City Lore

James Douglas Morrison was an American singer, songwriter, musician, poet and founding member of The Doors.

Sourced

• You know the day destroys the night,
  Night divides the day,
  Tried to run —
  Tried to hide —
  Break on through to the other side!
  • "Break Through (To The Other Side)" from The Doors (1967)

• We chased our pleasures here,
  Dug our treasures there,
  But can you still recall
  The time we cried?
  Break on through to the other side.
  • "Break on Through (To The Other Side)" from The Doors

• It hurts to set you free, but you’ll never follow me.
  • "The End" from The Doors (1967)

• People are strange when you're a stranger
  Faces look ugly when you're alone
  Women seem wicked when you're unwanted
  Streets are uneven when you're down.
  • "People Are Strange" on the album Strange Days (1967)

• When you're strange
  Faces come out of the rain
  When you're strange
  No one remembers your name
  When you're strange.
  • "People Are Strange" on the album Strange Days (1967)

• Five to one, baby
  One in five
  No one here gets out alive, now
  You get yours, baby
  I'll get mine
  Gonna make it, baby
  If we try.
  • "Five to One" on the album Waiting for the Sun (1968)

• The old get older
  And the young get stronger
  May take a week
  And it may take longer
  They got the guns
  But we got the numbers
  Gonna win, yeah
  We're takin' over
  Come on!
  • "Five to One" on the album Waiting for the Sun (1968)

• At first flash of Eden, We race down to the sea.
  Standing there on Freedom's shore.
  Waiting for the sun...
  • "Waiting for the Sun" on the album Morrison Hotel (1970)

• This is the strangest life I’ve ever known.
  • "Waiting for the Sun" on the album Morrison Hotel (1970)

• Killer on the road
  His brain is squirming like a toad.
  • "Riders on the Storm" from the album L.A. Woman (1971).

• Listen to this, and I'll tell you 'bout the heartache
  I'll tell you 'bout the heartache and the loss of God.
  • "The Wasp (Texas Radio And The Big Beat)" on the albums L. A. Woman (1971) and An American Prayer (1978)

• I'll tell you this —
  No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn.
  • "The Wasp (Texas Radio And The Big Beat)" on the albums L. A. Woman (1971) and An American Prayer (1978)

• Mute nostril agony.
  • "Horse Latitudes"

• Don't let me die in an automobile
  I wanna lie in an open field
  Want the snakes to suck my skin
  Want the worms to be my friends
  Want the birds to eat my eyes
  As here I lie
  The clouds fly by
  • "The End; Live in New York" (1970), "The End; Live at The Hollywood Bowl" (1968)

The Lords: Notes on Vision

• Yoga powers.
  To make oneself invisible or small.
  To become gigantic and reach to the farthest things.
  To change the course of nature.
  To place oneself anywhere in space or time.
  To summon the dead.
  To exalt senses and perceive inaccessible images, of events on other worlds,
  in one's deepest inner mind, or in the minds of others.

• (Windows work two ways, mirrors one way.)
  You never walk through mirrors or swim through windows.

• The world becomes an apparently infinite,
  yet possibly finite, card game.
  Image combinations,
  permutations,
  comprise the world game.

• Cinema has evolved in two paths. One is spectacle. Like the phantasmagoria, its goal is the creation of a total substitute sensory world. The other is peep show, which claims for its realm both the erotic and the untampered observance of real life, and imitates the keyhole or voyeur's window without need of color, noise, grandeur.

• The subject says "I see first lots of things which dance — then everything becomes gradually connected".

• Few would defend a small view of Alchemy as "Mother of Chemistry", and confuse its true goal with those external metal arts. Alchemy is an erotic science, involved in buried aspects of reality, aimed at purifying and transforming all being and matter. Not to suggest that material operations are ever abandoned. The adept holds to both the mystical and physical work.

• They can picture love affairs of chemicals and stars, a romance of stones, or the fertility of fire. Strange, fertile correspondences the alchemists sensed in unlikely orders of being. Between men and planets, plants and gestures, words and weather.

• Cinema returns us to anima, religion of matter, which gives each thing its special divinity and sees gods in all things and beings. Cinema, heir of alchemy, last of an erotic science.

• The Lords. Events take place beyond our knowledge or control. Our lives are lived for us. We can only try to enslave others. But gradually, special perceptions are being developed. The idea of the "Lords" is beginning to form in some minds. We should enlist them into bands of perceivers to tour the labyrinth during their mysterious nocturnal appearances. The Lords have secret entrances and they know disguises. But they give themselves away in minor ways. Too much glint of light in the eye. A wrong gesture. Too long and curious a glance.

