Jerry Garcia Quotes

I think that America is in danger of losing its adventurous spirit in the cause of some kind of illusion of safety, or substitute of law and order there.

The world that you can go walk outside and walk around the block. That's reality. The reality that's being talked about is something else entirely.

Magic is what we do, music is how we do it.

Run faster, jump higher, reach farther, and you'll always win! live life expecting the worst, hoping for the best, and living for the future! Somebody has to do something, and it's just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us.

If we had any nerve at all, if we had any real balls as a society, or whatever you need, whatever quality you need, real character, we would make an effort to really address the wrongs in this society, righteously.

There's a lot there to enlarge you. That's part of the value of being in an extended family is that it enlarges you. It makes you bigger. It makes you more.

How many Beethovens are there that just for lack of the training, the world doesn't get exposed to.

Don't tell me this town 'aint got no heart

Our strong suit is what we do, and our audience.

It's pretty clear now that what looked like it might have been some kind of counterculture is, in reality, just the plain old chaos of undifferentiated weirdness.

I mean, whatever kills you kills you, and your death is authentic no matter how you die.

As a musician you fall into certain patterns that you're not conscious of, unless you start listening to yourself on tape a lot. If you do that you start recognizing habits; then you have to try and break them.

So we are pretty convinced we don't want to play huge stadiums unless we can play them well.

Done time in the lock-up, done time on the streets. Done time on the upswing, and time in defeat. I know what I'm askin'. I know it's a lot. Just to say that I love you. Believe it or not.

You have to get past the idea that music has to be one thing. To be alive in America is to hear all kinds of music constantly: radio, records, churches, cats on the street, everywhere music. And with records, the whole history of music is open to everyone who wants to hear it.

I don't think that Slaughterhouse-Five was successful movie material. In fact, Vonnegut's books mostly I don't feel are movie material.

I equate Deadheads to people that like black licorice. There aren't many people that like black licorice, but the ones that do, REALLY REALLY like it! Or buttermilk, or whatever.

It's odd that there is a high level of appreciation of nature. There is the aesthetic side that really loves nature and beauty.

Some things may work, but they definitely won't work every time. Some things may work at various times.

Stuff that's hidden and murky and ambiguous is scary because you don't know what it does.

I recognize that as a musician there is a certain chauvinism attached to it, which is the thing of, "I spent my time learning how to play. You didn't spend time learning how to play, therefore, you are not a musician."

And there's a lot of that stuff with people bringing their kids, kids bringing their parents, people bringing their grandparents - I mean, it's gotten to be really stretched out now. It was never my intention to say, this is the demographics of our audience.

I'm goin' where the wind don't blow so strange, maybe off on some high cold mountain chain.

You need music, I don't know why. It's probably one of those Joe Campbell questions, why we need ritual. We need magic, and bliss, and power, myth, and celebration and religion in our lives, and music is a good way to encapsulate a lot of it.

You ain't gonna learn what you don't wanna know.

It's much too late to do anything about rock & roll now.

Why it's okay for people to tape the shows? Because even so, there's no way you can bottle up the experience. You can take the notes home, but that experience is one you have to be there.

I have always had this basic biological question in terms of evolution, if the drive to evolution is to like survive. An organism that survives well, there is really no need for consciousness in there.

People may need something to celebrate. They need a context in which to celebrate things. They need something that fills the void that's left by the bankruptcy of religion and so forth.

I think that the revolution in music is over, and what's left is a mop-up action. It's a matter of the news getting out to everybody else. I think that the important changes have already happened, changes in consciousness. It's mostly a matter of everything else catching up to that. Everything is traditionally slow - much faster than it ever has been on earth but still far, far too slow.

The alternate media are becoming important and viable alternatives to playing live. Records, videos, that kind of thing. They're going to start to count for something. Because there's only a limited amount of us-time available to us.

Either you were a hoodlum, or you were a puddle on the sidewalk.

Death comes at you no matter what you do in this life, and to equate drugs with death is a facile comparison.

I read somewhere that 77 per cent of all the mentally ill live in poverty. Actually, I'm more intrigued by the 23 per cent who are apparently doing quite well for themselves.

Cats on the bandstand, give them each a big hand, anyone who sweats like that must be all right.

Right now, America is under the gun. It's being tested and is being co-opted in a big way.

Seeing sound, the high order stuff that's not audible still affects how everything else behaves. There might be a visual metaphor for that somewhere.

Constantly choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil.

I sat down to my supper, twas a bottle of red whiskey.

If you think of music as a language, the space part is where you throw out all the syntax.

To get really high is to forget yourself. And to forget yourself is to see everything else. And to see everything else is to become an understanding molecule in evolution, a conscious tool of the universe.

You do not merely want to be considered just the best of the best. You want to be considered the only one who does what you do.

In folk music, I've always been fond of the fragment. The song that has one verse. And you don't know anything about the characters, you don't know what they're doing, but they're doing something important. I love that. I'm really a sucker for that kind of song.

I like all the kinds of music I've been into. I'm certainly not a purist in that I will only play country licks in a country song or blues licks in blues stuff. The thing I would like to be able to do is to make the music sound right no matter what it is. If somebody else wants to have a label for it, then that's their business.

Sometimes you have to be clever.

I'll try any guitar just to see if it's different in an effort to see if it will lead me anywhere. I'm trying to have a guitar built. What's needed is better instruments, better amplifiers, better hardware for electric music to get better.

The information is there, you may not perceive it, but it does affect the lower orders. There are places where it just peaks out. It is like the color spectrum, it just simply goes beyond where you can perceive it any more but it is still going on. If you decide that the invisible continuation of the color spectrum is important to your sense of what reality is about, then you would want to extend it. Extend it as far as you could, as an aesthetic.

Live life expecting the worst, hoping for the best, and living for the future!