“If they ask you to stand still, you should dance.”

Source: Let the Great World Spin

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Colum McCann 71
Irish writer and journalist 1965

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“Could you try not aiming so much?" he asked me, still standing there. "If you hit him when you aim, it'll just be luck.”

He was speaking, communicating, and yet not breaking the spell. I then broke it. Quite deliberately. "How can it be luck if I aim?" I said back to him, not loud (despite the italics) but with rather more irritation in my voice than I was actually feeling. He didn't say anything for a moment but simply stood balanced on the curb, looking at me, I knew imperfectly, with love. "Because it will be," he said. "You'll be glad if you hit his marble — Ira's marble — won't you? Won't you be glad? And if you're glad when you hit somebody's marble, then you sort of secretly didn't expect too much to do it. So there'd have to be some luck in it, there'd have to be slightly quite a lot of accident in it."
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963), Seymour: An Introduction (1959)

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“I tell you: one must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you have still chaos in you.”

Variant: One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
Source: Thus Spoke Zarathustra

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“If you still have to ask, shame on you”

Louis Armstrong (1901–1971) American jazz trumpeter, composer and singer

Armstrong's response to the question what jazz is, cited by Max Jones et. al.: "Salute to Satchmo", I.P.C. Specialist & Professional Press Ltd 1970, page 25
Often misquoted as "Man, if you gotta ask you'll never know." Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations (third edition)

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