Quotes about music

page 7

“There was no answer, except the general answer life gives to all the most complex and insoluble questions. That answer is: one must live for the needs of the day, in other words, become oblivious. To become oblivious in dreams was impossible now, at least till night-time; it was impossible to return to that music sung by carafe-women; and so one had to become oblivious in the dreams of life.”

“If Music is a Place -- then Jazz is the City, Folk is the Wilderness, Rock is the Road, Classical is a Temple.”

“LANGUAGE, n. The music with which we charm the serpents guarding another's treasure.”

“I see my life in terms of music.”

“But bringing people together is what music has always done best.”

“There's a friendly tie of some sort between music and eating.”

“It's like picking up an unfamiliar piece of sheet music & starting to stumble through it, only to realize it is a melody you'd once learned by heart, one you can play without even trying.”

“Three films a day, three books a week and records of great music would be enough to make me happy to the day I die.”

“Having eyes, but not seeing beauty; having ears, but not hearing music; having minds, but not perceiving truth; having hearts that are never moved and therefore never set on fire. These are the things to fear, said the headmaster.”

“Most musicians remain poor. But the music that they make, even if it does not bring them millions, gives millions of people happiness.”

“If conversation was the lyrics, laughter was the music, making time spent together a melody that could be replayed over and over without getting stale.”

“In our world, I rank music somewhere between hair ribbons and rainbows in terms of usefulness.”

“The muffled syllables that Nature speaks
Fill us with deeper longing for her word;
She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks,
She makes a sweeter music than is heard.”

“To him the stars seemed like so many musical notes affixed to the sky, just waiting for somebody to unfasten them. Someday the sky would be emptied, but by then the earth would be a constellation of musical scores”

“I make writing as much a part of my life as I do eating or listening to music.”

“All humans are musical. Why else would the Lord give you a beating heart?”

“For me there is something primitively soothing about this music, and it went straight to my nervous system, making me feel ten feet tall.”

“And the night shall be filled with music,
And the cares, that infest the day,
Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs,
And as silently steal away.”

“It strikes Werner just then as wondrously futile to build splendid buildings, to make music, to sing songs, to print huge books full of colorful birds in the face of the seismic, engulfing indifference of the world - what pretensions humans have!”

“He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music.”

“That's when I see him. Peter Kavinsky, walking down the hallway. Like magic. Beautiful, dark-haired Peter. He deserves background music, he looks so good.”

“Where music thundered let the mind be still,
Where the will triumphed let there be no will,
What light revealed, now let the dark fulfill.”

“It's music rage, which is like road rage, only more righteous. When you get road rage, a tiny part of you knows you're being a jerk, but when you get music rage, you're carrying out the will of God, and God wants these people dead”

“The community of the Giver had achieved at such great price. A community without danger or pain. But also, a community without music, color or art. And books.”

“Great Music, it said, and Great Poetry would like quieten Modern Youth down and make Modern Youth more Civilized. Civilized my syphilised yarbles.”

“My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence.”

“Beautiful music plays, but not everyone with ears can hear it.”

“Music, my rampart and my only one.”

“When the music is over, she keeps her head down till she finds her seat again, and I wonder how many times each day she dies a little.”

“Has the industry done to music what McDonald’s has done to eating?”

“The good life of any river may depend on the perception of its music; and the preservation of some music to perceive.”

“It sounds silly I know. But for me, the power of music rests in its ability to reach inside and touch the places where the deepest cuts lie. Like a benevolent god, a good song will never let you down.”

“This was the reason there was music, he realized. There were some feelings that didn't have words big enough to describe them.”

“You turn up your music to hide the noise. Other people turn up their music to hide yours. You turn up yours again. Everyone buys a bigger stereo system. This is the arms race of sound You don't win with a lot of treble.”

“Just as music is noise that makes sense, a painting is colour that makes sense, so a story is life that makes sense.”

“Then the singing enveloped me. It was furry and resonant, coming from everyone's very heart. There was no sense of performance or judgment, only that the music was breath and food.”

“A fine work of art - music, dance, painting, story - has the power to silence the chatter in the mind and lift us to another place.”

“Anything can become music if listened to long enough”

“People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder, but because they're going deaf, it has to be played louder still.”

“Do you know people who insist they like 'all kinds of music'? That actually means they likeof music.”

“There is nothing in the world that is not mysterious, but the mystery is more evident in certain things than in others: in the sea, in the eyes of the elders, in the color yellow, and in music.”

“I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company.”

“To him the stars seemed like so many musical notes affixed to the sky, just waiting for somebody to unfasten them.”

“The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side.”

“It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature and everlasting beauty of monotony.”

“Some say it's too country, some say it's too rock n' roll. But it's just good music if you can feel it in your soul.”

“Telling someone about what a symbol means is like telling someone how music should make them feel.”

