Favorite lyric

One of my favourites, if not my all-time favourite is on the Be-Bop Deluxe album, "Axe Victim" - a track called Adventues In A Yorkshire Landscape by Bill Nelson

Bridges and rivers
And buildings pulled down
Time spent in places my footsteps had found
Mirrors in ballrooms lie smashed on the ground,
Walking with November mists...

Pathways and windows
And movies in May
Quiet old ladies who soon pass away
Paintings and songs that I'd done in a day...
Going round in my head...

Fires on spires and chimneys of black
Fields on horizons with pylons that crack
With singing sad wires of council house mystics
To apply their statistics
And read the tea leaves,
Time knows no limits for days such as these


I'm especially fond of the first three lines.......

 

"You slammed my face down on the barbeque grill,
now my scars are all healing but my heart never will."

From "You Don't Love Me Anymore" by "Weird Al" Yankovic

 

Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine.

 

Can't forget these classic lines from John Prine:

Chased a rainbow down a one-way street -- dead end
And all my friends turned out to be insurance salesmen

or

The sun can play tricks with your eyes on the highway
The moon can lay sideways till the ocean stands still
But a person can't tell his best friend he loves him
Till time has stopped breathing, you're alone on the hill

 

Nobody loves me. It's true.

....Not like you do.

 

"Lonely is the room, the bed is made, the open window lets the rain in
Burning in the corner is the only one who dreams he had you with him
My body turns, and yearns for a sleep that will never come

It's never over...my kingdom for a kiss upon her shoulder
It's never over...all my riches for her smiles when I slept so soft against her
It's never over...all my blood for the sweetness of her laughter
It's never over...she's the tear that hangs inside my soul forever"

 

Ain't no money in poetry
That's what sets the poet free
I've had all the freedom I can stand

 

You have to be trusted by the people that you lie to
So that when they turn their backs on you
You get the chance to put the knife in

Pink Floyd "Dogs" from Animals (1977)

 

That whole song is quotable...but so sad, great choice.
(I'm new here, just checking out some old threads.)

 

I love "The French Inhaler" by Warren Zevon, I could post all the lyrics, but I love this verse:

Loneliness and frustration
We both came down with an acute case
When the lights came up at two I caught a glimpse of you
And your face looked like something
Death brought with him in his suitcase

Just a perfect kiss off, even Zevon's son Jordan loves it, though the song is about his mom.

The French Inhaler »

 

"The note I wrote as she read, she said,
'Has the Perrier gone straight to my head?'
'Or is life sick and cruel instead?'
Yes!
No no no no no no no no no..."

Or the most clever Morrissey lyric
"Now you send me your hardened regards
When once you'd send me love
Sincerely I must tell you
Your mild best wishes
They make me suspicious..."

 

Elvis Costello is untouchable as a lyricist.

 

Stooges

"Look out honey cuz I'm using technology"

"Soul radiation in the dead of night
love in the middle of a firefight"

"I'm a streetwalkin cheetah with a heart full of napalm
I'm a runaway son of the nuclear A-bomb"

Bowie was the master of good-awful lyrics, turgid but so great in some adolescent way

"The sniper in the brain
regurgitating drain
Incestuous and vain,
and many other last names"

"I'm having so much fun with the poisonous people
Spreading rumors and lies and stories they made up
Some make you sing and some make you scream
One makes you wish that you'd never been seen
But there's a shop on the corner that's selling papier mache
Making bullet-proof faces, Charlie Manson, Cassius Clay"

"We'll buy some drugs and watch a band
Then jump in the river holding hands"