Jeff Mangum Quotes:

And one day we will die and our ashes will fly from the aeroplane over the sea. But for now we are young; let us lay in the sun and count every beautiful thing we can see.

source: - "Song: "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea"". 1998.

Topics: Life, Beautiful, Sea, Very Beautiful

I would go to bed every night and have dreams about having a time machine and somehow I'd have the ability to move through time and space freely, and save Anne Frank.

source: - "Neutral Milk Hotel". Interview with Mike McGonigal, pitchfork.com. December 21, 1997.

Topics: Dream, Moving, Night, Time Machine

Soft silly music is meaningful, magical.

source: - "Song: "Oh Comely" ("In the Aeroplane Over the Sea")". February 10, 1998.

Topics: Meaningful, Silly, Music Is

How strange it is to be anything at all

source: - "Song: 'In the Aeroplane Over the Sea'". 1997.

Topics: Strange

God is a place you will wait for the rest of your life

source: - "Song: 'Two-Headed Boy Part Two'". 1998.

Topics: Waiting

The world is this incredibly blurry, crazy dream that I'm just sort of stumbling through.

source: - "Neutral Milk Hotel". Interview with Mike McGonigal, pitchfork.com. February 11, 2008.

Topics: Dream, Crazy, World, Blurry

You know, you struggle and cry and moan and thrash around and beat your head against the wall... and then you realize that you're just yourself, and you come to terms with yourself struggling. There are some serious, serious things to deal with in terms of the immensity of the suffering that we humans create for ourselves and for the world around us.

source: - Source: pitchfork.com

Topics: Wall, Struggle, Suffering

Usually, I create tunes that are fragmented. I think the biggest obstacle for people with their creativity is that they feel they have to sit down and create this finished, polished product.

source: - "Neutral Milk Hotel". Interview with Mike McGonigal, pitchfork.com. February 11, 2008.

Topics: Creativity, Thinking, People, Fragmented, Biggest Obstacles

I'm trying to find peace in the world, as it is. I'm feeling this sort of slow stripping of my mind, like the layers of an onion. I'm starting to see through all these little structures that have been imposed on me by my society that tell me how I'm supposed to view my life and the world. What I'm supposed to find to be important and what is not. Sometimes you see through so much of it that you feel like you're just a leaf blowing on the wind.

source: - Source: pitchfork.com

Topics: Feelings, Mind, Important

I do feel like it's so important not to take that for granted - that opportunity to share your ideas with intelligent, beautiful people.

source: - Source: pitchfork.com

Topics: Beautiful, Intelligent, Opportunity

We can see an anthill or a roach or a flower or anything, but we have this frame where our mind recognizes an anthill and then moves on, without taking the opportunity to have the sense of awe that we could have if we really looked at it. The montage is about taking pieces of reality and rearranging them - creating new frames to make you have to stop and look at things in a fresh way. It's basically taking pieces of everyday reality and rearranging them to show people the magic that is inherent in all of these things already.

source: - Source: pitchfork.com

Topics: Flower, Moving, Opportunity

We consider the animals to be lower, and to me, that makes no sense at all. If you look at a tree or a mushroom or a squirrel, it's perfectly in tune with itself. It has no problem being exactly what it is, and it does what it's meant to do without any complaints or problems. Because we create all these problems in being, we think we're somehow higher than the animals. But it's we humans who have a difficult time even caring for our children, or anything.

source: - Source: pitchfork.com

Topics: Children, Caring, Thinking

I think that so much of the creative process is a fragmentary one, and then it's about just allowing your intuition to put it together for you. It's funny how you create something and you think you're going in a million different directions, and then the thing you end up with is the thing that you wanted to create your whole life, but you're just as surprised by it as anybody else.

source: - Source: pitchfork.com

Topics: Thinking, Creative, Intuition

When so many of our dreams had come true and yet I still saw that so many of my friends were in a lot of pain... I saw their pain from a different perspective and realized that I can't just sing my way out of all this suffering. I have to try to understand human nature and myself and the nature of suffering and a lot of these other issues on a deeper level.

