“If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music.”
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Gustav Mahler 5
late-Romantic Austrian composer 1860–1911Related quotes

“If you could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint.”

This is how we all are.
John Banville: Who cares whodunnit? (2013)

Source: Thornton, Sarah. Seven Days in the Art World. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. 2008. p. 174–75 : Saltz on his approach to criticism

“If you had only two words to say to the people of the world, what would they be? Attain Peace.”
Miscellaneous, March 31, 2017
“The being was trying to get him to think about what he was saying, not just recite.”
Source: Lady of Mazes (2005), Chapter 5 (p. 45).

Source: On the Mystical Body of Christ, p.422

Source: The Oven Bird (1916)
Context: There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.