“There are worse things than finding your wife and child dead. You can watch the world do it. You can watch your wife get old and bored. You can watch your kids discover everything in the world you've tried to save them from. Drugs, divorce, conformity, disease. All the nice clean books, music, television. Distraction. These people with dead children, you want to tell them, go ahead. Blame yourself. There are worse things you can do to the people you love than kill them. The regular way is just to watch the world do it. Just read the newspaper.”

“My ambition was to live like music.”

“I don’t think many people appreciate silence or realize that it is as close to music as you can get.”

“Life's a show and we all play a part
And when the music starts
We open up our hearts”

“The Smiths are singing and someone says "Turn that gay angst music off.”

“Most people live and die with their music still unplayed. They never dare to try.”

“Life without playing music is inconceivable for me. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music, I get most joy in life out of music.”

“Listen to them — children of the night. What music they make.”

“Music fathoms the sky.”

“The light music of whisky falling into glasses made an agreeable interlude.”

“The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all of these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man’s memory. That is our duty. If we don’t fulfill it, we feel unhappy.”

“I mean, if Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at twenty-two, the history of music would have been very different. As would the history of aviation, of course.”

“DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.”

“I just listened to the music, and breathed in the day, and remembered things. Things like walking around the neighborhood and looking at the houses and the lawns and the colorful trees and having that be enough.”

“I was like a well trained pianist who knows which note to hit, but can't make the music his own.”

“Musically, he was like an old man in a boy's skin.”

“Music is the only language in which you cannot say a mean or sarcastic thing.”

“This is the music business. 'Five years is five hundred years' - your words.”

“This land is your land and this land is my land, sure, but the world is run by those that never listen to music anyway.”

“The music in my heart I bore
Long after it was heard no more.”

“I'm wishing he could see that music lives. Forever. That it's stronger than death. Stronger than time. And that its strength holds you together when nothing else can.”

“We grown-up people think that we appreciate music, but if we realized the sense that an infant has brought with it of appreciating sound and rhythm, we would never boast of knowing music. The infant is music itself.”

“Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes.”

“The music we listen to may not define who we are. But it’s a damn good start.”

“No other human being, no woman, no poem or music, book, or painting can replace alcohol in its power to give man the illusion of real creation.”

“There are only four great arts: music, painting, sculpture, and ornamental pastry- architecture being perhaps the least banal derivative of the latter.”

“When it comes, you’ll be dreaming
that you don’t need to breathe;
that breathless silence is
the music of the dark
and it’s part of the rhythm
to vanish like a spark.”

“The world in books seemed so much more alive to me than anything outside. I could see things I'd never seen before. Books and music were my best friends. I had a couple of good friends at school, but never met anyone I could really speak my heart to.”

“The music, while it lasted, brought a new world into being.”

“You understand my music.”

“Poetry is prose bewitched, a music made of visual thoughts, the sound of an idea.”

“A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless'…”

“… A strange art – music – the most poetic and precise of all the arts, vague as a dream and precise as algebra.”

“When we pay attention to nature's music, we find that everything on the Earth contributes to its harmony.”

“Music is the melody whose text is the world.”

“Every man's work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.”

“The light of love, the purity of grace,
The mind, the music breathing from her face, 19
The heart whose softness harmonized the whole,—
And oh, that eye was in itself a soul!”

“I think you're the only person who gets me. When I'm with you, the world doesn't feel like a problem I can't figure out. Please come to the dance, because you're my music.”

“Let God have you, and let God love you - and don’t be surprised if your heart begins to hear music you’ve never heard and your feet learn to dance as never before.”

“We breathe the light, we breathe the music, we breathe the moment as it passes through us.”

“If it weren't for music, I would think that love is mortal.”

“Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people's ideas, like listening to music, like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.”

“Behind him, across vast distances of space and time, from the place he had left, he thought he heard music too. But perhaps it was only an echo.”

“The pounding music, the cheers, the admiration work their way into my blood, and I can’t suppress my excitement. Cinna has given me a great advantage. No one will forget me. Not my look, not my name. Katniss. The girl who was on fire.”

“Inner guidance is heard like soft music in the night by those who have learned to listen.”

“When she played her music even the night demons stopped their work & it took them some time to remember what it was they were doing & the best of them had no stomach for it for a long time after that.”

“And it was good just to hold her and touch the softness of her skin. He wanted to hold her hard, not to hurt her but to keep her safe, to show her that he was strong enough to protect her. Her beauty was like fire and strange music, and he loved her.”

“Mountain-rose petals
Falling, falling, falling now…
Waterfall music”

“I was fairly poor
but most of my money went
for wine and
classical music.
I loved to mix the two
together.”

“It bewildered Ig, the idea that a person could not be interested in music. It was like not being interested in happiness.”

“There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time, when he was an old man, to learn music and dancing, and thought it time well spent.”

“Sex must be mixed with tears, laughter, words, promises, scenes, jealousy, envy, all the spices of fear, foreign travel, new faces, novels, stories, dreams, fantasies, music, dancing, opium, wine.”