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Nick Cave Quotes

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Famous Nick Cave Quotes

“[T]he luminous and shocking beauty of the everyday is something I try to remain alert to, if only as an antidote to the chronic cynicism and disenchantment that seems to surround everything, these days. It tells me that, despite how debased or corrupt we are told humanity is and how degraded the world has become, it just keeps on being beautiful. It can’t help it.”

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Book:Faith, Hope and Carnage
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“That perhaps grief can be seen as a kind of exalted state where the person who is grieving is the closest they will ever be to the fundamental essence of things. Because, in grief, you become deeply acquainted with the idea of human mortality. You go to a very dark place and experience the extremities of your own pain — you are taken to the very limits of suffering. As far as I can see, there is a transformative aspect to this place of suffering. We are essentially altered or remade by it. Now, this process is terrifying, but in time you return to the world with some kind of knowledge that has something to do with our vulnerability as participants in this human drama. Everything seems to fragile and precious and heightened, and the world and the people in it seem to endangered, and yet so beautiful. To me it feels that, in this dark place, the idea of a God feels more present or maybe more essential. It actually feels like grief and God are somehow intertwined. It feels that, in grief, you draw closer to the veil that separates this world from the next.”

Grief
Book:Faith, Hope and Carnage
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“Well, grief can lead some people to dark places from where they simply never return. I have seen it often. People constricting around an absence, growing hard and mad and furious at the world, and never recovering. There is nothing to lead them from the abyss. And beyond that, too, I think the point-blank rejection of all spiritual matters as mere nonsense has its own problems. I'm talking about the outright rejection of religion by some who basically see it as a kind of inherent evil. That stance is a denial of all the potential good religion brings: the comfort, the succour, the redemption, the community. This thinking can bring its own kind of nothingness - not always, of course, but often. And, as we are seeing, people find a version of religion elsewhere, in tribalism, in their identity, in politics, for God's sake, in possessions. Look at our glorious secular world as it stands today. To me, secularism can also feel like a kind of hardening around an absence.”

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Book:Faith, Hope and Carnage
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“But what I want to say is this: this will happen to everybody at some point - a deconstruction of the known self. It may not necessarily be a death, but there will be some kind of devastation. We see it happen to people all the time: a marriage breakdown, or a transgression that has a devastating effect on a persons, life, or health issues, or a betrayal, or a public shaming, or a separation, or someone loses their kids, or whatever it is. And it shatters them completely, into one million pieces, and it seems like there is no coming back. It’s over. But in time they put themselves together piece by piece. And the thing is, when they do that, they often find that they are a different person, a changed, more complete, more realized, more clearly drawn person. I think that’s what it is to live, really – to die in a way, and to be reborn. And sometimes it can happen many times over, that complex re-ordering of ourselves.”

HopeGrief
Book:Faith, Hope and Carnage
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“I have grown to understand that it's a good thing for people to probe a little bit into the way grieving people feel, maybe ask them questions. There is a lot of hesitancy around this because it feels invasive, but the bereaved need encouragement to speak sometimes. They are prone to silence because they're worried about the effect their sadness will have on other people. And this silence becomes habitual, but also builds up like a terrible pressure.”

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Book:Faith, Hope and Carnage
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