In the meantime [1963-65], [Bob] Dylan was writing some of the best love songs in the genre, like "Girl From the North Country," "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright," and "It Ain't Me, Babe."

After an initial solo album in which the young [Bob] Dylan was just finding his voice (i.e., reinventing himself from the middle-class Robert Zimmerman into a pseudo-hobo Woody Guthrie), Dylan put out two acoustic albums that forever changed popular music.

There’s no path to liberation that doesn’t pass through the shadow.

The best songs of this [modern] period - the apocalyptic "High Water," for example - return [Bob] Dylan to where he was in his first phase, updating and transforming American traditional music.

Folk music had long been political but [Bob] Dylan's poetry took it to a new level.

I thought that coming out was going to be the end of my religious life but actually it was the beginning. Because it only afterwards that I could be honest about who I was, what I wanted, how I understood spirituality.

Religion is commodified; the educational system is a sham; and yet,[Bob] Dylan wonders, everyone has to stand naked sometime.