William Butler
William Butler
Multi-instrumentalist for the band Arcade Fire who plays bass, synth, guitar, and percussion. He has also worked on movie soundtracks, like the one for Her.
ProfessionGuitarist
Date of Birth6 October 1982
heart enmity our-love
We had fed the heart on fantasies, The heart's grown brutal from the fare, More substance in our enmities Than in our love
lying drinking home
A statesman is an easy man, he tells his lies by rote. A journalist invents his lies, and rams them down your throat. So stay at home and drink your beer and let the neighbors vote.
horse fighting sea
"Chaunt in his ear delusions magical, That he may fight the horses of the sea." The Druids took them to their mystery, And chaunted for three days.
teaching filling-up fire
Teaching is not filling up a pail, it is lighting a fire.
inspirational past disrespect
Mysticism has been in the past and probably ever will be one of the great powers of the world and it is bad scholarship to pretend the contrary.
country book class
It is most important that we should keep in this country a certain leisured class. I am of the opinion of the ancient Jewish book which says there is no wisdom without leisure.
emotional tree branches
If what I say resonates with you, it's merely because we're branches of the same tree.
flower heart rose
I cast my heart into my rhymes, That you, in the dim coming times, May know how my heart went with them After the red-rose-bordered hem.
morning children flower
Let the minor genius go his light way and enjoy his life - the great nature cannot so live, he is never really in holiday mood, even though he often plucks flowers by the wayside and ties them into knots and garlands like little children and lays out on a sunny morning.
valentines-day time moon
And pluck till time and times are done the silver apples of the moon the golden apples of the sun.
time oxen behinds
And God, the herdsman, goads them on behind.
garden soil said
All that we did, all that we said or sang must come from contact with the soil.
song art long
Speech after long silence; it is right, All other lovers being estranged or dead . . . That we descant and yet again descant Upon the supreme theme of Art and Song: Bodily decrepitude is wisdom; young We loved each other and were ignorant.
feet three fairy
Fairies in Ireland are sometimes as big as we are, sometimes bigger, and sometimes, as I have been told, about three feet high.