Rolling Stone interview (2005)
Context: I was in my room listening on headphones on a tape recorder. It's very intimate. It's like talking to somebody on the phone, like talking to John Lennon on the phone. I'm not exaggerating to say that. This music changed the shape of the room. It changed the shape of the world outside the room; the way you looked out the window and what you were looking at.
I remember John singing "Oh My Love." It's like a little hymn. It's certainly a prayer of some kind — even if he was an atheist. "Oh, my love/For the first time in my life/My eyes can see/I see the wind/Oh, I see the trees/Everything is clear in our world." For me it was like he was talking about the veil lifting off, the scales falling from the eyes. Seeing out the window with a new clarity that love brings you. I remember that feeling.
Yoko came up to me when I was in my twenties, and she put her hand on me and she said, "You are John's son." What an amazing compliment!
“Sing on, with hymns uproarious,
Ye humble and aloof,
Look up! and oh how glorious
He has restored the roof!”
"Hymn", from Mount Zion (1931).
Poetry
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John Betjeman 30
English poet, writer and broadcaster 1906–1984Related quotes
Io Victis (1883). Compare: "Now it seems to me, when it can not be helped that defeat is great", Walt Whitman, To a Foiled European Revolutionaire.
“We will now sing forth, hymn 405, 'Oh God, what on earth is my hairdo all about?”
“Come oh come ye tea-thirsty restless ones -- the kettle boils, bubbles and sings, musically.”
Source: Collected Poems and Plays of Rabindranath Tagore
“Gardens are not made by singing 'Oh, how beautiful!' and sitting in the shade.”
Source: Complete Verse