Melancholy is as seductive as Ecstasy.
I remember all too well the premiere of Ecstasy when I watched my bare bottom bounce across the screen and my mother and father sat there in shock.
Ecstasy is not really part of the scene we can do on celluloid.
One may speak about anything on earth with fire, with enthusiasm, with ecstasy, but one only speaks about oneself with avidity.
Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.
Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough.
Although the events we appear to perceive in dreams are illusory, our feelings in response to dream content are real. Indeed, most of the events we experience in dreams are real; when we experience feelings, say, anxiety or ecstasy, in dreams, we really do feel anxious or ecstatic at the time.
My early colleagues and myself helped create the life styles of Americans and, by osmosis, of the rest of the world. I found it difficult to reconcile success with humility. I tried it first, but it meant avoiding the very essence of my career - total exhilaration and the ecstasy of creativity.
What I absolutely want is to suggest that before it's anything else, redemption is God mending the bicycle of our souls; God bringing out the puncture repair kit, re-inflating the tires, taking off the rust, making us roadworthy once more. Not so that we can take flight into ecstasy, but so that we can do the next needful mile of our lives.
I'm from Jersey, so I have a love of T.G.I. Friday's and chain restaurants in general. When you go to a Friday's, it seems like everyone's on ecstasy and way too happy anyway.
Most people are at a concert because they want to be inspired, entertained, moved; we musicians have the mission to be bringers of joy, of ecstasy.
The only time I've ever really felt envy is when I've watched people make music, which made my time living in the now-legendary Jazz Loft at 821 Sixth Avenue in New York a constant source of agony and ecstasy!
Anyone who hasn't experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.
Nature best teaches how to pray, and how to reverence all the gifts the Almighty has given us. She is like a vast outspread handkerchief, embroidered with God's eternal name, on which we may dry alike our tears of sorrow and of joy; she turns weeping into ecstasy, and fills our hearts with speechless, quiet reverence and resignation.
