If there was anything I learned from John the Baptist, it was that the sooner you confess a mistake, the quicker you can get on to making new and better mistakes.

A Bluesman hates to be told what to do. Authority rankles him, inspires his rebellion, and plays to his need to self-destruct. A Bluesman doesn't take to having a boss unless he's on a chain gang (for the chain gang boss ranks below only a mean old woman and a sweet young thing in the hierarchy of the Blues Muse, followed closely by bad liquor, a dead dog, and the Man).

Hope is merely another face of desire. And desire is a motherfucker.

We make our discoveries through our mistakes: we watch one another's success: and where there is freedom to experiment there is hope to improve.

John (the Baptist) stands as prophets do to this very day, as an unyielding presence unsettling us and leaving us not quite sure of how we feel about him.
...
And yet John seems hard to know, hard to like even though we stand back in admiration of him. We react the same way to most absolute figured.

He's not like any other freshman I've seen come through here. He just doesn't make that many freshman mistakes. He acts like he's been here before.