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The moments of perfect pleasure in Johnson's songs, and the beauty of those songs, remind one that it is not the simple presence of evil that is unbearable; what is unbearable is the impossibility of reconciling the facts of evil with the beauty of the world.

— Greil Marcus

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More quotes by Greil Marcus

Complete freedom meant — no one knew. It was most readily defined in the negative: not this gap between the heaven promised in the new advertisements and the everyday satisfactions I can buy.

Van Morrison remains a singer who can be compared to no other in the history of modern popular music.

When That Rough God Goes Riding: Listening to Van Morrison (2010)

Every youth movement presents itself as a loan to the future, and tries to call in its lien in advance, but when there is no future all loans are canceled.

While it's well known that as one gets older, one tends to find changes in the world at large unsettling, confusing, fucking irritating, a rebuke to one's very existence, it's generally not a good idea to make a career out of saying so. (emphasis in the original)

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Greil Marcus (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.