Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story Quotes
"You've got eyes that can see right through me. You're not afraid of anything they've seen."
"You cannot return to where you've never left."
"Sometimes fear is the only place we can call home."
"Free yourself to be yourself if only you could see yourself."
"While I kept silence, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long."
"The stars are bright but do they know the universe is beautiful but cold."
"Once we are born, we begin to forget the very reason we came."
"Success should come with a health warning—for the workaholic and for those around them."
"The worst ones I can’t see. You can…you can."
"Music is all he ever wanted to do. He had the style, the attitude, the ambition."
"Music had a kind of musical dyslexia where he could play the most sophisticated parts or the most simple but not so much in between."
"Where might I find the smoking room? he asked, in perfect Queen’s English."
"Unteachable was one teacher’s reaction. Too smart for the school curriculum was another."
"Rare is a man so at home in his own body, equally celebrating or mocking all bodily functions."
"Adam was going to be serious about art and life but certainly not school. School was for fun."
"Adam might have been the most fun at school, but he was the first person to be serious about our band."
"A boy tries hard to be a man, his mother lets go of his hand."
"The elephant in the room is a phrase I enjoy, having at different times been either elephant or room."
"I’ve finally found my real name, I won’t be me when you see me again."
"Sometimes the night inspires unplanned communication between band and audience."
"London is too easily described as Babylon, and we innocents abroad are just discovering sex."
"I hadn’t done drugs since sniffing Lady Esquire shoe polish when I was fifteen."
"I knew there was darkness in the world, but I was sure it would not overpower us."
"And the beautiful searching eyes of our audience."
"Making a show out of yourself? Isn’t that the whole point of being in a rock ’n’ roll band?"
"We were still prayerful, and still to work out how to be 'in this world if not of it.'"
"One night in a hotel, a woman, arriving to service one of our rooms, found the three of us praying and joined in with us."
"To play music on the same field as Real Madrid or where Barcelona plays their percussive soccer."
"I can’t change the world, but I can change the world in me."
"It’s a pumped-up person who believes they can live a life free from worldly concerns."
"Music has function, it can get people from A to Z, but it won’t do any of that unless, first, it gets you there—you the singer or you the player."
"The greatest songwriting is never conclusive, but the search for conclusion."
"Ali and I were moving in together, and now we were beginning to move together."
"I feel I have a kind of perverse tic when I’m told not to say or do something."
"The drums are thin skin stretched tightly over hollow volumes, mostly of wood, which gives them their earthiness, their sexiness."
"The static. The kinetic. The static again. The mysterious distance between a man and a woman."
"All of us humans weighed down with so much stuff."
"It’s sorrow rather than joy that often glues people together."
"As a musician he has mastered the art of remaining the student."
"Christianity seemed to have become the enemy of the radical Jesus of Nazareth."
"Some days he will stand, gloves off, and as far as I can tell there’s absolutely no threat whatsoever in the room."
"I’m a Catholic," he would tell me. "And I can tell you the division of our small island was much more to do with keeping Harland & Wolff in the union than to protect the Protestants."
"The greatest words in the English language are some of the dullest, and some of the most romantic can be the most useless."
"Compromise is surely among the most underestimated words in the lexicon."
"Music for me has always been a lifeline in times of turbulence."
"The cerebral nature of our inquiries, mine specifically, may sometimes appear pretentious."
"The thought was dawning that one of us would take longer than the other to work out how to be married."
"Being in a rock ’n’ roll band turned out to be the perfect excuse for such stunted growth."
"Maybe Americans have a right to be more demanding custodians of their own mythology."
"There’s nothing any man can make that is as beautiful as that child in that pram."
"This is just the end of something for U2; we have to go away and dream it all up again."
"Is this why we’d started our band? Just to be rich and famous?"
"It would be a shame to look like a band too stupid to enjoy being at number one."
"Well you left my heart empty as a vacant lot for any spirit to haunt."
"If Jordan was born in a storm, her sister, Eve, was the storm."
"In the garden I was playing the tart, I kissed your lips and broke your heart."
"It’s no secret that the stars are falling from the sky."
"A man will rise, a man will fall, from the sheer face of love, like a fly from a wall."
"Will it make it easier on you, now you’ve got someone to blame?"
"You say love is a temple, love a higher law."
"It’s inevitable that one falls out with one’s biographer, isn’t it?"
"The mischief maker who streaked through the school corridors in Mount Temple was now streaking the halls of grande dame hotels in Paris, New York, and Sydney."
"That rare ability he developed to answer his hotel phone. While asleep."
"The drinking, once his playmate, was now his boss."
"Sydney marked the moment. It might have been the end of Adam’s youth, but that was better than the alternative."
"I’ve never been to AA, but I get a sense of the spirituality of the 12 Steps in the idea of 'breathing underwater'."
"I listen through your ears, and through your eyes I can see."
"I’ve got just enough low self-esteem to get me where I want to go."
"Jazz is about the moment you’re in. Being modern’s not about the future; it’s about the present."
"The showman gives you front row to his heart."
"We confuse our self-esteem with our self-expression."
"Living well, as someone put it, is the best revenge. Come to think of it, just living will do."
"Making a spectacle of falling apart is just the start of the show."
"We don’t shortchange an audience of a top C!"
"Eight hundred years of oppression disappearing in eight seconds."
"If you’ve ever wondered about the usefulness of royals, I would always point to this incident."
"The song, released by Passengers on Original Soundtracks 1 later in the year, remains one of my few recorded favorites."
"Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief."
"The performers who enthrall me are the ones who mistrust the stage."
"Even if you’re at the back of a stadium or a festival crowd, still we want your complete attention."
"On a really great night you are the crowd and the crowd is you."
"What do you call a person who before the magic trick sees the rabbit being placed in the top hat and is still surprised when the rabbit is revealed? A magician."
"Owning up to being a showman is probably what saved me."
"You don’t have to put up a fight, you don’t have to always be right."
"The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because He has anointed me to preach good news to the poor."
"We fight, all the time, you and I, that’s alright, we’re the same soul."
"The search for common ground starts with a search for higher ground."
"In science and in medicine, I was a stranger, you took me in."
"Poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings."
"Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice."
"The protection of a fundamental human right, the right to dignity and a decent life."
"Sometimes it falls upon a generation to be great. You can be that great generation."
"Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural."
"Make daylight the detergent. Transparency is the vaccine for corruption."
"Unless we’re ruled properly, we cannot move forward. Everything else is second. Everything."
"The people have the power to dream, to rule, to wrestle the world from fools."
"The selling of diamonds is the selling of dreams that don’t really exist."
"A country is a story we tell ourselves."
"The success story that is Ireland was not written for us, it’s a story we wrote for ourselves."
"The stories a country tells of itself are essential to its identity and its development."