The past is not dead. Indeed, it is often not even past.

Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.

Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.

As long as they talk about you, you're not really dead, as long as they speak your name, you continue. A legend doesn't die, just because the man dies.

Life doesn't end on the kitchen floor while there is the will to dance.

God has wrought many things out of oppression. He has endowed his creatures with the capacity to create and from this capacity has flowed the sweet songs of sorrow and joy that have allowed man to cope with his environment and many different situations. Jazz speaks for life. The Blues tell the story of life's difficulties, and if you think for a moment, you will realize that they take the hardest realities of life and put them into music, only to
come out with some new hope or sense of triumph. This is triumphant music. Modern Jazz has continued in this tradition, singing the songs of a more complicated urban existence. When life itself offers no order and meaning, the musician creates an order and meaning from the sounds of the earth, which flow through his instrument.

Death is not the end.

The past is never dead. It's not even past.

"But I'm not dead!" Tereza cried. "I can still feel!"
"So can we," the corpses laughed.

Not everything buried is actually dead. For many, the past is alive.

Any conversation is a unique jazz performance. Some are more pleasing to the ears, but that is not necessarily a measurement of their importance

The past is not dead, it is living in us, and will be alive in the future which we are now helping to make.

At the bottom in the gut of jazz if you listen closely you can hear — no matter how complexly, obliquely, mysteriously stylized — somebody talking, crying, growling, singing, farting, praying, stomping, voicing in all those modes through which our bodies communicate some tale about how it feels to be here on earth or leaving, or about the sweet pain of hanging on between the coming and going.

Now there grows among all the rooms, replacing the night's old smoke, alcohol and sweat, the fragile, musaceous odor of Breakfast: flowery, permeating, surprising, more than the colour of winter sunlight, taking over not so much through any brute pungency or volume as by the high intricacy to the weaving of its molecules, sharing the conjuror's secret by which - though it is not often Death is told so clearly to fuck off - the living genetic chains prove even labyrinthine enough to preserve some human face down ten or twenty generations... so the same assertion-through-structure allows this war morning's banana fragrance to meander, repossess, prevail. Is there any reason not to open every window, and let the kind scent blanket all Chelsea? As a spell, against falling objects...