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Jim Morrison

American singer and poet; lead vocalist of The Doors (1943–1971)

James Douglas Morrison (8 December 1943 – 3 July 1971) was an American singer, songwriter, musician, poet and founding member of The Doors.

People are strange when you're a stranger...

Quotes

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At first flash of eden, we race down to the sea. Standing there on freedom’s shore. Waiting for the sun...
 
This is the strangest life I’ve ever known.
 
I'll tell you this —
No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn.
 
Don't worry, the operation won't take long and you'll feel much better in the morning.
  • You know the day destroys the night,
    Night divides the day,
    Tried to run —
    Tried to hide —
    Break on through to the other side!
  • 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)
    • Always a playground instructor, never a killer running to two young girls freedom and enterprize
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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)
  • Hello, I love you, won't you tell me your name? Hello, I love you, let me jump in your game.
  • Take an Indian home to lunch.
    • When asked how the USA should celebrate the Bicentennial, as quoted in Avant Garde magazine (March 1968)
  • At first flash of Eden, We race down to the sea.
    Standing there on Freedom's shore.
    Waiting for the sun...
  • This is the strangest life I’ve ever known.
    • "Waiting for the Sun" on the album Morrison Hotel (1970)
  • 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)
  • Alright listen man, we got a special treat for you now. This is a little tour-de-force that we've only done a couple times in front of strangers, and it starts off kinda quiet, so if everybody just kinda relax, take a few deep breaths, think about your eventual end and what's gonna happen tonight; and we'll try and do something good to your head, right man?
    I don't know if you're aware of it, but this whole evening is being taped for eternity and beyond that too. And so listen man, if you want to be represented in eternity with some uncouth language then I hope you'll stand up on the top of your seat and shout it out very clearly or we're not going to get it on tape.
    Don't worry, the operation won't take long and you'll feel much better in the morning.
  • I see myself as a huge fiery comet, a shooting star. Everyone stops, points up and gasps "Oh look at that!" Then — whoosh, and I'm gone... and they'll never see anything like it ever again... and they won't be able to forget me — ever.
    • As quoted in Straight Whisky: A Living History of Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'n' Roll on the Sunset Strip (2003), by Erik Quisling, and Austin Lowry Williams p. 152
  • I think, in these days, especially in the States, you have to be a politician or an assassin or something, to really be a superstar.
  • People are afraid of themselves, of their own reality; their feelings most of all. People talk about how great love is, but that’s bullshit. Love hurts. Feelings are disturbing. People are taught that pain is evil and dangerous. How can they deal with love if they’re afraid to feel? Pain is meant to wake us up. People try to hide their pain. But they’re wrong. Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain. It’s all in how you carry it. That’s what matters. Pain is a feeling. Your feelings are a part of you. Your own reality. If you feel ashamed of them, and hide them, you’re letting society destroy your reality. You should stand up for your right to feel your pain.

The Lords and the New Creatures: Poems (1969)

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Yoga powers.
To make oneself invisible or small.
 
To become gigantic and reach to the farthest things.

The Lords: Notes on Vision

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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...
  • 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 seek 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

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

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Let's reinvent the gods, all the myths of the ages
Celebrate symbols from deep elder forests
 
O great creator of being
grant us one more hour to
perform our art
and perfect our lives
 
We live, we die
and death not ends it
 
resident mockery
give us an hour for magic
 
Death makes angels of us all
and gives us wings
where we had shoulders
smooth as raven's
claws

  • 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
  • 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.
  • Indian, Indian what did you die for?
    Indian says, nothing at all.
  • Lying on stained wretched sheets with the bleeding virgin,
    we could plan a murder...or start a religion.


Misattributed

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  • 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.
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