The songs on Nebraska deal with ordinary, down-on-their-luck blue-collar characters who face a challenge or a turning point in their lives. The songs also treat the subject of outsiders, criminals and mass murderers with little hope for the future—or no future at all—as in the title track, where the main character is sentenced to death in the electric chair.

Autumn reminds me of my future place in the world; Because youth is supposed to bear fruit, then. But it is a horrible thought, only to enjoy the past troubles I overcame.

My Soul must stay in a state of everlasting spring, because when the time of flowers is over, so is my life.

Friedrich Nietsche, as a schoolkid

André Kertész, Martinique, January 1 (1972)

Andrew Moore, Golden Valley Norwegian Lutheran Church, Perkins County, South Dakota, 2013

“Isolation is not solitude. In solitude, we are never alone with ourselves. In solitude we are always two in one, and we become one, a complete individual with richness and the limits of its exact features, only in relation to the others and in their company. The big metaphysical questions, the search for God, liberty and immortality, relations between man and the world, being and nothingness or again between life and death, are always posed in solitude, when man is alone with himself, therefore, in the virtual company of all. The fact of being, even for a moment, diverted from one’s own individuality allows it to formulate mankind’s eternal questions, which go beyond the questions posed in different ways by each individual.”

- Godard quoting Hannah Arendt in Nous sommes tous encore ici

Vladimir Mayakovsky, The Lady and the Hooligan (1918)

I went far and deep with the knapsack of things I know. I made the journey, bought the useless, found the indefinite, And my heart is the same as it was: a sky and a desert. I failed in what I was, in what I wanted, in what I discovered. I’ve no soul left for light to arouse or darkness to smother. I’m nothing but nausea, nothing but reverie, nothing but longing.

- Fernando Pessoa, English Song (Selected Poems)

François Kollar, The hands of Coco Chanel, 1938

Francisco Infante, The sea, 1983

Eventually we're all just memories, right? At least until the last person we knew dies. Until the places we went fall down or get bulldozed over. After that, we're nothing. It's like we were never really here at all. Just a black screen of nothing.

- The Hellblazer 14, November 2017 (DC Comics, 2017)