In my own musical existence I don’t feel that being a guitar player is like the best thing on earth to be. I would rather be a balanced musician.
JERRY GARCIAYou need music, I don’t know why. It’s probably one of those Joe Campbell questions, why we need ritual.
More Jerry Garcia Quotes
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We were just in line to see what was going to happen.
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I know what I’m askin’. I know it’s a lot. Just to say that I love you. Believe it or not.
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Nobody stopped thinking about those psychedelic experiences. Once you’ve been to some of those places, you think, ‘How can I get back there again but make it a little easier on myself?’
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I think it’s too bad that everybody’s decided to turn on drugs, I don’t think drugs are the problem.
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To be alive in America is to hear all kinds of music constantly: radio, records, churches, cats on the street, everywhere music. And with records, the whole history of music is open to everyone who wants to hear it.
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Somebody has to do something, and it’s just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us.
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American society has gone completely into denial.
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If we had any nerve at all, if we had any real balls as a society, or whatever you need, whatever quality you need, real character, we would make an effort to really address the wrongs in this society, righteously.
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And there’s a lot of that stuff with people bringing their kids, kids bringing their parents, people bringing their grandparents.
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Constantly choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil.
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Everything is traditionally slow – much faster than it ever has been on earth but still far, far too slow.
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I read somewhere that 77 per cent of all the mentally ill live in poverty. Actually, I’m more intrigued by the 23 per cent who are apparently doing quite well for themselves.
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The bigger issue, was the whole takeover of the food industry by big corporations.
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You don’t want to be the best at what you do, you want to be the only one.
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You have to be ready, and also you have to discard notions that are fondly held by a lot of musicians, about sequences and notes and about scales and musical systems as a whole. If you think of music as a language, the space part is where you throw out all the syntax.
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What is life but being conscious? And good and evil are manifestations of consciousness. If you reject one, you’re not getting the whole thing that’s there to be had.
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There’s a lot there to enlarge you. That’s part of the value of being in an extended family is that it enlarges you. It makes you bigger. It makes you more.
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For me, I think the only danger is being too much in love with guitar playing. The MUSIC is the most important thing, and the guitar is only the instrument.
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If you go into a complete, like a cyberspace model of some type, in which… you know the discussion about the mind and the interaction between the mind and the universe as a holographic phenomenon.
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We would all like to be able to live an uncluttered life, a simple life, a good life.
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What we need is something, a definition of a human, starting from the ground up, so that the suitable moral structure that goes around it makes sense.
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Some things may work, but they definitely won’t work every time. Some things may work at various times.
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Music is more objective, I think, than a lot of art is, but a surprising amount of it is cultural.
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You do not merely want to be considered just the best of the best. You want to be considered the only one who does what you do.
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You listen to a politician making a speech, and it is like hearing nothing. Whereas, music is unmistakably music.
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So every once in a while I get an idea about plumbing, I get an idea about city government, and they come the way they come.
JERRY GARCIA