Playing the blues was a way of exorcising the specter of random force, turning cosmic uncertainty into a song.

-- Jackson Lears

(in Divine Sparks: Collected Wisdom of the Heart,

edited by Karen Speerstra)

Life has been your art.

You have set yourself to music.

Your days are your sonnets.

-- Oscar Wilde

(in Music: A Book of Quotations,

edited by Herb Galewitz)

Birdsong brings relief

of my longing.

I am just as ecstatic as they are,

but with nothing to say!

Please, universal soul, practice

some song, or something, through me!

-- Rumi

(in The Essential Rumi,

translated by Coleman Barks

with John Moyne)

May the thread of my song be not cut before my life merges in the sea of love.

-- The Rig Veda

(in God Makes the Rivers to Flow,

edited by Eknath Easwaran)