source: - Source: pitchfork.com

Topics: Dream, Pain, Perspective

I think the songs I was writing after Aeroplane were full of a lot of undealt-with pain that was just a little too big... the issues seemed too large for me to confront intuitively through songwriting. I kept pushing it and pushing it. There are so many issues about being human and why people inflict pain on each other. There were seeds of all these things I hadn't dealt with. With just the personal issues, I felt I was in over my head, but then to write about it... To write you have to have at least a little bit of confidence you know what you're talking about.

source: - Source: pitchfork.com

Topics: Song, Pain, Writing

I love the idea of a record containing an entire universe; where the sounds span decades of recording from all over the world and all sorts of different sources.

source: - "Neutral Milk Hotel". Interview with Marci Fierman, pitchfork.com. February 1, 2002.

Topics: Ideas, Sound, Different

Even our concepts about romantic love, I think, are destructive; treating people as property is destructive; being jealous of other people is destructive. You know, being jealous is a perfectly natural thing to feel, so it's not about suppressing jealousy, but learning to come to terms with it and to recognize its destructiveness and then to transform it.

source: - Source: pitchfork.com

Topics: Jealous, Romantic Love, Thinking, Being Jealous

The music is supposed to be healing.

source: - Source: pitchfork.com

Topics: Healing, Music Is

Often, everywhere we look, we seem to find obstacles and facades and smokescreens, so it was really nice to find things in the world that actually spoke to me. And I felt like Eastern thought really spoke to me. Because it isn't trying to cover up the pain in life; it's trying to deal with it and overcome it in an intelligent way. I think the reason I love Eastern thought so much, and mysticism in general - but especially Buddhism - is because it seems to me an attempt to look life squarely in the face, as it is.

source: - Source: pitchfork.com

Topics: Pain, Nice, Buddhism, Pain In Life

Typically there are little fragments of specific words and images swimming around in my mind, and then at some point, I'll sit down with the guitar and everything will fall into place. It's like your brain is a drain with a bunch of words and images dropping into it, swirling around. The drain is stopped up, but you can feel these things dropping into it. Then at some point, someone comes along and pulls the plug out of the drain and everything comes together in the song.

source: - Source: pitchfork.com

Topics: Song, Fall, Swimming

I realized that, to a large degree, I had kept my rational mind at bay my whole life. I just acted on intuition in terms of how I related to life. At some point, my rational mind started creeping in, and it would not shut up. I finally had to address it and confront it. I think most intelligent people, at a younger age than I have, begin to question some of the fundamental assumptions our society promotes. But me, I just rejected it without even considering it.

source: - Source: pitchfork.com

Topics: Intelligent, Thinking, People

I decided at 10 I wanted to be in a band; everyone else wanted to play football.

Topics: Football, Play, Band

I feel like we're so limited by the context at which we look at life. The way we look at who we're supposed to be and how we're supposed to love... everything. I feel like that, in and of itself, is a project of a lifetime: the problem of how to break out of the limiting context that is imposed upon us by the educational system, by the church, by our parents... As a kid I rejected it without even thinking about it. Now that I'm a little older, I see how deeply destructive it really is.

source: - Source: pitchfork.com

Topics: Educational, Kids, Thinking

For me, there's a lot of intrinsic mystery and power in folk music, but a lot of people don't perceive that music from around the world as something that fits into their lives or their psyche in any way. So I tried to present it in a different way to give it more of a chance to sink into people's heads.

source: - Source: pitchfork.com

Topics: People, Giving, Different

When I tried to grasp at either what I love or what I hate, I destroyed the very ability of being able to really penetrate the essence of either. By trying to understand it, I would just crush it.

source: - Source: pitchfork.com

Topics: Crush, Hate, Trying

I realized that even though I believe with my whole heart in the power of music... it didn't provide any solid answers on how to heal myself and heal others so that they could overcome what had happened to them. I realized that I wanted to take a deeper look at life in order to be some kind of truly healing force in people's everyday lives.

source: - Source: pitchfork.com

Topics: Believe, Healing, Heart