• More or less, we're all afflicted with the psychology of the voyeur. Not in a strictly clinical or criminal sense, but in our whole physical and emotional stance before the world. Whenever we week to break this spell of passivity, our actions are cruel and awkward and generally obscene, like an invalid who has forgotten to walk.

The New Creatures

• I can't believe this is happening
  I can't believe all these people
  are sniffing each other
  & backing away
  teeth grinning
  hair raised, growling, here in
  the slaughtered wind

• Do you dare
  deny my
  potency
  my kindness
  or forgiveness?

• Camel caravans bear
  witness guns to Caesar.
  Hordes crawl and seep inside
  the walls. The streets
  flow stone. Life goes
  on absorbing war. Violence
  kills the temple of no sex.

• Cool pools
  from a tired land
  sink now
  in the peace of evening
  Clouds weaken
  and die.
  The sun, an orange skull,
  whispers quietly, becomes an
  island, & is gone.

  There they are
  watching
  us everything
  will be dark.
  The light changed.
  We were aware
  knee-deep in the fluttering air
  as the ships move on
  trains in their wake.

• This is it
  no more fun
  the death of all joy
  has come.

An American Prayer (1978)

• Indians scattered on dawn's highway bleeding
  Ghosts crowd the young child's fragile eggshell mind.

  Me and my mother and father, and a grandmother and a grandfather. were driving through the desert, at dawn, and a truck load of Indian workers had either hit another car, or just — I don't know what happened — but there were Indians scattered all over the highway, bleeding to death.
  So the car pulls up and stops. That was the first time I tasted fear. I musta' been about four — like a child is like a flower, his head is just floating in the breeze, man. The reaction I get now thinking about it, looking back — is that the souls of the ghosts of those dead Indians... maybe one or two of 'em... were just running around freaking out, and just leaped into my soul. And they're still there.

• Do you know the warm progress under the stars?
  Do you know we exist?
  Have you forgotten the keys to the kingdom?
  Have you been born yet
  & are you alive?

• Let's reinvent the gods, all the myths of the ages
  Celebrate symbols from deep elder forests

• Now listen to this...

Ill tell you about texas radio and the big beat

Soft driven, slow and mad Like some new language

Reaching your head with the cold, sudden fury of a divine messenger

Let me tell you about heartache and the loss of god

Wandering, wandering in hopeless night

Out here in the perimeter there are no stars...

Out here we is stoned...

Immaculate.

• O great creator of being
  grant us one more hour to
  perform our art
  and perfect our lives

  The moths & atheists are doubly divine
  & dying
  We live, we die
  and death not ends it

• I touched her thigh
  and death smiled

• We have assembled inside this ancient
  & insane theatre
  To propagate our lust for life
  & flee the swarming wisdom
  of the streets

• Resident mockery
  give us an hour for magic

• I'm sick of dour faces
  Staring at me from the T.V.
  Tower.
  I want roses in
  my garden bower; dig?

• Death makes angels of us all
  and gives us wings
  where we had shoulders
  smooth as raven's
  claws

• I will not go
  Prefer a
  feast of Friends
  To the Giant family

• The program for this evening
  is not new. You have seen
  This entertainment through and through.
  You've seen your birth, your
  life and death; you might recall
  all of the rest — (did you
  have a good world when you
  died?) — enough to base
  a movie on?

• They're making a joke of our universe

• Let's swim to the moon, uh huh
  Let's climb through the tide
  Penetrate the evenin'
  that the City sleeps to hide

• Do you know freedom exists in a school book
  Did you know madmen are running our prisons
  Within a jail
  Within a gaol
  Within a white free protestant maelstrom
  We're perched headlong on the edge of boredom
  We're reaching for death on the end of a candle
  We're trying for something that's already found us.

• Always a playground instructor, never a Killer

• Her cunt gripped him like a warm friendly hand.

Interviews

• Take an Indian home to lunch.
  • When asked how the USA should celebrate the Bicentennial, as quoted in Avant Garde Magazine (March 1968)

Misattributed

• You know that it would be untrue
  You know that I would be a liar
  If I was to say to you
  Girl, we couldn't get much higher.
  Come on baby, light my fire —
  Come on baby, light my fire —
  Try to set the night on fire.
  • "Light My Fire" (1967). Because Jim Morrison sang this as a breakthrough hit for The Doors and was the group's primary songwriter, this is often mistakenly thought to have been written by him. It was actually written by guitarist Robby Krieger, as were some other songs including "Love Her Madly," "You're Lost Little Girl" and "Touch Me" (as well as some other songs on the Soft Parade album). The second verse of the song, however, was written by Morrison.

• There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.
  • Aldous Huxley, using the term "the doors of perception" which originated with William Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. It is sometimes credited to Morrison because he cited it in interviews as the inspiration for the name The Doors and without always crediting Huxley as the source.