Quotes About Experience

People probably heard a greater quantity of music, and a greater variety, on these devices than they would ever hear in person in their lifetimes.

One forgets that part of one's performance is one's history—or sometimes the lack of it. You're playing against what an audience knows, what they expect. This seems to be true of all performers; there's baggage that gets carried into the venue that we can't see.

With the advent of recorded music in 1878, the nature of the places in which music was heard changed.

You can't touch music—it exists only at the moment it is being apprehended—and yet it can profoundly alter how we view the world and our place in it.

One forgets that part of one's performance is one's history—or sometimes the lack of it. You're playing against what an audience knows, what they expect. This seems to be true of all performers; there's baggage that gets carried into the venue that we can't see.

Recordings aren't time sensitive. You can hear the music you want whether it's morning, noon, or the middle of the night. You can "get into" clubs virtually, "sit" in concert halls you can't afford to visit, go to places that are too far away, or hear people sing about things you don't understand, about lives that are alien, sad, or wonderful. Recorded music can be ripped free from its context, for better and worse. It becomes its own context.

in acoustic culture, the world, like sound, is all around you, and comes at you from all directions at once. It is multilayered and nonhierarchical; it has no center or focal point.

Does asking oneself these questions in an attempt to see how the machine works spoil the enjoyment? It hasn't for me. Music isn't fragile. Knowing how the body works doesn't take away from the pleasure of living.

I love the passing of time.

As music becomes less of a thing--a cylinder, a cassette, a disc--and more ephemeral, perhaps we will begin to assign an increasing value to live performances again.

Music resonates in so many parts of the brain that we can't conceive of it being an isolated thing. It's whom you were with, how old you were, and what was happening that day.

Every addict is formed in the crucible of the memory of that first hit.

There is only so much space on any one person's hard drive, and old memories are prone to replacement by newer ones.

People remember what they can live with more often than how they lived.

You have to utilize who you are in your work. Nobody else can do that: nobody else can pull from your background, from your parents, your upbringing, your whole life experience.

My mom used to take me down to the Jersey Shore when I was 7 8, 9 years old. I can remember being down in that area - Belmar, Seaside Heights, Asbury Park and all those places that I went back and revisited.

Better to have loved and lost a short person than never to have loved a tall.

But life is not a legend or a story. Reality is far more precious than a story...

The accumulated research into quantum physics has begun to explain how the mind, or consciousness, has always played a major role in determining our particular experience of reality.

John Coltrane, still playing at top intensity and volume, totally into it. He blew me out so bad I slid down the wall. The guy was still playing his solo. He hadn't stopped. I don't think he ever knew that I was in that room. He never saw that little ofay kid in the corner, you know, but he totally turned my mind to Jell-O at that point and that was my John Coltrane experience.

As I get older and I get a few more years experience I become more like Dad, you know, King Lear.

After all, this is how you learned how to walk. You didn't just jump up from your crib one day and waltz gracefully across the room. You stumbled and fell on your face and got up and tried again. At what age are you suddenly expected to know everything and never make any more mistakes? If you can love and respect yourself in failure, worlds of adventure and new experiences will open up before you, and your fears will vanish.

You must first consider that a human life is an ongoing process that involves a constantly changing physical body as well as an enormous number of rapidly changing thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Your life therefore is an evolving experience, a continual flow. You are not a thing; that's why any label is constricting, highly inaccurate, and global.

I stood before her asserting my age, but in truth not knowing where the years had gone or how they had led up to this moment.