Top 100 Conor Oberst Quotes
#2. I really believe in the way the energy can consolidate in certain geographical spots. You can find it in a lot of different places, beautiful natural spots, or if you look at Islam or Judaism or Christianity, these ideas of holy places.
Conor Oberst
#3. So I wait for the day when I'll hear the key as it turns in the lock And the guard will say to me, Oh my patient prisoner you waited for this day and finally, you are free! You are free! You are free!
Conor Oberst
#4. Sometimes I worry that I've lost the plot My twitching muscles tease my flippant thoughts I never really dreamed of heaven much Until we put him in the ground. There is nothing as lucky, as easy, or free
Conor Oberst
#5. Joe Arpaio needs no help from me getting attention. For years he has been a beacon of bigotry and intolerance for all the world to see. The list of human and civil-rights abuses he's committed in Maricopa County is long and well documented.
Conor Oberst
#6. I'm happy just because I found out I am really no one
Conor Oberst
#7. The worst thing you can do as an artist is to repeat yourself.
Conor Oberst
#8. With science and reason throughout history, what people believed turned out to be false. So I like to keep an open mind to all perspectives and learn and become more fully realised as a person. I just feel we're never going to know what the full picture is.
Conor Oberst
#11. I think there's so much about Rasta culture that's interesting. Just the idea of preaching one-ness, that we're all in this together.
Conor Oberst
#12. If there's a song that stops meaning anything to me, then I'll quit playing it.
Conor Oberst
#13. My dad, who plays guitar and piano and was in cover bands, along with my older brother, Matt, taught me guitar and stuff. I started writing acoustic songs and playing by myself in 7th grade.
Conor Oberst
#14. If you think about Protestant and Catholic or Shiite and Sunni, they are basically the same thing ... one eats with their left hand, the other eats with their right hand.
Conor Oberst
#15. They say it's better to bury your sadness in a graveyard or garden that waits for the spring to wake from its sleep and burst into green.
Conor Oberst
#16. I have a car in Nebraska. When I bought it, they gave me a satellite radio, and there's an 'indie-rock' station. It's just nothing I'm interested in.
Conor Oberst
#17. The Bible's blind, the Torah's deaf, the Qur'an is mute; if you burned them all together you'd get close to the truth.
Conor Oberst
#18. To me, a political song is also a personal song. Most political activism has been driven by empathy for other people and the desire for a world that's less divisive. Even if songs aren't overtly political, they can make a listener more empathetic.
Conor Oberst
#19. Rock and roll seems to have had a mellowing in the business where it got harder to sell individual records and make money doing that.
Conor Oberst
#20. I swear that I'm dying slowly but it's happening, and if the perfect spring is waiting somewhere ... just take me there.
Conor Oberst
#21. Art is basically communication, and I think everyone who's a music lover has had that experience where a record or a recording has kept you company when no one else is around. And I think that is what I'm hoping that people get out of my music.
Conor Oberst
#22. We [ Desaparecidos] try to be the opposite of apathetic. There are so many young people in America that are apathetic.
Conor Oberst
#23. I didn't used to think about politics much, or social issues. I was a teenager, writing about girls.
Conor Oberst
#24. I need some meaning I can memorize. The kind I have always seems to slip my mind.
Conor Oberst
#25. Men with purple hearts carry silver guns and they will kill a man for what his father has done. But what my father did, I don't live it: no, I am not him.
Conor Oberst
#26. For a sunrise or a sunset, you're manic or you're depressed. Will you ever feel ok?
Conor Oberst
#27. It's in vogue to have a cause and give money in charity. But to actually speak up and say something like, I'm pissed about this - that doesn't seem to be very popular unless you're writing a blog or tweeting.
Conor Oberst
#28. I try to make all my songs good. I don't ever write one to finish one. A lot of protest songs end up that way, driven by some kind of emotional response.
Conor Oberst
#29. I've thought about the idea of, 'Can happiness and creativity co-exist?' So much of what I've done, I think, has been based on being dissatisfied or incomplete or lonely. The answer is, 'There isn't an answer, necessarily.'
Conor Oberst
#30. I like science fiction. Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick and Vonnegut, and I really like Margaret Atwood, 'The Handmaid's Tale.' And you know, so much of science fiction has to do with predicting what's to come, so I think that's really interesting.
Conor Oberst
#31. I think there's a danger, for me at least, in retreating and going inward and depression. I have to stay diligent against that tendency.
Conor Oberst
#32. I was raised Catholic, and I have an aversion to anyone who takes religion to the extreme.
Conor Oberst
#33. I think we should be pushing for amnesty and a path to citizenship for every undocumented person residing in the United States who has not committed a violent crime, with a special emphasis on keeping families together.
