Bob Dylan Lyrics as Prompts

I've been listening to a lot of Bob Dylan lately and so I decided that this Wednesday's writing prompt will include single lines from various Bob Dylan songs. If there don't work for you, visit bobdylan.com and find a line or two that click with you.

“I saw a white ladder all covered with water” - “A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall”

“Spreading their wings 'neath the falling leaves.” - “Changing of the Guards”

“Were handing out the flowers that I'd given to you.” - “Changing of the Guards”

“But the next time I looked there was light in the room.” - “Day of the Locusts”

“I been lookin' at my shadow, I been watching the colors up above” - “Dirt Road Blues”

“it's hard labour and cold beans” - “Endless Highway”

“A place where there is no pain of birth.” - “Gonna Change My Way Of Thinking”

“Stand in one place till your feet begin to hurt.” - “Hard Times in New York Town”

“Highway 51 runs right by my baby's door” - “Highway 51”

“The next time you see me comin' you better run" - “Highway 61 Revisited”

All quotes above are from Bob Dylan songs.

Primer prompts

Sentences from old primer and grammar books... Use as prompts!

The river talked all night in the shoals.

My life is ghastly, the told the grass.

What kind of word?
Just a word.
Whatever. Hush.
Whisper it in my ear.

The cottonwoods went by like rows of bones.

There are no absolutes in human misery and things can always get worse.

Old whiskey bottles with their bleached labels lying on the wet tar of the rooftops.

I have been waiting for you for hours.

Does your brother dance well?

Why are you sitting here alone in the dark?

A little bit of common glass sometimes glitters like a diamond.

I see the man in the moon.

Mr. Jones bought a knife for his little boy.

Of all beasts he learned the language.

The two strangers were really Jupiter and Mercury.

A shaft of song, a winged prayer

Iris always wore a chain of raindrops for pearls, and a cloud for a robe.

The meanest flower that blows can give thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

I met a little cottage girl.

Writing and Small Images

Take any one or combination of the ideas below and insert them in your writing. There are no rules.

RADIO:
song on the radio, old transistor radio, broken radio, found radio, etc.

TEACUP/COFFEECUP:
chipped cup, cracked handle, saucer broken on the floor, found cup, something else in the cup other than tea or coffee, etc.

APRON:
pockets empty, pockets always have something in them, stained apron, crisp clean apron, ripped apron, etc.

CHAIR:
wooden chair with a loose bolt, chair with a worn seat cushion, chair with initials carved in the back slats, someone sitting in the chair, etc.

MAILBOX:
beaten mailbox, brick mailbox, empty mailbox, waiting by the mailbox, put in mailbox letters to nonexistent/lost/forgotten people, etc.

CHESS PIECE:
chess piece found under a couch or floor board, chess piece thrown at someone, chess piece carried in someone's pocket, chess piece given as a gift, etc.

Prompts from 1 Giant Leap

Most of these prompts are quotes from the film 1 Giant Leap. There are two quotes from a novel by Truman Capote I just finished reading, Other Voices, Other Rooms. Enjoy!

"This is what comes through to us." - from The Greek

"It's God making contact with itself." – Ram Dass (in reference to creation of art)

"While I thought I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die." – Leonardo da Vinci

"When you can't find the rhyme to fit the beat, You can't find the answer to feel complete." - ?

"There will be time to put on the face to meet the faces that you meet." – T.S. Eliot

"Every man and woman has their place. They have their entrances and they have their exits." - ?

"I have to learn not to waste everything my forefathers earned in tears." - Maxi Jazz

"Last night I went to sleep as a child
Only to wake up this morning finding I was a man.
In my hand I discovered the tools and the rage of my father.
In my heart I found the love and fears of my mother...........
We are not walking with the ghosts of the dead...
We are alive... In the spirit of our passion"
- Michael FRANTI, from 1 Giant Leap (film)

"...for anger seemed, if anything, more unsafe than love: only those who know their own security can afford either." - Truman Capote

"...he is no rose dependent upon thorn or root." - Truman Capote

Truman Capote quotes

Use the quotes below to spur your writing into a direction by either finding an image or idea in the quotes to spur on your writing, or write about something the quote reminds you.
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"...for so few of us learn that love is tenderness, and tenderness is not, as a fair proportion suspect, pity; and still fewer know that happiness in love is not the absolute focusing of all emotion in another: one has always to love a good many things which the beloved must come only to symbolize; the true beloveds of this world are in their lover's eyes lilac openings, ship lights, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child's Sunday, lost voices, one's favorite suit, autumn and all the seasons, memory, yes, it being earth and water of existence, memory."

p. 141-142, Other Voices, Other Rooms. Truman Capote

"...there was always between us something muted, hushed; still our silence was not of a secret kind, for in itself it communicated that wonderful peace those who understand each other very well sometimes achieve..."

p. 143, Other Voices, Other Rooms. Truman Capote

"...this was not a hotel; indeed, had never been: this was the place where folks came when they went off the face of the earth, when they died but were not dead."

p. 118, Other Voices, Other Rooms. Truman Capote

Writing prompts from a novel

Dear Laura,
I finished this book last night and saved some lines that I thought might be useful for prompts for a couple of sessions. See what you can salvage.
- Vicky H.

Where do we go when we die?
I don't know. Where are we now?

In the middle of life, he said, I drew the path of it upon a map and I studied it for a long time.

In any case it is difficult to stand outside of one's desires and see things of their own volition.

But then if we don't know ourselves in the waking world, what chance in dreams?

How comes she to own a world of night at all?

When you look at the world is there a point in time where the scene becomes the remembered?

For each event is revealed to us at the surrender of every alternative course.

I think you got a habit of making things a bit more complicated that they need to be. Why not just tell the story?

The stars which were belled above them against he eternal blackness of the world's nativity.

In any case this was a deep dream for the dreamer and in such dreams there is a language that is older than the spoken word at all.

He thought he saw in the world's science a great conspiracy.

Yet it is the narrative that is the life of the dream while the events themselves are often interchangeable. The events of the waking world are forced upon us and the narrative is the unguessed axis along which they must be strung.

But in dreams we stand in the great democracy of the possible and there we are right pilgrims indeed.

Every man's death is a standing in for every other. There is no way to abate that fear of it except to love that man that stands for us.

The dust of the few cars hung in the dry air long after the cars were gone.

It was just this big whispering sound all over. Geese by the thousands... They blacked out the moon.

I wouldn't have the crazy bitch on the place, he said.

He gathered her black hair in his hand and spread it across his chest like a blessing.