Quotes about sound
page 8

“On the fifth day, which was a Sunday, it rained very hard. I like it when it rains hard. It sounds like white noise everywhere, which is like silence but not empty.”

Mark Haddon book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Source: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Silence

“The truth is, laughter always sounds more perfect than weeping. Laughter flows in a violent riff and is effortlessly melodic. Weeping is often fought, choked, half strangled, or surrendered to with humiliation.”

Anne Rice (1941) American writer

Truth, Laughter, Perfection

“You can wet the rim of a glass and run your finger around the rim and it will make a sound. This is what I feel like: this sound of glass. I feel like the word shatter. I want to be with someone.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

Feeling

“It was kind of soothing, these sounds of lives being lived all around me, for better or for worse. And there I was, in the middle of them all, newly reborn and still waiting for mine to begin.”

Sarah Dessen book What Happened to Goodbye

What Happened To Goodbye (2011)
Source: What Happened to Goodbye

Waiting

“Sadie got up and kissed Amos on the forehead. “Leave it to us, Uncle. I’ve got a plan.”
“That,” I said, “sounds like very bad news.”

Rick Riordan book The Red Pyramid

Source: The Red Pyramid

Kiss

“She put a wedge beside my heart
And then she brought the mallet down
She sang no song to guide her work
I lost my heart without a sound”

Shannon Hale (1974) American fantasy novelist

Heart

“There's a hazardous sadness to the first sounds of someone else's work in the morning; it's as if stillness experiences pain in being broken.”

Jonathan Franzen book Freedom

Source: Freedom

Pain, Sadness

“You…you need to move on,” I managed. Yes, that was a sound reason. “You need to find someone else. You know I don’t—that I can’t. Well, you know. You’re wasting your time with me.”

He remained firm. “It’s my time to waste.”

Richelle Mead book The Indigo Spell

Source: The Indigo Spell

Time

“I don't play the tuba. The tuba plays me. My tuba is not actually a tuba, because it has never produced a musical sound. It is actually a giant frog pretending to be a tuba.”

David Klass book You Don't Know Me

Source: You Don't Know Me

Music

“echo, the death of a sound that had nowhere to go but to come back.”

Janet Fitch (1955) American writer

Source: Paint it Black

Death

“I will tell you that there have been no failures in my life. I don't want to sound like some metaphysical queen, but there have been no failures. There have been some tremendous lessons.”

Oprah Winfrey (1954) American businesswoman, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist

Life, Failure

“We were language's magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny.”

Salman Rushdie The Ground Beneath Her Feet

Source: The Ground Beneath Her Feet

Nature

“Awakened at midnight
by the sound of the water jar
cracking from the ice”

Bashō Matsuo (1644–1694) Japanese poet

Water

“To shut your eyes is to guess nothing of blindness. Beneath your world of skies and faces and buildings exists a rawer and older world, a place where surface planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon in shoals through the air.”

Anthony Doerr book All the Light We Cannot See

Source: All the Light We Cannot See

World

“Clearly the Old One had the capacity to kill - or easily deliver some sort of final ending that sounded remarkably like death.”

Garth Nix book Mister Monday

Source: Mister Monday

Death

“Rectory always sounded to me like a place you would find a proctologist.”

Jeff Lindsay book Dexter in the Dark

Source: Dexter in the Dark

“Tape the sound of the moon fading at dawn. Give it to your mother to listen to when she's in sorrow.”

Yoko Ono (1933) Japanese artist, author, and peace activist

“Surfing?” he asked. She laughed, and the sound sent a shock wave through the water. The wailing faded to background noise. Annabeth wondered if anyone had ever laughed in Tartarus before—just a pure, simple laugh of pleasure. She doubted it.”

Rick Riordan book The House of Hades

Source: The House of Hades

Pleasure, Water

“Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good. In area after area - crime, education, housing, race relations - the situation has gotten worse after the bright new theories were put into operation. The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them.”

Thomas Sowell (1930) American economist, social theorist, political philosopher and author

Social Deterioration
1980s–1990s, Is Reality Optional? (1993)

World, Education, History, Failure

“Sometimes my mouth is a little too big and a little too open and sounds too much like a sailor.”

Dolly Parton (1946) American singer-songwriter and actress

“Saying my story makes me want to change it, make it sound pretty the way I do with the stories I tell the workers. I'd like it to have a beginning as grand as a ball and an ending in a whisper, like a mother tucking in a child for sleep.”

Shannon Hale The Goose Girl

Source: The Goose Girl

Way, Sleep, Change

“A woman with an education may be able to spend more time sitting in a chair instead of lying on her back. A sound advantage, I should think.”

Anne Bishop (1955) American fiction writer

Source: Daughter of the Blood

Education, Lying, Thinking, Time

“No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our life are made. Destiny is made known silently.”

Agnes de Mille (1905–1993) American dancer and choreographer

Life, Decision

“So much of language is unspoken. So much of language is compromised of looks and gestures and sounds that are not words. People are ignorant of the vast complexity of their own communication.”

Garth Stein The Art of Racing in the Rain

Source: The Art of Racing in the Rain

People, Communication

“A word has power in and of itself. It comes from nothing into sound and meaning; it gives origin to all things.”

