Songwriters From The United States

"We must be wise task-masters, and not require of ourselves what we can not possibly perform. Recreation we must have. Otherwise, the strings of our soul, wound up to an unnatural tension, will break."

"You cannot will to possess the spirit of Christ; that must come as His gift, but you can choose to study His life, and to imitate it."

"You cannot prove to yourself that you love God by examining your feelings towards Him. They are indefinite and they fluctuate. But just so far as you obey Him, just so far, depend upon it, you love Him."

"Sleep, baby, sleep! Thy father's watching the sheep. Thy mother's shaking the dreamland tree, And down drops a little dream for thee. Sleep, baby, sleep!"

"O happy life! life hid with Christ in God! So making me, At home, and by the wayside, and abroad, Alone with Thee!"

"Ah, what a life is theirs who live in Christ; How vast the mystery! Reaching in height to heaven, and in its depth The unfathomed sea!"

"Above all, the first act of Godspell must be about the formation of a community. Eight separate individuals, led and guided by Jesus (who is helped by his assistant, John the Baptist/Judas), gradually come to form a communal unit. This happens through the playing of games and the telling and absorption of lessons, and each of the eight individuals has his or her own moment of committing to Jesus and to the community. When Jesus applies clown make-up to their faces after "Save the People," he is having them take on an external physical manifestation that they are his disciples, temporarily separating them from the rest of society. But the internal journey of each character is separate and takes its individual course and period of time. Exactly when and why this moment of commitment occurs is one of the important choices each of the actors must make, in collaboration of course with the director. At the end of the first act, the audience is invited to join the community through the sharing of wine (or grape juice), mingling with the actors during intermission."

"Start a new fashion, wear your heart on your sleeve Sometimes you reach what's real just by making believe Unafraid, unashamed There is joy to be claimed in this world You even might wind up being glad to be you."

"Ever ever after It may only be a wish away"

"The Volta is taken from a Federico Fellini book about his films, what he characterizes as a changing of scene, or a turnaround; a new scene to him is called Volta. Y'know, changing of time and the changeover. And Mars, we're just fascinated by science fiction so and it's something that ultimately looked as in anything I write, its meaning is always up to the listener. As the way we write songs and words, if it looks great on paper then to us it's like painting, so if it looks good meaning the second then people usually have a better interpretation than we ever would."

"I never saw a useful Christian who was not a student of the Bible. If a man neglects his Bible, he may pray and ask God to use him in His work; but God cannot make much use of him, for there is not much for the Holy Ghost to work upon."

"Merely reading the Bible is no use at all without we study it thoroughly, and hunt it through, as it were, for some great truth."

"I have come a hundred miles," said a minister, "to get some of Mr. Moody's spirit." " You don't want my spirit," was the reply. "What you want is the Spirit of God."

"From that time Mr. Moody ceased to urge people to begin their religious life by finding something to do for Christ; but insisted that, first of all, they should let Christ do something for them. If they would only believe, Christ would help them to be and to do."

"He will reprove the world of sin" —not because men swear and lie and steal and get drunk and murder— "of sin because they believe not on me."

"As a dead man cannot inherit an estate, no more can a dead soul inherit heaven. The soul must be resurrected in Christ."

"Many of the Bible characters fell just in the things in which they were thought to be strongest. Moses failed in his humility, Abraham in his faith, Elijah in his courage, for one woman scared him away to that juniper-tree; and Peter, whose strong point was boldness, was so frightened by a maid, as to deny his Lord."

"My friends, look to Christ, and not to yourselves. That is what is the matter with a great many sinners; instead of looking to Christ, they are looking at the bite of sin."

"I firmly believe that the moment our hearts are emptied of pride and selfishness and ambition and self-seeking and every thing that is contrary to God's law, the Holy Ghost will come and fill every corner of our hearts; but if we are full of pride and conceit and ambition and self-seeking and pleasure and the world, there is no room for the Spirit of God; and I believe many a man is praying to God to fill him when he is full already with something else."

"Character is what you are in the dark."

"The work of the Spirit is to impart life, to implant hope, to give liberty, to testify of Christ, to guide us into all truth, to teach us all things, to comfort the believer, and to convict the world of sin."

"If you were to spend a month feeding on the precious promises of God, you would not be going about with your heads hanging down like bulrushes, complaining how poor you are; but you would lift up your heads with confidence, and proclaim the riches of His grace because you could not help it."

"My friends, does God invite you? If He does, why don't you accept the invitation? If you want to come, just come along, and don't be talking about feeling. Do you think Lazarus had any feeling when Christ called him out of the sepulchre?"

"When I read the life of such a man as Paul, how I blush to think how sickly and dwarfed Christianity is at the present time, and how many hundreds there are who never think of working for the Son of God and honoring Christ."

"My friends, there is one spot on earth where the fear of Death, of Sin, and of Judgment, need never trouble us, the only safe spot on earth where the sinner can stand — Calvary."

