Top 34 Quotes & Sayings by Jay Michaelson

The most recent incarnation of [Bob] Dylan has been the traveling journeyman/ charlatan who sings roots music, snarls dark lyrics that make "All Along the Watchtower" sound like a Disney tune, hosts an old-school radio show, and turns up in some unusual places, like ads for Chrysler and Victoria's Secret.

I suspect many readers might associate [Bob Dylan] with one of the shortest phases of his career, the time from 1963 to '65 when he wrote his most famous "protest songs," like "Blowin' in the Wind" and "The Times They Are a-Changin.'"

In honor of his new Nobel, this hard-core Dylanophile wants to share with you a song or two from each of his many incarnations. Because you deserve to know.

"Masters of War" [of Bob Dylan] wasn't peacenik, anti-war stuff. With its minor key and uncompromising final lines ("And I hope that you die/And your death'll come soon/ I will follow your casket/ In the pale afternoon...") this was a previously unknown hybrid of caustic political commentary and punk rock, which itself wouldn't be invented for another decade or so.

In late [Bob] Dylan, music is the key to immortality, even though the summer days are long gone.

We in the Jewish community are comparatively lucky. All of traditions have anti-gay pieces but the Jewish tradition doesn't have as many anti-sexuality and anti-body teachings. It's a lot easier to fit affirmation of sexuality and gender.

Religion is commodified; the educational system is a sham; and yet,[Bob] Dylan wonders, everyone has to stand naked sometime.

The best songs of this [modern] period - the apocalyptic "High Water," for example - return [Bob] Dylan to where he was in his first phase, updating and transforming American traditional music.

[Bob Dylan] is a preacher but also a sinner; a poet but also a pitchman; authentic all-American but also invented persona.

All relaxation does is allow the truth to be felt. The mind is cleared, like a dirty window wiped clean, and the magnitude of what we might ordinarily take for granted inspires tears.

Weirdly, by the way,[Bob] Dylan also managed to write several beautiful love songs, like "To Make You Feel My Love" (covered by Adele, Garth Brooks, Billy Joel, and who knows who else) and "Most of the Time." Go figure.

More of the symbols are stock (does [Bob] Dylan really have hogs lying out in the mud somewhere? I doubt it), but that's the point.

In the meantime [1963-65], [Bob] Dylan was writing some of the best love songs in the genre, like "Girl From the North Country," "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright," and "It Ain't Me, Babe."

[Bob] Dylan, like Johnny Cash and only a handful of others, simultaneously embodies the American dream and the harsh wake-up call that comes after it.

Unlike many Sixties rockers,[Bob] Dylan sang about getting old, about broken dreams. His return to roots music pointed the way for many of his contemporaries to forsake trying to sound 'current' and to instead make music that would stand the test of time.

The Buddha’s dharma didn’t teach peace and relaxation; it taught awakening—often rude awakening.

Funny thing about Bob Dylan, the newest Nobel laureate in literature: He's been a master of self-invention for more than 50 years, creating personae, wearing them like masks, and then discarding them as soon as they grew too familiar.

[Bob] Dylan is a contemporary Don Quixote, at once besotted by the promise of America and yet also undermining it.

What a miracle, that all we have to do to be beautifully loving creatures is just relax and allow.

Sometimes, sitting there on the cushion failing to watch your breath, it can feel like you’re the only weirdo weird enough to be wasting your time in this way. But you’re not! There are generations of weirdos, monasteries full of them, and we have the benefit of their accumulated wisdom.

Except in these latter-day songs, [Bob] Dylan is a grizzled old prophet who's already been to hell and back.

There’s no path to liberation that doesn’t pass through the shadow.

While [Bob] Dylan's folk fans thought he was selling out [in 1965-67], actually Dylan was lodging a stronger, deeper critique of American hypocrisy.

[Bob] Dylan would cut out phrases from magazines and then paste them together.

There has been a ton of excellent music in this period (along with a few misses), evoking scenes like a bar-room brawl at a border-town dive, a washed-up singer in a smoky lounge, and the scenes of violence in Bob Dylan latter-day music videos.I think the ethos of this period is best summed up in the 2001 song "Summer Days".

People should support equality because of their religion not despite it. These are the values that openness, inclusion, diversity promote. And they're directly opposed to the kind of enforced closet of certain interpretations of religion.

After an initial solo album in which the young [Bob] Dylan was just finding his voice (i.e., reinventing himself from the middle-class Robert Zimmerman into a pseudo-hobo Woody Guthrie), Dylan put out two acoustic albums that forever changed popular music.

I was raised a nice Jewish boy in a Conservative household. Went to Camp Ramah. It's funny actually. I think I enacted my queerness there unconsciously. I was kind of one of the weirdos. I was on staff and definitely interested in alternatives to what that social structure was supposed to be.

[Bob] Dylan thus deserves the Nobel Prize, not just for "new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition," as the Nobel committee aptly described his work, but also for embodying the contradictions within it.

Folk music had long been political but [Bob] Dylan's poetry took it to a new level.

Probably the high-watermark of [Bob] Dylan's career came after he plugged in his guitar ("Judas!" one fan shouted during a concert) and exploded American poetry, combining Beat aesthetics, psychedelic imagery, collage techniques.

I thought that coming out was going to be the end of my religious life but actually it was the beginning. Because it only afterwards that I could be honest about who I was, what I wanted, how I understood spirituality.

At the last stages of the journey, there’s no journey at all.

[Bob] Dylan's many quotations from classic American roots music (that song is from an album aptly titled Love and Theft) join the aging poet to a tradition that preceded him and hopefully will outlive him as well.