Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory/Quotes

And you listen to the music,
and you love to sing along,
and you want to get the meaning out
of each and every song,
and you find yourself a message,
some words to call your own,
and take them home.

—Bread, "Guitar Man"

"Hey man did you
write that for me?
It seems like it,
it spoke to me."
You made it up,
you made it up,
you made it up,
you make it up.

—Starflyer 59, "M23"

"I don't know what it's about. I'm just the drummer. Ask Peter."

—Phil Collins, when asked about the meaning of "The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway"

"Everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified."

—Sherwood Anderson

"Some thought there was some greater symbolic meaning behind this infamous comic, and a couple of readers actually analyzed it as a representation of my feelings of women being inferior. Honestly, I just wanted to put Dominic in a He-Man harness because I thought he'd look silly."

—Michael "Mookie" Terracciano

Suppose you are studying Moby-Dick. Anybody with any common sense would say Moby-Dick is a big white whale, since the characters in the book refer to it as a big white whale roughly eleven thousand times. So in your paper, you say Moby-Dick is actually the Republic of Ireland. Your professor, who is sick to death of reading papers and never liked Moby-Dick anyway, will think you are enormously creative.

—Dave Barry, "College Admissions"

It's possible to read too much into this shit.

—Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw, "'Runaway Train' by Soul Asylum is actually about a man being absorbed into the vagina of an evil shapeshifting alien"

Oh no! They take it too far.
Now all the greatest love songs
Are secretly about heroin.

—Lemon Demon, "Being a Rock Star"

"Saw Cannonball Run II in West Virginia. After the movie, everybody broke up into discussion groups. Trying to get through that Burt Reynolds subtext. I believe Heloise is supposed to be a Christ figure." (If anyone knows the correct quote, please fix this.)

—Dennis Miller

"Why in the hell do journalists insist on coming up with a second rate Freudian evaluation on my lyrics when 90% of the time they've transcribed the lyrics incorrectly?"

—Kurt Cobain

This game - discovering feelings that writers didn't know they had on the basis of things they didn't say - is great fun, and anyone can play it. (There's is a bit-part player in "Prince Caspian" called Mrs Prizzle. Well then, the fact that Lewis chose this name proves that he had an unconscious desire to spank women using the penis of a bull. See how easy it is?)

—Andrew Rilstone, Lipstick on My Scholar

You know, I always thought that your short hair was somehow symbolic of your character growth
Me too! I guess it was just a crappy haircut.
Weird.

—The Order of the Stick

No. That's not how English class works. What we CAN do is pretend the book is a towering riddle of symbology designed to obfuscate a central theme so simplistic that it can be expressed in a single paragraph during a one-hour midterm.

—Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

Every fiction should have a moral; and, what is more to the purpose, the critics have discovered that every fiction has. (...) In short, it has been shown that no man can sit down to write without a very profound design. Thus to authors in general much trouble is spared. A novelist, for example, need have no care of his moral. It is there--that is to say, it is somewhere--and the moral and the critics can take care of themselves. When the proper time arrives, all that the gentleman intended, and all that he did not intend, will be brought to light, in the "Dial," or the "Down-Easter," together with all that he ought to have intended, and the rest that he clearly meant to intend:--so that it will all come very straight in the end.

—Edgar Allan Poe, Never Bet the Devil Your Head

Jack [main character]: You sure you're not reading into [my poem] too much?
Monika: Ahaha! I could be!
Jacksepticeye (as Monika): But it's a fucking literature club, Jack. I kinda have to read into things all the time. It's what we do, you dumbass.
Jacksepticeye (as Jack): Okay, Monika. Jesus, relax.

—THIS IS GETTING CREEPY - Doki Doki Literature Club - Part 3

Joel: Few know the true meaning of Toto's Africa, a song about Archbishop Lefebvre. A brief gloss on this hymn to the saintly SSPX^[1] founder:
[...]
Joel: A mere bit of eisegesis I'm afraid. But if it makes you feel better, here's a picture of +Lefebvre blessing the rains (or something) in Africa
Frank James: Well, it was inspired by the Catholic school stories of the Marianist missionaries who worked in Africa and did indeed bless the rains. Alas, tantalizingly close...
[...]
Verbia: The plot thickens... I did some research around Jeff Porcaro, co-writer of Africa. Turns out he was a Roman Catholic^[2] from... South Windsor, Connecticut. For those who don't know, the SSPX operates St. Lawrence Chapel in South Windsor.

— This Twitter thread

1. ↑ Society of Saint Pius X
2. ↑ also, he was a member of Catholic Youth Organization when he was a kid, and his first band was formed in CYO