""Verily I say unto you, he that heareth my word and believeth on Him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation, but is passed from death unto life." My friend, that is worth more than all the feeling you can have in a life-time."

"If Jesus bore the cross, and died on it for me, ought I not to be willing to take it up for Him?"

"We are to come to Christ. This is the primal duty. The doctrines are but highways that lead to Him. But when we come to Christ we must receive Him as our Saviour."

"No man ever sought Christ with a heart to find Him who did not find Him."

"Christ died for the ungodly. And if you turn to Him at this moment with an honest heart, and receive Him simply as your Saviour and your God, I have the authority of His word for telling you that He will in no wise cast out."

"I never yet have known the Spirit of God to work where the Lord's people were divided."

"Depend upon it, as long as the church is living so much like the world, we cannot expect our children to be brought into the fold."

"Would you be free from the condemnation of the sins that are past, from the power of the temptations that are to come? Then take your stand on the Rock of Ages. Let death, let the grave, let the judgment come, the victory is Christ's and yours through Him."

"The last business of Christ's life was the saving of a poor penitent thief."

"Go through John's Gospel, and study the "believes," the "verilys," the " I ams; "and go through the Bible in that way, and it becomes a new book to you."

"Study the Bible topically. If you will study assurance for a week, you will soon find it is your privilege to know that you are a child of God."

"Still I only feel alive when the view is flashing, alarms going off in my head... I want to grab you and just kiss you; maybe I should sit down. No sense in cashing us now. Yeah, I only feel alright when the view is flashing, bombs going off in my head... I want to grab you, want to scream at you, no icing me down. The party's crashing us now. The party's crashing us now."

"I should know who I am by now. I walk the record stands somehow. Thinking of winter. Your name is the splinter inside me. While I wait."

"For people like us it is necessary to be a bit stronger, more self-critical, more observant than the usual run. Whether we happen to come already enhanced with these qualities, as some have claimed, or whether our situation invests them in us, we have traditionally - and we do have a long and proud tradition - been a little finer, a little firmer, more sensitive and flexible than others... There will be times when only your own spine can support you, moments when only your own wit can inspire you, days when nothing but exacting self-control can raise you from bed, nights when nothing but your word can impel you into society. But of all these disciplines, there is nothing you must hold to more sternly than to be kind and sympathetic. The easiest armor to put on is always cruelty. That armor will, indeed, see you through everything. Vicious condescension toward those without your strength can make you feel momentarily superior. But that easy armor must be forgone. Don't ever curdle that creamy brow with lines of easy disdain, or curl those lips with a popular sneer. Of all the models available, the one of gentleman in our late war is most succinct: Face what you have to face with humor, dignity, and style; protect yourself with knightly grace; have contempt for your own weakness and never encourage it in others; but never, Ralph, never for an instant permit yourself to feel anything other than pity and deepest sympathy for unfortunate comrades who have, after all, fallen in the same battle."

"If you have to do something, write me a funny AIDS play. Sure you can. It's the biggest joke played on us since sex itself - and with the longest punch line."

"You're right, you're always right, yes, yes, of course. Love will survive. They couldn't kill it with purple hair-do's, they can't kill it with a plague. Boys will fall in love with each other's earlobes if all else should fail. Because it never really was about sex, was it? It was about love."

"Must one go through the five official stages? What are those five stages again: "anger, denial, bargaining, depression, and acceptance." Well, back up: here comes my acceptance speech. "I am now, and I have always been a flaming faggot, responsible for style in its every manifestation. I have my own five steps: flippancy, sentimentality, sarcasm, camp, and smut. They've got me through life, and deity dammit, they'll get me through death!""

"It's my party and I'll die if I want to!"

"When I was just a little girl in East Bay, California, I noticed that East Bay was pig Latin for “beast.” But I knew I had found my niche when I realized that Alice Faye was pig Latin for "phallus.""

"I tried to make up by offering to be a subject for any cute tricks that science might want to try. And [the doctor] said, "Mr. Wood, we cannot use you as an experimental animal," and I tod him, "Doc, I’m an effeminate queer, I’ve never been used as anything else!""

"God, think of the great men that have nibbled on me, and now I'm nothing but a snack for a virus - something that can't even decide if it's a plant or an animal."

"I want to give [my records] all away before some fool plays disco at my funeral, and then the record gets stuck, and nobody can tell, and the service goes on forever!"

"Don't bother answering back. Anything said to me at this point might as well be written on a decomposing squash. The brain goes first, you know -- except the portions dedicated to pain, which are apparently immune."

"Bob: People came here for religious freedom, and we worshipped those boys."

"Reverend Lawson:You lured those boys in here and made filth of them! Bob: We don't think human bodies is filth until they're corpses, Reverend Lawson! Bill: We loved every inch of those boys. Bob: Every chance we got. Bill: And we sent them away to war, since they had to go, with every surface of them— Bob: Tinglin' with kisses an' love."