Creativity Quote by Jim Morrison

Morrison takes a wrecking ball to the polite way we talk about dying. He borrows the language of consolation - angels, wings, uplift - then stains it with something feral: "shoulders smooth as ravens claws". The image is gorgeous and wrong at the same time. Shoulders are supposed to be human, vulnerable, touchable; ravens are carrion birds, mythic scavengers, nature's clean-up crew. By fusing smoothness with claws, he suggests the body is both sensual and predatory, already halfway in the animal world death will return it to.

The line's intent isn't to promise an afterlife so much as to expose our need to mythologize loss. "Death makes angels of us all" reads like a critique of instant sainthood: the way the dead get edited into symbols, absolved by absence. In Morrison's hands, that sentimental upgrade is inseparable from violence. Wings don't arrive as a reward; they arrive because the self is stripped down to an icon people can carry.

Context matters: Morrison was writing from the late-60s American fever dream, where mortality was public (Vietnam, assassinations) and transcendence was a consumer product (psychedelia, rock spectacle). His stage persona flirted with martyrdom, and this line feels like him narrating that bargain: become myth, get wings; pay with your body, your mess, your ordinary shoulders. It's romantic, but it isn't comforting. It's a dare to look at how quickly we turn grief into a halo.