Musicians From The United States

"We chased our pleasures here, Dug our treasures there, But can you still recall The time we cried? Break on through to the other side!"

"You know the day destroys the night, Night divides the day, Tried to run — Tried to hide — Break on through to the other side!"

"We have assembled inside this ancient & insane theatre To propagate our lust for life & flee the swarming wisdom of the streets"

"When you're strange Faces come out of the rain When you're strange No one remembers your name When you're strange."

"O great creator of being grant us one more hour to perform our art and perfect our lives The moths & atheists are doubly divine & dying We live, we die and death not ends it"

"Now listen to this... Ill tell you about texas radio and the big beat Soft driven, slow and mad Like some new language Reaching your head with the cold, sudden fury of a divine messenger Let me tell you about heartache and the loss of god Wandering, wandering in hopeless night Out here in the perimeter there are no stars... Out here we is stoned... Immaculate."

"Let's reinvent the gods, all the myths of the ages Celebrate symbols from deep elder forests"

"Do you know the warm progress under the stars? Do you know we exist? Have you forgotten the keys to the kingdom? Have you been born yet & are you alive?"

"Indians scattered on dawn's highway bleeding Ghosts crowd the young child's fragile eggshell mind. Me and my mother and father, and a grandmother and a grandfather. were driving through the desert, at dawn, and a truck load of Indian workers had either hit another car, or just — I don't know what happened — but there were Indians scattered all over the highway, bleeding to death. So the car pulls up and stops. That was the first time I tasted fear. I musta' been about four — like a child is like a flower, his head is just floating in the breeze, man. The reaction I get now thinking about it, looking back — is that the souls of the ghosts of those dead Indians... maybe one or two of 'em... were just running around freaking out, and just leaped into my soul. And they're still there."

"This is it no more fun the death of all joy has come."

"Cool pools from a tired land sink now in the peace of evening Clouds weaken and die. The sun, an orange skull, whispers quietly, becomes an island, & is gone. There they are watching us everything will be dark. The light changed. We were aware knee-deep in the fluttering air as the ships move on trains in their wake."

"Camel caravans bear witness guns to Caesar. Hordes crawl and seep inside the walls. The streets flow stone. Life goes on absorbing war. Violence kills the temple of no sex."

"Do you dare deny my potency my kindness or forgiveness?"

"I can't believe this is happening I can't believe all these people are sniffing each other & backing away teeth grinning hair raised, growling, here in the slaughtered wind"

"More or less, we're all afflicted with the psychology of the voyeur. Not in a strictly clinical or criminal sense, but in our whole physical and emotional stance before the world. Whenever we seek to break this spell of passivity, our actions are cruel and awkward and generally obscene, like an invalid who has forgotten to walk."

"The Lords. Events take place beyond our knowledge or control. Our lives are lived for us. We can only try to enslave others. But gradually, special perceptions are being developed. The idea of the "Lords" is beginning to form in some minds. We should enlist them into bands of perceivers to tour the labyrinth during their mysterious nocturnal appearances. The Lords have secret entrances and they know disguises. But they give themselves away in minor ways. Too much glint of light in the eye. A wrong gesture. Too long and curious a glance."

"Cinema returns us to anima, religion of matter, which gives each thing its special divinity and sees gods in all things and beings. Cinema, heir of alchemy, last of an erotic science."

"They can picture love affairs of chemicals and stars, a romance of stones, or the fertility of fire. Strange, fertile correspondences the alchemists sensed in unlikely orders of being. Between men and planets, plants and gestures, words and weather."

"Few would defend a small view of Alchemy as "Mother of Chemistry", and confuse its true goal with those external metal arts. Alchemy is an erotic science, involved in buried aspects of reality, aimed at purifying and transforming all being and matter. Not to suggest that material operations are ever abandoned. The adept holds to both the mystical and physical work."

"The subject says "I see first lots of things which dance — then everything becomes gradually connected"."

"Cinema has evolved in two paths. One is spectacle. Like the phantasmagoria, its goal is the creation of a total substitute sensory world. The other is peep show, which claims for its realm both the erotic and the untampered observance of real life, and imitates the keyhole or voyeur's window without need of color, noise, grandeur."

