Bob Dylan Quotations | Page 4

The ghosts race towards the light, you can almost hear the heavy breathing spirits, all determined to get somewhere. New Orleans, unlike a lot of places you go back to and that don't have the magic anymore, still has got it. Night can swallow you up, yet none of it touches you. You can't see it, but you know it's here. Somebody's always sinking.

Anything I can sing, I call a song. Anything I can't sing, I call a poem.

For the loser now Will be later to win

My songs are personal music, they're not communal. I wouldn't want people singing along with me. It would sound funny. I'm not playing campfire meetings. I don't remember anyone singing along with Elvis, Carl Perkins or Little Richard.

And I'll know my song well before I start singing

I don't write the songs; I just write 'em down.

Shedding off one more layer of skin, Keeping one step ahead of the persecutor within.

So happy just to be alive, Underneath the sky of blue, On this new morning, new morning, On this new morning with you.

I just try to understand that tomorrow is another day.

People call you this or that. But I can't respond because then it seems like I'm defensive, you know, what does it matter, really?

You get older. You start having hopes for other people rather than yourself.

After a while you earn that privacy is something you can sell, but you can't buy it back.

I'm used to writing songs and songs-I can fill em up with symbolism and metaphors. When you write a book (Chronicles, Vol. 1), you gotta tell the truth, and it can't be misinterpreted.

I believe that instinct is what makes a genius a genius.

Peace is the time it takes to reload your rifle.

I was headed for the fantastic lights. No doubt about it. Could it be that I was being deceived? Not likely. I don't think I had enough imagination to be deceived; had no false hope, either. I'd come from a long ways off and had started from a long ways down. But now destiny was about to manifest itself. I felt like it was looking right at me and nobody else.

People are going to say, ‘Well, it’s not very truthful.’ But a songwriter doesn’t care about what’s truthful. What he cares about is what should’ve happened, what could’ve happened. That’s its own kind of truth. It’s like people who read Shakespeare plays, but they never see a Shakespeare play. I think they just use his name.

I’m in awe of McCartney. He’s about the only one that I am in awe of. He can do it all. And he’s never let up... He’s just so damn effortless.

I've never gone for having a great voice, for cultivating one. I'm still not doing it now.

Art is a never-ending dance of illusions.

There ought to be a law about you coming around.

I set my monkey on the log, and ordered him to do the Dog. He wagged his tail and shook his head, and he went and did the Cat instead.

You use to ride on the chrome horse with your diplomat, who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat.

You walk into the room like a camel and then put your eyes in your pockets and your nose on the ground.

A cork screw to my heart, ever since we've been apart.

As he weeps to wicked birds of prey, who pick up on his bread crumb sins, and there are no sins inside the Gates of Eden.

Lord knows I've paid my dues getting through, tangled up in blue.

Watch waterfalls of pity roar, you feel to moan but unlike before, you discover that you'd just be one more person crying.

When you're sad and when you're lonely and you haven't got a friend, just remember that death is not the end.

The truth that I am seeking is in your missing file.

Idiot wind, blowing every time you open your mouth.

But now we got weapons Of the chemical dust If fire them we're forced to Then fire them we must One push of the button And a shot the world wide And you never ask questions When God's on your side

Rumble is the best instrumental ever.

Let me drink from the waters where the mountain streams flood Let the smell of wildflowers flow free through my blood Let me sleep in your meadows with the green grassy leaves Let me walk down the highway with my brother in peace Let me die in my footsteps Before I go down under the ground.

You had no faith to lose and you know it.

Everything in New Orleans is a good idea. Bijou temple-type cottages and lyric cathedrals side by side. Houses and mansions, structures of wild grace. Italianate, Gothic, Romanesque, Greek Revival standing in a long line in the rain. Roman Catholic art. Sweeping front porches, turrets, cast-iron balconies, colonnades- 30-foot columns, gloriously beautiful- double pitched roofs, all the architecture of the whole wide world and it doesn't move.

You can't do something forever.

If not for you, winter wouldn't hold no spring, couldn't hear a robin sing. I just wouldn't have a clue, if not for you.

You breathed on me and made my life a richer one to live, when I was deep in poverty you taught me how to give. Dried the tears up from my dreams and pulled me from my hole, quenched my thirst and satisfied the burning in my soul.

I see through your brain like I see through the water that runs down the drain.

Ain't no use jiving, ain't no use joking, everything is broken.

Madonna, she still has not showed, we see this empty cage now corrode, where her cape of the stage once had flowed, the fiddler he now steps to the road, on the back of the fish truck that loads, while my conscience explodes.

