“The tight place, the dark pit in which I am now lying, of what bird is it the talon? When the design of my life is complete, shall I, shall other people see a stork?”

“Then taking up his Oedipus at Colonus, which he had lately written, but had not yet brought out, he read from it a beautiful passage, with which the judges were so struck that they at once dismissed the case.”

He who binds himself to a joy
Does the wingèd life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise.

“It is instructive to think that there is not a single person in this room, or for that matter in any room in the world, who, at some nicely chosen point in historical space-time would not be put to death there and then, here and now, by a commonsensical majority in righteous rage. The color of one’s creed, neckties, eyes, thoughts, manners, speech, is sure to meet somewhere in time or space with a fatal objection from a mob that hates that particular tone.…”

…and takes a vow of silence: he’s allowed to say two words every seven years...

You have come to my rescue again & again
in my impassable, sometimes despairing years.
You have allowed my brilliant friends to destroy themselves
and I am still here, severely damaged, but functioning…

“Corcovado” (known in English as “Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars”) is a bossa nova song written by Antonio Carlos Jobim in 1962. The Portuguese title refers to the Corcovado mountain in Rio de Janeiro.

Emily Dickinson: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”

From his books Point Your Face at This and This Is a Book.

Infectious 1974 smash by the Queen of Salsa.

High-octane psychobilly.

Wiig spoofs the TODAY show host in a pitch-perfect Saturday Night Live sketch.

James Brown and the Famous Flames pull out all the stops—including a frantic, electrifying “Night Train”—on a bill that included Marvin Gaye, The Rolling Stones, Smokey Robinson, the Beach Boys, Chuck Berry and The Supremes. According to Rick Rubin, Prince kept the performance on loop at Paisley Park.

“There is not one time in a hundred spins of the gut-wrenching ‘Three Babies’ that chills don’t shoot through my nervous system as she clutches the high notes for ‘The face on you / The smell of you / Will always be with me.’ It may be the most haunting eight seconds ever recorded…”—James Campion

While she’s living like a queen on alimony
I’m working two shifts eating baloney,
Asking myself “Why didn’t you just learn how to cook?”

Reed’s last #1 country hit, written—fittingly—by Certified Public Accountant Tim DuBois.