I became a human jukebox, learning all these songs I'd always known, discovering the basics of what I do. The cathartic part was in the essential act of singing. When is it that the voice becomes an elixir? It's during flirting, courtship, sex. Music's all that.

Jeff Buckley

Be seriously involved with growing, with your own development, and never fear. Be the kind of person who is naturally powerful, positive, ingenious, open, to the highest degree. Be the best. No negativity. No weakness. No acquiescence to fear or disaster. No errors of ignorance. No evasion to reality.

Jeff Buckley

powerful ignorance reality

My favorite kind of music is the stuff that stops time. You put something on to sit there and let an experience go through you. To look at yourself clearly through a song. It's true of all art, all mediums, but for some reason music has a direct line straight into people.

Jeff Buckley

song people art

We are born to live, we are born to understand, we are born to carry a cursed pattern and be transformed by pain.

Jeff Buckley

patterns born pain

Somebody asked me what I wanted to do. I just said I wanted to…just to give back to it what it’s given me. And to meet all the other people that are doing it…just to be in the world, really.

Jeff Buckley

giving people world

Grace is what matters. In anything. Especially life, especially growth, tragedy, pain, love, death. About people, that's what matters. That's a quality I admire very greatly. It keeps you from reaching for the gun too quickly; it keeps you from destroying things too foolishly; it sort of keeps you alive and keeps you open for more understanding.

Jeff Buckley

what-matters pain gun

I just want to have a completely adventurous, passionate, weird life.

Jeff Buckley

adventurous passionate want

Sensitivity isn't about being wimpy. It's about being so painfully aware that a flea landing on a dog is like a sonic boom

Jeff Buckley

sensitivity fleas dog

I don't really need to be remembered. I hope the music's remembered.

Jeff Buckley

remembered needs

Your soul can fly outward, stringed to your ribcage like a shimmering kite in the shape of an open hand. Be still and listen to the evidence of your own holiness.

Jeff Buckley

shapes soul hands

Music should be like making love. Sometimes you want it soft and tender, another time you want it hard and aggressive.

Jeff Buckley

making-love want sometimes

You can't kill the past by denying the past. You can kill it only by making it obsolete. And even in that, you have to find honor in the past. You can't hack off pieces of yourself, and expect them to grow again.

Jeff Buckley

pieces honor past

I have no advice for anybody; except to, you know, be awake enough to see where you are at any given time, and how that is beautiful, and has poetry inside. Even places you hate.

Jeff Buckley

hate advice beautiful

The only goal is in the process. The process is the thing…with little flashes of light here and there. Those are the gigs, those are the live shows. But it's the life in between—that's all I got.

Jeff Buckley

here-and-there light goal

I prefer to learn everything through music. If you want divinity, the music in every human being and their love for music is pretty much it. It's the big indication of their spirituality and their ability to love and make love, or feel pain or joy, and really manifest it, really be real.

Jeff Buckley

pain real joy

I love anything that haunts me...and never leaves

Jeff Buckley

I don’t know, I don’t know that I’m missing anything. I just think too much sometimes. Sometimes I’m even happy because I’m so engaged in the thinking. But that’s the great thing about performing, and why it is also sexual, because in that moment – or in that evening – I’m completely in the present for once in my life. Nothing that came before or anything that may come after: only what matters is now. And that’s what human beings crave.

Jeff Buckley

what-matters missing thinking

Time to write and sing, to laugh, to listen, to discover, to cry,

Jeff Buckley

music time song

There's the moon asking to stay long enough for the clouds to fly me away

Jeff Buckley

moon expression clouds

If you feel blocked, do not turn to others, but look inside, in silence, for the enemy of your progress.

Jeff Buckley

progress silence enemy

Sometimes if somebody you feel you need... the whole universe tells you that you have to have her, you start watching her favorite TV shows all night, you start buying her the things she needs, you start drinking her drinks, you start smoking her bad cigarettes, you start picking up her nuances in her voice, you sleep in safe sometimes the most dangerous thing... this is called Mojo Pin.

Jeff Buckley

drinking sleep night