"The world becomes an apparently infinite, yet possibly finite, card game. Image combinations, permutations, comprise the world game."

"All good niggas, all the niggas who change the world, die in violence. They don't die in regular ways."

"If you thought about it I'm hardly the villain, I'm hardly the one you should be scared of. It's the guy who can't talk, it's the guy without a job, it's the one with scares in his face, not the one clean cut, you know what I mean you should worry about a lot of other things, but not me."

"I've always been an actor, the reason I've been successful in the rap-game I think is that I treat my albums like movies, and I treat writing it like I'm a character writing a story, you know, for each album whatever I'm going through, whatever stages I'm going through, and I do it vividly with vivid pitcure, with action and description, and an beginning and with an end, and conflict, and you know, redemption, things like that. So I feel like I always been an actor and acting is my first love."

"The only thing that can kill me is death, that's the only thing that can ever stop me, is death, and even then my music will live forever."

"Fear is stronger than love, remember that. Fear is stronger than love, all that love I gave didn't mean nothing when it came to fear."

"Trust nobody, TRUST NO BODY."

"Listen to the words people say in their lyrics, and tell me, if that's some real shit, if that's real to you, you know what I mean. Listen to what they sayin', don't just bob your head to the beat, peep the game, and listen to what Im saying. Hold us accountable for it."

"Don't support the phonies, support the real."

"I don't feel like what I did was so evil, I just feel like the way I was living and my mentality was a part of my progression to be a man."

"Measure a man by his actions fully, from the beginning to the end. Don't take a piece out of my life or a song out of my music and say this is what I'm about, because you know better than that."

"Watch people, because you can fake for a long time, but one day you're gonna show yourself to be a phony."

"No matter what these people say about me, my music does not glorify any image, my music is spiritual if you listen to it. It's all about emotion, it's all about life."

"Now if we do wanna live the thug life and the gangsta' life and all that, OK, so stop being cowards and let's have a revolution. But we don't wanna do that, dudes just wanna live "character", they wanna be "cartoons", but if they really wanted to do something, they was that tuff, alright, let's start our own country, let's start a revolution, let's get outta' here, let's do something. But they don't wanna do that, they wanna pimp our communities and portray this image that they know we all can't survive and make, and that's what I saw."

"Prison kills your spirit, straight up. It kills your spirit. There is no creativity, there's none of that."

"America is the biggest gang in the world."

"The guns are turning away from Europe and Russia and Iran and Iraq and they're turning to us."

"Jail is big business, believe me. I'm in jail, I see the big business. You can feed a whole town off one jail. This jail is in the middle of a town that feeds everybody. Everybody works here, this is the main income. So if there were no criminals, nobody would work."

"I'm known as a survivor now, I hope so, for the jail thing, bullets and everything, controversies and everything, I hope so. And I want to be in the future known as somebody. You know I want people to be talking about me like you know: "remember when he was real bad, remember when Tupac was real bad". You know what I mean, they do that about a lot of actors now, like John Travolta I read stories like "remember you were wild". And all these other people, and now they're like sweet hearts. We all should get that chance, I just want my chance."

"I think that I'm really, I was a reactionary, and now I don't do that any more. Same person, but I don't react. Before, I reacted. I didn't like the cameras, so I spit."

"I think being humble is sexy."

"Marlon Brando is not a gangster-actor, he's an actor. Axl Rose and them are not gangster rock-and-rollers, they're rock-and-rollers right. So I'm a rapper, this is what I do. I'm an artist."

"I know how it's gonna be when I die. It's going to be no noise, you ain't going to hear people screaming. I'mma fade out."

"Best Of 2Pac Vol 1:Thug and Vol 2:Life (2007)"

"Pac's Life (2006)"

"Live At The House Of Blues (with Outlawz, Dogg Pound, Snoop Dogg, K-Ci & JoJo) (2005)"

"The Rose Vol. 2 (2005)"

"Loyal to the Game (2004)"

"2Pac Live (2004)"