If you're only killing time then it will kill you right back
First quality:
you are capable of great things, but you must never forget that there is a hand guiding your steps.
We call that hand God, and He always guides us according to His will.’
‘Second quality:
now and then, I have to stop writing and use a sharpener.
That makes the pencil suffer a little, but afterwards, he’s much sharper.
So you, too, must learn to bear certain pains and sorrows, because they will make you a better person.
‘Third quality:
the pencil always allows us to use an eraser to rub out any mistakes.
This means that correcting something we did is not necessarily a bad thing; it helps to keep us on the road to justice.’
‘Fourth quality:
what really matters in a pencil is not its wooden exterior, but the graphite inside.
So always pay attention to what is happening inside you.’
‘Finally, the pencil’s fifth quality:
it always leaves a mark.
in just the same way, you should know that everything you do in life will leave a mark, so try to be conscious of that in your every action
For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?
And what is it to cease breathing but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?
Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.
And when you have reached the mountaintop,then you shall begin to climb.
And when the earth shall claim your limbs,then shall you truly dance
Anyone who lives in their own world is crazy.
Like schizophrenics, psychopaths, maniacs.
people who are different from others.
On the other hand,
you have Einstein, saying that there was no time or space, just a combination of the two.
Or Columbus, insisting that on the other side of the world lay not an abyss but a continent.
Or Edmund Hillary, convinced that a man could reach the top of Everest.
Or the Beatles, who created an entirely different sort of music and dressed like people from another time.
Those people--
and thousands of others--
all lived in their own world.
Lent ends with Easter Sunday
the day Christians celebrate Jesus rising from the dead
I had gone on Easter Day
early and alone
to be beyond insidious bells
(that any other Sunday I’d not hear)
up to the hills
where are winds
to blow away commination.
In the frail first light I saw him,
unreal and sudden
through lifting mist,
a fox on a barn door,
nailed
like a coloured plaster Christ
in a Spanish shrine,
his tail coiled around his loins.
Sideways his head hung limply,
his ears snagged with burdock,
his dry nose plugged with black blood.
For two days he’d held the orthodox pose.
The endemic English noise of Easter Sunday morning
was mixed with the mist swirling
and might have moved his stiff head.
Under the hill
the ringing had begun.
As the sun rose red
on the stains of his bleeding
to press on seemed the best thing.
I walked the length of the day’s obsession.
At dusk I was swallowed by the misted barn,
sucked by the peristalsis of my fear that he had gone,
leaving nails for souvenirs.
But he was there still.
I saw no sign.
He hung as before.
Only the wind had risen
to comb the thorns from his fur.
I left my superstition
stretched on the banging barn door.
Strange Little Girl:
Whenever it rains you think of her
The album's namesake song — and most upbeat, straightforward musical moment, as it features tumbleweed keyboards — is "Strange Little Girl."
The 1982 single by the Stranglers featuring a protagonist who's figuratively lost and trying to find her place in the world:
"Strange little girl /
Where are you going? /
Do you know where you could be going?"
The word "strange" is an interesting one to describe a person.
The term isn't always wielded as a compliment; in fact, it's a verbal side-eye to convention. "Strange" is a close relation to "peculiar," another vaguely antique-sounding words that connotes someone who's offbeat and different.
That Amos called the album "Strange Little Girls" — plural — is even more telling: These are a collection of offbeat people who don't fit into any sort of neat, tidy mold.
Vassago: Strange Little Girl Song by The Stranglers
Raining Blood:
Actually the Gestapo picked her up
Slayer's "Raining Blood," a song about someone mired in purgatory after being jettisoned from heaven; the implication is that it's somewhere he doesn't want to be.
Amos has a different view:
Instead, she envisions purgatory as a place of shelter, a refuge for a badass with supernatural tendencies.
"She's a French Resistance woman whose sister was killed," she told Alternative Press about the "Raining Blood" character, who sports a jaunty beret and holds an ashed cigarette.
The woman "knows myths and is calling on power and working on alchemy" in response, however: "She went to the underground after the death of everyone she knew."
Heart of Gold:
It's not glamorous... (on the twin pic) ...it's just business.
On a roaring "Heart of Gold," which is as noisy as Young's guitar hurricanes, Amos saw twins — or "economic espionage gals," as she puts it to Alternative Press — who "infiltrate corporations and access information and send it somewhere else.
Good or bad, it depends what side you're on."
This backstory certainly isn't obvious from listening to Neil Young's song, which is a loose, weary meditation on searching for meaning in life and the self. However, Amos' vision certainly complicates what the song's reference to a "heart of gold" could mean.
Vassago: Heart Of Gold Song by Neil Young
Rattlesnakes:
She rides rollercoasters but never screams
The song features a main character named Jodie, who "wears a hat although it hasn't rained for six days" and packs a gun "on account of all the rattlesnakes."
Cole is himself an empathetic writer, and so his character sketch of Jodie offers telling details ("her neverborn child still haunts her") that explain her behavior.
Ever perceptive, Amos picks up on Jodie's heartbreak; her voice drips with sadness and understanding, ensuring the cover ends up deeply affecting.