N. Scott Momaday book The Way to Rainy Mountain

Source: The Way to Rainy Mountain

“You give her all your french fries, even when she won't give you back onion rings,' Sophie says. 'And when you say her name it sounds different.'

How?'

Sophie thinks. 'Like it's covered with blankets.”

Jodi Picoult (1966) Author

Source: Vanishing Acts

Thinking

“Are you badly hurt?"
"Hideously," said the king, without sounding injured at all. "I am disemboweled. My insides may in an instant become my outsides as I stand here before you.”

Megan Whalen Turner The King of Attolia

Source: The King of Attolia

Hurt

“There comes a time when the world gets quiet and the only thing left is your own heart. So you'd better learn the sound of it. Otherwise you'll never understand what it's saying.”

Sarah Dessen book Just Listen

Source: Just Listen

World, Understanding, Learning, Time

“She knew the true shape of the world. All else was shadow and the sound of distant drums.”

Patrick Rothfuss book The Slow Regard of Silent Things

Source: The Slow Regard of Silent Things

World, Distant

“I love you dammit,"she brushed her lips teasingly against his.

"How much?" He made a slight sound, as if the soft kiss had affected him intensely.

"Without limit. Beyond forever.”

Lisa Kleypas (1964) American writer

Source: Secrets of a Summer Night

Love, Kiss

“The drowsy stillness of the afternoon was shattered by what sounded to his strained senses like G. K. Chesterton falling on a sheet of tin.”

P.G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) English author

Sense

“Achilles makes a sound like choking. “There are no bargains between lions and men. I will kill you and eat you raw.” His spearpoint flies in a dark whirlwind, bright as the evening-star, to catch the hollow at Hector’s throat.”

Madeline Miller book The Song of Achilles

Source: The Song of Achilles

Men, Star

“It keeps eternal whisperings around
Desolate shores, and with its mighty swell
Gluts twice ten thousand Caverns, till the spell
Of Hecate leaves them their old shadowy sound.”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

"On the Sea" (1817)

“What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Beauty, Music, Heart, Personality

“The Chinese system must be classified as a syllabic system of writing. More specifically, it belongs to the subcategory that I have labeled meaning-plus-sound syllabic systems or morphosyllabic systems. I use the term morphosyllabic in two senses. The first applies to the Chinese characters taken as individual units. Individual characters are morphosyllabic in the sense that they represent at once a single syllable and a single morpheme (except for the 11 percent or so of meaningless characters that represent sound only). In this usage the term is intended to replace the more widely used expressions logographic, word-syllabic, and morphemic, all of which are applied to individual characters taken as a unit. The second sense of the term refers to the structure of Chinese characters and is intended to draw attention to the fact that, in most cases, a character is composed of two elements, a phonetic grapheme which suggests the syllabic pronunciation of the full character, and a semantic element which hints at its meaning.”

John DeFrancis (1911–2009) American linguist

Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems (1989, pp. 115-116) http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/visible/index.html Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems (1989)

Sense, Drawing

“I had the good fortune of having my first and only heart attack last January … I call it good fortune because it taught me that there's a limited amount of time left and I better concentrate on one thing: How come existence? How come the quantum? Maybe those questions sound too philosophical, but maybe philosophy is too important to be left to the philosophers.”

John Archibald Wheeler (1911–2008) American physicist

As quoted by Amanda Gefter (from the symposium in honor of Wheeler's 90th birthday) [Trespassing on Einstein's lawn: a father, a daughter, the meaning of nothing, and the beginning of everything, 2014, https://books.google.com/books?id=NUMkAAAAQBAJ]

Question, Time, Heart

“When an active individual of sound common sense perceives the sordid state of the world, desire to change it becomes the guiding principle by which he organizes given facts and shapes them into a theory. The methods and categories as well as the transformation of the theory can be understood only in connection with his taking of sides. This, in turn, discloses both his sound common sense and the character of the world. Right thinking depends as much on right willing as right willing on right thinking.”

Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) German philosopher and sociologist

Source: "The Latest Attack on Metaphysics" (1937), p. 162.

World, Thinking, Sense, Change

“The grown-ups snapped the chillies (each made a sound terse as a satirical retort), and scattered the tiny, deadly seeds in their food.”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

A Strange and Sublime Address (1991)

Food

“More tears. Disgraceful. I was getting just like Kester, weeping at the drop of a hat, but of course I was Kester. I'd become him, and now there was just this other stranger who wrote me debonair notes and who sounded just like me.”

Susan Howatch book The Wheel of Fortune

The Wheel of Fortune (1984), Part 5: Harry

Tear

“Somewhere far away a bittern cried, a hollow, melancholy sound like a cow shut up in a barn. The cry of that mysterious bird was heard every spring, but no one knew what it was like or where it lived. At the top of the hill by the hospital, in the bushes close to the pond, and in the fields the nightingales were trilling. The cuckoo kept reckoning someone's years and losing count and beginning again. In the pond the frogs called angrily to one another, straining themselves to bursting, and one could even make out the words: "That's what you are! That's what you are!" What a noise there was! It seemed as though all these creatures were singing and shouting so that no one might sleep on that spring night, so that all, even the angry frogs, might appreciate and enjoy every minute: life is given only once.”

