Pale Blue Eyes

i think its about a love that runs so deep that it doesnt really matter whether they're together or not - if you don't get this song go cry in a corner. it could not be clearer.

I was spending the night with a girl I'm unfortunately destined to be friends with, even though i'd prefer more and i'm pretty sure she would too, and this song came on. she just looked at me and smiled. its that one person you love more than anything life can offer, but it just won't ever happen. someday she moves on and gets married, "but it's truly, truly a sin"

"It was good what we did yesterday, and I'd do it once again. The fact that you are married only proves you're my best friend. But it's truly, truly a sin." ..Scandalous!

This song is so hauntingly beautiful.

I agree with venus in furs. This song seems to be that he loves someone so much that it doesnt matter if he's with her or not. Especially in the beginning of the song, no matter how mad she makes him or how sad he is, he's okay as long as he can still linger on her pale blue eyes. This song makes me feel like I'm following a lifetime in a way. "Skip a life completely" I can't really explain it, but it feels the listener of the song is being taken through years of love and heartbreak, sort of. Like the love is so deep and so is the heartache that it lasts a whole life time. Anyone else feel this way? Anyway, I think the love and the lives gets to a point where they both give into the temptation and have an affair. Even though it's "truly, truly a sin."

And, ya know, it could very well be about a boy or a girl.

to me this song is about a love you had once but she's moved on... & she wants you to think you never had it. i think this happend to lou for sure also because the SJ line "women never really feign" its the same kind of theme.

basically the song has a feeling of wanting to reject what happend... wanting to move past it because it hurts. but on the other hand the hurt feels kind of good.. lets you know your alive. lets you know you tried & didn't just let it pass. so he's admiting she lingers inside him, this hurts him, but he lets it happen. it's like a confession.

(this is just what the song means to me... i get that kinda of feeling just from the sound; lyrics second)

This is not a song about unrequited love, rather it's about impossible love. This isn't about a guy who wants a girl or wants her back and now she's married. The man and woman in this song had a love affair. The last verse makes that obvious. "It was good what we did yesterday and I'd do it once again". They had sex and he at least would do it again (even though "It's truly, truly a sin"). "The fact that you are married, only proves that you're my best friend" - I think this means she wanted be with him so much, they have such a connection, she was willing to step over the fact that she's married.

When you have an affair, you get very infatuated. "Thought of you as my mountain top" "my peak". But since it's an affair it's something he "had but couldn't keep", because she'll never truly be his.

He imagines a world "pure and strange" where they could be together, where only love matters and not inconvenient facts like that she's married to someone else. But that is not to be: "skip a life completely, stuff it in a cup". What they are doing is backwards "lies but can't stand up, down for you is up". It can't last.

A very sad and beautiful song. She is an ideal and ultimately unkeepable love for him on pedestal and he's doomed to be haunted by her Pale blue eyes.

This song is perfect.

As I see it, it's about that friend who is more than that, and you both know you want to be more than that, but life doesn't help to make it happen, and yet you stay around because even though the romance is impossible there is so much more than that.

Setting aside the fact that this song is about the sweet balm of heroin it is also about love and life.

Being about the same age as Lou (would be). I have a different reaction now to this song to when I was 18. For me it is the sad musings of an older man about meeting someone he hopelessly loved in his youth. An experience I recently had.

He knows her so well. Well enough to be pleased saddened and maddened by her. She was everything to him but could never be his. He remembers her eyes.

She was everything to him but the problem wasn't her but the world, If he could make the world like the strange enchanting vision he has in his mind they would be together.

He meets her years later after they have both lived a life. It's gone – stuff it in a cup. She says to him that their relationship is like money- it's worth something but it's inert and can't stand up. You've always had the wrong idea – down for you is up. She's saying he had value (she loved him) but he never did anything.

What they did yesterday is not an affair. It was the genuine love they had years ago. She married to find happiness which is what he wanted for her. She did what he wanted for her. That's why she's his best friend. The sin is they never consummated their love.

Read the book Transformer, it's about Lou Reed. It talks about the meaning of this song. This song was about an ex of his which got married after her and Lou broke up. He continued going out with her but she broke off the affair.