Conor Oberst
#34. The drunk kids, the catholics They're all about the same They're waiting for something Hoping to be saved
Conor Oberst
#35. There's a lot of optimism in changing scenery, in seeing what's down the road.
Conor Oberst
#36. I wanna be your happiness. I wanna be your common sense pain.
Conor Oberst
#37. Everything must belong somewhere. I know that now, that's why I'm staying here.
Conor Oberst
#38. I try to keep the idea that there's an audience in as little space in my mind as possible, but you can't erase it entirely, the idea that when you're sitting down to write a song, people are going to hear it.
Conor Oberst
#39. Cause a costume can be comfortable It can make you feel more beautiful It can even make you look like someone else But it's still you, so there's nothing you can do Like a bad habit, the one you couldn't kick, there it always is And it's nothing that no doctor's gonna fix.
Conor Oberst
#40. We must memorize nine numbers and deny we have a soul.
Conor Oberst
#41. Considering our history, I can think of nothing more American than an immigrant.
Conor Oberst
#42. There's all body types, but there's just one size.
Conor Oberst
#43. And the sad act like lepers They stick to the shadows They long to ring bells of warning To tell of their coming So that the pure can shut their doors.
Conor Oberst
#44. I'm always fascinated when people really fervently believe, because I have such a hard time believing anything. When people have real faith in something, it's fascinating to me. And the fact that so many people, in surveys, so many people say they do. It kind of blows my mind.
Conor Oberst
#45. Now I believe that lovers should be draped in flowers and laid entwined together on a bed of clover and left there to sleep, left there to dream of their happiness.
Conor Oberst
#46. My main thing is just to keep writing. I've been doing some songwriting that's for my own record, I suppose.
Conor Oberst
#47. It's hard to get people to focus on one idea.
Conor Oberst
#48. When I try to explain to people the big influences in my life, or at least when I first started, the most important ones were my friends who were also writing songs and were typically four or five years older than me.
Conor Oberst
#49. There's a small amount of super-wealthy people that want to maintain their billions and billions of dollars. Those are the people who are really making the decisions.
Conor Oberst
#50. Little soldier, little insect You know war it has no heart It will kill you in the sunshine Or happily in the the dark Where kindness is a card game Or a bent up cigarette In the trenches, in the hard rain With a bullet and a bet.
Conor Oberst
#51. One by one I drowned all the people I'd been.
Conor Oberst
#52. I'm proud that with 'Bright Eyes' we've always experimented and tried to make a different record every time out.
Conor Oberst
#54. On every Bright Eyes record, there's some kind of sound collage that begins it. Some of them have dialogue, some don't. I like it because it can kind of slow down the attention span a bit. It's a way to draw you in to the rest of the record.
Conor Oberst
#55. Rastafarianism and reggae music have always kind of resonated with me. Those ideas of redemption, liberation and overcoming oppression through music, weed and community. Fighting evil through love and music, I think it's just a really powerful idea.
Conor Oberst
#56. I went right from wunderkind to washed up. Old. Been around too long. That's just the way I feel. That's my internal dialogue.
Conor Oberst
#57. I'll never understand how destroying families through deportation benefits our society. How we treat the undocumented says a great deal about us as a people and whether or not we'll continue to fulfill the fundamental American promise of equality and opportunity for all.
Conor Oberst
#58. I think in a lot of ways unconditional love is a myth. My mom's the only reason I know it's a real thing.
Conor Oberst
#59. When I started writing songs, I was doing it for myself and a small circle of friends. And gradually, over the years, an audience became involved.
Conor Oberst
#60. Well morning came, and it dressed the sky in a lovely yellow gown. Shopping malls are opening in that narrow hallway of downtown, filled with people who are shopping for their lovers and their friends, singing I won't ever be lonely again
Conor Oberst
#61. We're all too busy working, entertaining ourselves With forty hours, television and prescription pills Well, I take two a day to help my brain behave It never does, but who's to say? At least my doctor gets paid.
Conor Oberst
#62. I like to feel the burn of the audience's eyes when I'm whispering all my darkest secrets into the microphone.
Conor Oberst
#63. I used to work at a school as a teacher's assistant, and my mom is a principal at an elementary school. I don't know, I think that's a pretty good life, teaching kids.
Conor Oberst
#64. In theory, I always think I should totally go back to school, because I don't want to start sinking slowly ... I want to learn, blah blah blah. Then I think about actually going and sitting in classes and, man, it sounds terrible.
Conor Oberst
#65. So when your new eyes meet mine they won't see no lies, just love ...
Conor Oberst
#66. In many ways Bright Eyes is really a studio project. We form bands to tour, but it really is - you know, we take the songs and we figure out how to decorate them and it's all in the studio; we build the songs that way.
Conor Oberst
#67. Maybe there's a different story when it comes to hip-hop or different genres, but as far as rock music goes, I think there is a sort of fear of saying things people might be apt to criticize. Our band is the opposite of that.
