Daily Inspiration Quote by Ned Rorem

“Divine fires” is Rorem’s elegantly unsentimental name for inspiration: the rare, incandescent moment when music feels less made than received. He refuses the romantic myth that the artist lives in permanent lightning. Instead, the line takes the more bracing view that most creative life happens in the dimmer, unglamorous hours after the strike, when you’re left with residual heat and the hard question of what to do with it.

The genius of “afterglow” is its double edge. It’s consolation and it’s limitation. The afterglow lets you see enough to keep working - to orchestrate, revise, structure - but it also reminds you that the original blaze is gone. Rorem, a composer whose diaries chronicled equal parts discipline, vanity, doubt, and craft, is quietly arguing for professionalism over mysticism. The artist “functions”: an almost clinical verb that demotes genius from a personality trait to a job performed under imperfect conditions.

The hope “for their recurrence” is the emotional engine here. It’s not certainty, not entitlement, not even faith in a muse that reliably returns on schedule. It’s a wager. In a 20th-century American music world that often demanded productivity, public persona, and stylistic allegiance, Rorem’s sentence protects a private truth: the work continues even when the heavens are closed. What looks like inspiration from the outside is usually persistence lit by memory of a better flame.