“The voice returns like the insistent out-of-tune
Of a broken violin on an August afternoon:
‘I am always sure that you understand
My feelings, always sure that you feel,
Sure that across the gulf you reach your hand.

You are invulnerable, you have no Achilles’ heel.
You will go on, and when you have prevailed
You can say: at this point many a one has failed.
But what have I, but what have I, my friend,
To give you, what can you receive from me?
Only the friendship and the sympathy
Of one about to reach her journey’s end.

I shall sit here, serving tea to friends…’ ”

—T.S. Eliot, Prufrock, 1917

Ok, this is kind of cheating because technically this should be a Music Monday post. But I’ve been on a bit of a jazz kick lately and re-reading through Oscar Peterson’s autobiography. Night Train was my first and is still my very favorite jazz album. Here’s what OP had to say about it, and recording Hymn to Freedom:

“Norman Granz had an unquenchable thirst for the blues…the Night Train album, made in December 1962, featured quite an assortment of tunes, but they all took on a blues flavour in performance…the session went very well: everybody felt good and there were no problems with the different takes. Some way through the date, Norman came out of the control booth and said, ‘Why don’t you do a really slow blues tune? Whatever you choose, but make it slow.’ I couldn’t think of an example straight off, so I decided to compose one on the spot. I played the first chorus on my own, and the Trio fell in behind me on the subsequent choruses. Since the tune had an almost church-like feel to it, and as by this time the Civil Rights movement had come into being, I decided to call it The Hymn to Freedom—a musical salute to the brave and persevering leaders of that movement, especially the Rev. Martin Luther King.”
—Oscar Peterson, A Jazz Odyssey

Can you imagine just sitting down and improvising that?

“It is difficult to get into stride with God, because when we start walking with Him we find He has outstripped us before we have taken three steps. He has different ways of doing things, and we have to be trained and disciplined into His ways. It was said of Jesus—”He shall not fail nor be discouraged,” because he never worked from His own individual standpoint but always from the standpoint of His Father, and we have to learn to do the same. Spiritual truth is learned by atmosphere, not by intellectual reasoning. God’s Spirit alters the atmosphere of our way of looking at things, and things begin to be possible which never were possible before. Getting into the stride of God means nothing less than union with Himself. It takes a long time to get there, but keep at it. Don’t give in because the pain is bad just now, get on with it, and before long you will find you have a new vision and a new purpose.”

—Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest, 1917

“I like watching people fall in love onscreen so much that I can suspend my disbelief in the contrived situations that occur only in the heightened world of romantic comedies. I have come to enjoy the moment when the male lead, say, slips and falls right on top of the expensive wedding cake. I actually feel robbed when the female lead’s dress doesn’t get torn open at a baseball game while the JumboTron camera is on her. I regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world operates according to different rules than my regular human world. For me, there is no difference between Ripley from “Alien” and any Katherine Heigl character. They are equally implausible. They’re all participating in a similar level of fakey razzle-dazzle, and I enjoy every second of it.”
— Mindy Kaling, from The New York Times.

“You see, God wasn’t only interested in drawing Paul out of difficulty or danger. He wanted to draw Paul closer to Himself. Every time God delivers us, the point is ultimately to draw us closer to Himself. Whether we get to avoid pain and suffering or we must persevere in the midst of it, our deliverance comes when we’re dragged from the enemy of our souls to the heart of God.”
—Beth Moore, To Live is Christ (ref. 2 Tim 3:10-11)

“I’m wary about being in the generation of social networking where people are like, ‘I am my musical taste,’…I am not just a collection of music. Or a collection of movies. I think that’s a thing that people romanticize: ‘Oh my God, she likes this band so she is a dream.’ I’ve definitely learned that you can easily get stars in your eyes. I’ll meet directors and they’ll be like, ‘I love Godard!’ And they love screwball comedies and they love all these things I love, and then it’s, like, ‘Wait a minute, that doesn’t mean they can make movies.’ Just because somebody likes something doesn’t mean … anything, really.”

—Zooey Deschanel, quoted in The New York Times, 2011

“I knew a man who was failing as a farmer
Burned down his farmhouse for the fire insurance,
And spent the proceeds on a telescope
To satisfy a lifelong curiousity
About our place among the infinities.
And how was that for otherworldliness?”
—Robert Frost, New Hampshire, 1923