebody to protect (somebody a little high-strung, who had a tough time emotionally with things like the lights going out indefinitely).

Whatever doesn't kill you makes you incredibly annoying.