“Not the torturer will scare me, nor the body's final fall, nor the barrels of death's rifles, nor the shadows on the wall, nor the night when to the ground the last dim star of pain, is hurled but the blind indifference of a merciless, unfeeling world.”
“Each small candle lights a corner of the dark When the wheel of pain stops turning And the branding iron stops burning When the children can be children When the desperados weaken When the tide rolls into greet them And the natural law of science Greets the humble and the mighty And a billion candles burning Lights the dark side of every human mind”
“I always used to look at books and wonder how anybody could come up with so many words. But my divorce and then falling in love with somebody else has released in me an ability to write in other ways apart from songs.”
“Is gentleness too much for us Should gentleness be filed along with empathy We feel for someone else's child Every time a smart bomb does its sums and gets it wrong Someone else's child dies and equities in defence rise America, America, please hear us when we call You got hip-hop, be-bop, hustle and bustle You got Atticus Finch You got Jane Russell You got freedom of speech You got great beaches, wildernesses and malls Don't let the might, the Christian right, fuck it all up For you and the rest of the world”
“All my life, ... I have been preoccupied with the great tragedy of losing family in wars. The pain of losing a parent or a child in (an act of) violence that is purposefully and directly generated by political forces is in a certain way harder to bear than if someone dies in, say, an accident. The death feels more preventable.”
