“Some is subtle, wry-mouthed, or back-handed. It is by turns bitter, agonized, and grotesque. Even in the hands of white composers it involuntarily reflects the half-forgotten suffering of the negro.”

The humor of jazz is rich and many-sided. Some of it is obvious enough to make a dog laugh.

It also describes music exhibiting influence of that technique which has as its traditional object to secure the effects of surprise, or in the broadest sense, humor.

Jazz has both white and black elements, and each in some respects has influenced the other. It’s recent phase seems to throw the light of the white race’s sophistication upon the anguish of the black.

Jazz is musical humor. The noun jazz describes a modern American technique for the playing of any music, accompanied by noise called harmony, and interpolated instrumental effects.

Then when the fugitive word was least expecting it I would suddenly turn the full blaze of my attention back onto it catching the culprit in the beam of my mental torch before it could sneak off again into the darkness.

Spending a weekend with Hitler would have been boring in the extreme, although you would have had a greater certainty in coming back alive.

The literal, basic thing of the stage is really like a magnet. It brings me back to earth.

I fling myself down on my back, throw my arms and legs out so that I look like an asterisk, and gaze at the sky.

I don’t believe there’s anything in life you can’t go back and fix.

One day, though, I realized I was no longer a believer, and realizing that, I couldn’t go back.

After a while I started to think of that as an image of something that went a lot deeper than the dead dog, which is you can’t bring back anything to life.

What I’ve learned about teaching is to refer back to the root of that word, which is educo, which means “to pull from.