Ahmir R B Quotes & Sayings

One night, I was out driving with a few friends of mine when the police pulled us over. We were told we fit the description of someone who had committed a robbery or stolen a car, though I don't really know what kind of description that could have been: three black kids in a Hyundai blasting U2's Joshua Tree on their way back from Bible study? — Ahmir Questlove Thompson

Sitting there at one twenty in the afternoon in a maroon Chrysler, I told myself that I had to cherish that magical moment, because there was no guarantee that I would never again know what it felt like to hear that for the first time. — Ahmir Questlove Thompson

I don't like the shrug. It's an abdication of responsibility for making sure that art keeps doing the things that art should do. If you shrug, that keeps the wheels turning the way they're turning. It lets corporations turn you into selfish consumers. It lets them fit you for a new pair of blinkers. And that means that predictability keeps getting prized over experimentation and product keeps getting prized over art. — Ahmir Questlove Thompson

What a shitty way to go through life, hiding your love for music so that people don't think the wrong things about you. — Ahmir Questlove Thompson

When she awakened, Hunter was watching her with eyes like dark velvet.
"You're the last woman I'll ever make love to," he said, stroking her breast, toying with the rosy peak. She stroked his sun-streaked hair and the hard nape of his neck, loving the feel of him against her.
"Good," she whispered.
"Keep me with you, Lara. I don't want to leave you. — Lisa Kleypas

What's the point in being here if you have to follow a computer? What is this, a fucking Turing test in reverse? — Ahmir Questlove Thompson

The question marks were piling up and I wasn't even ?uestlove yet. But Amir had questions, too, and the fishhook of the punctuation wasn't catching anything, and it wasn't straightening out either. — Ahmir Questlove Thompson

Trying to be white? What the hell does that mean? I've never understood that. How could anyone be white when they aren't white? Seems like a simple enough thing to prove, right? Hold out your arm next to someone else's arm and do a simple swatch test. Of course, what people mean when they say that is that there's some kind of authentic black experience that the accused isn't properly expressing. But what is the authentic experience? Clothes that wannabe gangbangers wear on the street? Hood style? What's authentic about that? For that matter, is fashion even a good marker of authenticity or race, anyway? Aren't clothes a second skin you wear over your real skin to obscure who you really are? Can they also express who you really are? — Ahmir Questlove Thompson

No one aspires to be the working man. Everyone aspires to be The Man. — Ahmir Questlove Thompson

Think of all the different ways that stories get told. I'm working with the James Brown people on a movie that will end up being the closest thing to a biopic that can possibly exist for a man like that, who was actively working for fifty years. The story is too big to tell straight on through, so they decided to deal with it by breaking it into five different episodes, five representative short stories. — Ahmir Questlove Thompson

In general, I don't like to blame the creators. They are making work that appeals to them and the people in the room with them. They are making something that is, at some level, genuine. But the distributors, the networks that bring art to the population, they are the ones who ensure that there's a flattening and narrowing. The younger me may have sat up all night with bandmates raging against Puffy or DMX or whoever, but the fact is that they were never the problem. The problem was that someone in the corporate chain of command felt that there was a need to play those songs fourteen times a day and to eliminate alternatives. — Ahmir Questlove Thompson

Graphene is dead; long live graphene. — Andre Geim

When I really like something, I tend to never listen to it again. I want to remember the feeling even more than I want to remember the music. If you get that record back out, you risk learning that it's not as good in reality as it is inside of you. Better to have the memory than to go back and have to adjust your truth. And even if it is every bit as good, you're just going to deconstruct it. You're going to use your brain instead of your feelings. As you get older, feelings are hard to come by. - Richard Nichols — Ahmir Questlove Thompson

Rich said, "As your get older, feelings are harder to come by." It was so simple and poignant. — Ahmir Questlove Thompson

Science fiction is huge and varied, and there's almost any sort of book or story you might imagine. — Ann Leckie

A good education is the greatest gift you can give yourself or anyone else. — Mahtab Narsimhan

There is no greater sorrow ... than to be mindful of the happy time. — Dante Alighieri

I remember being a teenager and being ashamed of my musical tastes, at least some of them. My Brian Wilson and Beach Boys fandom, which is as important to me as anything else, was almost like a porn stash. Hide that shit, someone's coming! You couldn't look like me and be black in West Philadelphia and love the Beach Boys the way I did. — Ahmir Questlove Thompson

Someone once said that blues and gospel were fraternal twins, close in spirit, neither one wanting to admit how similar they looked. — Ahmir Questlove Thompson

Words need to be sown like seeds. No matter how tiny a seed may be, when in lands in the right sort of ground it unfolds its strength and from being minute expands and grows to a massive size. — Seneca.

Respect for the word - to employ it with scrupulous care and an incorruptible heartfelt love of truth - is essential if there is to be any growth in a society or in the human race.To misuse the word is to show contempt for man. It undermines the bridges and poisons the wells. It causes Man to regress down the long path of his evolution. — Dag Hammarskjold

There was nothing wrong with it. But there wasn't everything right with it. That — Ahmir Questlove Thompson

On the plantations the slave owners would take their slaves' drums away because they didn't want them communicating with other slaves. They were afraid that the drum was some kind of magic signal system, a primal, coded language, which it was. And is. When the drums were taken away, other instruments were taken up - fifes and fiddles and the rest, and they were used for celebration and lamentation both, and a new kind of song sprung up, a work song, to document the labor in the fields, to pass the time, to pass on the content of the time, so that people would know what had happened. — Ahmir Questlove Thompson