Conor Oberst
#68. I find that life is easier when it is just a blur With no details to confuse who or what or where I was So when the ending comes the full regret will be obscure
Conor Oberst
#69. I have a terrible memory in general, but one thing I've always been able to remember is my songs.
Conor Oberst
#70. Movement has been one of the few constants in my life, and I always feel a great sense of optimism when I set off to a new place.
Conor Oberst
#71. I've cried, and you'd think I'd be better for it, but the sadness just sleeps, and it stays in my spine the rest of my life.
Conor Oberst
#72. When you write a song, the goal is not to convey the details of your life. You should write a memoir or something if that's what you're going to do.
Conor Oberst
#73. I've always been slightly preoccupied with death or whatever those kind of silly big questions people will tell you to not spend your time worrying about.
Conor Oberst
#74. We've all seen the power music has to spread messages of solidarity and hope.
Conor Oberst
#75. When you're 16 or 17, I think like most people that age, the first time you experience certain things in life, whether it's heartbreak or death or love, obviously it's going to seem like a much bigger deal.
Conor Oberst
#76. Pronouns really don't matter in a song - 'I' or 'he' or 'she' or even subscribing a lyric to an inanimate object.
Conor Oberst
#77. We [Desaparecidos] have to make the message and the music and the packaging as appealing as possible - as Taco Bell as possible: mediocre and no one can be offended by it and everyone can sort of enjoy it and we can play it on the radio.
Conor Oberst
#78. I don't feel real confident expressing myself except when I'm writing. I feel kind of scatterbrained. I can see everything from both sides and that makes it hard to reach conclusions. Writing enables me to clarify things.
Conor Oberst
#79. I really just want to be warm yellow light that pours over everyone I love.
Conor Oberst
#81. If there's a criticism of 'Cassadaga' that I agreed with, it's that we left things in the oven too long, that songs were overstuffed, with too many ideas competing for space.
Conor Oberst
#82. I understand why people get desensitized and roll their eyes when they hear a protest song, or even a politician making some flowery speech. It doesn't really change anything.
Conor Oberst
#83. Much of appreciating art or music is really the interpretation of the listener. To a certain extent it's projection - it's what people need or lack in themselves that they then put upon these people that they admire.
Conor Oberst
#84. If you think about the concept of reincarnation, it's essentially uploading yourself and your spirit into a new form, a new hard drive as it were.
Conor Oberst
#85. My feeling is that I think writers in general tend to be self-conscious and it takes a bit of a leap of faith or just not giving a sh-t to write something you know people are going to criticize.
Conor Oberst
#87. I think there are some songs that stand the test of time better than others for sure. I think some songs go out of favour; I'll get sick of a song for a while, and I won't play it; then it'll make a comeback.
Conor Oberst
#88. The one recurring theme in my writing, and in my life in general, is confusion. The fact that anytime you think you really know something, you're going to find out you're wrong - that is the rule. The moments where you think you have something figured out, those are the exceptions.
Conor Oberst
#89. I'd rather be working for a paycheck, than waiting to win the lottery. Besides, maybe this time it's different, I mean, I really think you like me.
Conor Oberst
#90. And I sing and sing of awful things The pleasure that my sadness brings.
Conor Oberst
#91. Each song [Desaparecidos] has a seed that it came from. We're trying to take that and broaden it out and make it resonate with people.
Conor Oberst
#92. Since the songs were written over a five-year period, I think these are little snapshots. Some people call it political or topical, but I think each song is self-contained. I think it fits together as a picture of the last half-decade of time.
Conor Oberst
#93. We made love on the living room floor with the noise in the background of a televised war and in that defeaning pleasure i thought i heard someone say if we walk away they'll walk away
Conor Oberst
#94. You can only really understand good if you have bad, so the idea of heaven or anything that happens for eternity, even if it's nice, I can't imagine it being nice forever. Even the idea of forever is kind of ridiculous, which is unfortunate because it's kind of a nice thing to say, you know.
Conor Oberst
#95. In a coma, you don't dream, you just hope that someone sits with you.
Conor Oberst
#96. I started to sink like the moon tends to do if you stare at it too long Then you blink and it's gone
Conor Oberst
#97. I have many friends who are both Mexican and Mexican-American and others who, I guess you would say, are somewhere in between. The ironic thing is that all three of those categories often exist inside of the same family.
Conor Oberst
#98. If there's ever a kid out there that can't afford to buy the music, I still want them to hear it, and hopefully they'll go to the show, or buy a T-shirt from the band. That's the idea.
Conor Oberst
#99. There is no Hell when you die so don't look so worried
Conor Oberst
#100. We [ the Desaparecidos ] are perfectly prepared for people to hate what we're saying or not like what we're saying.
Conor Oberst
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