The cavalries charged and the Indians died, oh the country was young with God on its side.

The drunken politician leaps upon the street where mothers weep, and the saviors who are fast asleep, they wait for you.

The National Bank at profit sells road maps for the soul.

There's danger in this open world where men strive to be free, and to me the greatest danger was in society.

Charity is suppose to cover up for a multitude of sins.

Forget the dead you've left, they will not follow you.

I've always been the kind of person that doesn't like to trespass, but sometimes you just find yourself over the line.

Let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late.

Satan will give you a little taste, then he'll move in with rapid speed.

The walls of pride are high and wide, can't see over to the other side.

Don't wanna marry nobody, if they're already married.

Socialism, hypnotism, patriotism, materialism, fools making laws for the breaking of jaws.

Sing your praise of progress and the doom machine, the naked truth is still taboo whenever it can be seen.

On the stone that remains carved next to his name, his epitaph plain, only a pawn in their game.

Crimson flames tied through my ears rolling high and mighty traps, pounced with fire on flaming roads using ideas as my maps.

Come Senators, Congressman, please heed the call, don't stand in the doorway, don't block the hall.

Freedom just around the corner for you, but with the truth so far off, what good will it do?

How can the life of such a man be in the palm of some fools hand?

I didn't know whether to duck or to run, so I ran.

I was just too stubborn to ever be governed by enforced insanity.

I was lookin' high an' low for them Reds everywhere, I was lookin' in the sink an' underneath the chair. I looked way up my chimney hole, I even looked deep inside my toilet bowl.

If God is on our side, he'll stop the next war.

In the home of the brave, Jefferson turning over in his grave.

Masters of the bluff and masters of the proposition, but the enemy I see wears a cloak of decency.

Maybe someday you will understand, that something for nothing is everybody's plan.

She took off her wheel, took off her bell, took off her wig, said, how do I smell? I hot footed it barenaked out the window.

You say you're looking for someone who'll pick you up each time you fall, to gather flowers constantly and to come each time you call, a lover your life and nothing more. But it ain't me, babe.

Abe said, where do you want this killing done? God said, out on highway 61.

If I lived my life by what others were thinkin', the heart inside me would've died.

Life is sad, life is a bust, all you can do is do what you must.

Nothing is better, nothing is best, take heed of this and get plenty of rest.

Pain sure does bring out the best in people, doesn't it?

The enemy is subtle, how be it we are so deceived, when truth's in our hearts and we still don't believe.

The tree of life is growing where the spirit never dies, and the bright light of salvation shines in dark and empty skies.

The truth is far from you, so you know you got to lie. Then you're all the time defending what you can never justify.

One who sings with his tongue on fire, gargles in the rat race choir.

Sold my guitar to the baker's son for a few crumbs and a place to hide.

If I had the stars from the darkest night and the diamonds from the deepest ocean, I'd forsake them all for your sweet kiss, for that's all I'm wishin' to be ownin'.

I'll always thank the Lord when my working day is through, I get my sweet reward to be alone with you.

I can't see my reflection in the waters, I can't speak the sounds that show no pain. I can't hear the echo of my footsteps, or can't remember the sound of my own name.

Good and bad, I define these terms, quite clear, no doubt, somehow.

Every cause that ever I fought, I fought it full without regret or shame.

God got the power, man has got his vanity. Man gotta choose before God can set him free.

God is in heaven, and we all want what's his. But power and greed and corruptible seed seem to be all that there is.

I bargained for salvation and they gave me a lethal dose.

I don't need your organization, I've moved your mountains and I've marked you cards, but Eden is burning. You better get ready for elimination or else your hearts must have the courage of the changing of the guard.

I said, you know they refused Jesus, too. He said, you're not him.

There are no truths outside the Gates of Eden.

To preach of peace and brotherhood, oh what might be the cost? A man he did it long ago, and they hung him on a cross.

I never could guess your weight, baby.

Too much of nothing, it just makes a fellow mean.

Ain't it hard when you discover that, he wasn't really where it's at, after he took from you everything he could steal. How does it feel?

Don't put my faith in nobody, not even a scientist.

I ain't saying you treated me unkind you could've done better, but I don't mind. You just kinda wasted my precious time. But don't think twice, it's alright.

Mothers tell your children not to do the things I have done, to spend my life in sin and misery in the House of the Rising Sun.

Trying to create a next world war, he found a promoter who nearly fell off the floor, he said I never engaged in this kind of thing before, but yes I think it can be very easily done.

Each one of them suffering from the failures of their day, with strings of guilt they tried hard to guide us.

You shouldn't let other people get your kicks for you.