Anton Chekhov book In the Ravine

Source: In the Ravine (1900), Ch. 8, pp. 224

Life, Spring, Bird, Sleep

“[In Ethiopia, ] Abeh enrolled all three of us in school, which was taught in Amharic. We spoke only Somali and Arabic, so everything was completely foreign again for a little while. It wasn't until I could communicate that I came to a startling realization: the little girls in school with me were not Muslims. They said they were Kiristaan, Christian, which in Saudi Arabia had been a hideous playground insult, meaning impure. I went bewildered to my mother, who confirmed it. Ethiopians were kufr, the very sound of the word was scornful. They drank alcohol and they didn't wash properly. They were despicable.”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali book Infidel

Source: Infidel (2007), Chapter 4: Weeping Orphans and Widowed Wives

Alcohol, School, Girl, Communication

“That experiment prefigured today’s rap “artists,” who are entirely dependent on promoters, arrangers, and sound technicians, and create no music themselves.”

Jeffrey Tucker (1963) American writer

Source: "Powerful Song, Man" by Jeffrey Tucker, The Rothbard-Rockwell Report, August 1997, UNZ.org, 2016-05-22 http://www.unz.org/Pub/RothbardRockwellReport-1997aug-00009,

Music, Dependency

“Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Aye, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.”

Walter de la Mare (1873–1956) English poet and fiction writer

The Listeners (1912)

Silence, Housing

“Somewhere along the line, he thought, these things have become your heritage. You are multiplied by each sound that you hear. And you cannot deny them, without denying with them the purpose of your own existence. Yet now, he told himself, you are denying them, by renouncing the place that they have given you.”

James Jones book From Here to Eternity

From Here to Eternity (1951)

“This new quantum mechanics promised to explain all of chemistry. And though I felt an exuberance at this, I felt a certain threat, too. “Chemistry,” wrote Crookes, “will be established upon an entirely new basis…. We shall be set free from the need for experiment, knowing a priori what the result of each and every experiment must be.” I was not sure I liked the sound of this. Did this mean that chemists of the future (if they existed) would never actually need to handle a chemical; might never see the colors of vanadium salts, never smell a hydrogen selenide, never admire the form of a crystal; might live in a colorless, scentless, mathematical world? This, for me, seemed and awful prospect, for I, at least, needed to smell and touch and feel, to place myself, my senses, in the middle of the perceptual world.”

Oliver Sacks book Uncle Tungsten

Source: Uncle Tungsten (2001), pp. 312–313

World, Color, Feeling, Mathematics

“The philosophy of Kant, then, is the only philosophy with which a thorough acquaintance is directly presupposed in what we have to say here. But if, besides this, the reader has lingered in the school of the divine Plato, he will be so much the better prepared to hear me, and susceptible to what I say. And if, indeed, in addition to this he is a partaker of the benefit conferred by the Vedas, the access to which, opened to us through the Upanishads, is in my eyes the greatest advantage which this still young century enjoys over previous ones, because I believe that the influence of the Sanscrit literature will penetrate not less deeply than did the revival of Greek literature in the fifteenth century: if, I say, the reader has also already received and assimilated the sacred, primitive Indian wisdom, then is he best of all prepared to hear what I have to say to him. My work will not speak to him, as to many others, in a strange and even hostile tongue; for, if it does not sound too vain, I might express the opinion that each one of the individual and disconnected aphorisms which make up the Upanishads may be deduced as a consequence from the thought I am going to impart, though the converse, that my thought is to be found in the Upanishads, is by no means the case.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book The World as Will and Representation

:s:The World as Will and Representation/Preface to the First Edition Kants Philosophie also ist die einzige, mit welcher eine gründliche Bekanntschaft bei dem hier Vorzutragenden gradezu vorausgesetzt wird. — Wenn aber überdies noch der Leser in der Schule des göttlichen Platon geweilt hat; so wird er um so besser vorbereitet und empfänglicher seyn mich zu hören. Ist er aber gar noch der Wohllhat der Veda's theilhaft geworden, deren uns durch die Upanischaden eröfneter Zugang, in meinen Augen, der größte Vorzug ist, den dieses noch junge Jahrhundert vor den früheren aufzuweisen hat, indem ich vermuthe, daß der Einfluß der Samskrit-Litteratur nicht weniger tief eingreifen wird, als im 14ten Jahrhundert die Wiederbelebung der Griechischen: hat also, sage ich, der Leser auch schon die Weihe uralter Indischer Weisheit empfangen und empfänglich aufgenommen; dann ist er auf das allerbeste bereitet zu hören, was ich ihm vorzutragen habe. Ihn wird es dann nicht, wie manchen Andern fremd, ja feindlich ansprechen; da ich, wenn es nicht zu stolz klänge, behaupten möchte, daß jeder von den einzelnen und abgerissenen Aussprüchen, welche die Upanischaden ausmachen, sich als Folgesatz aus dem von mir mitzutheilenden Gedanken ableiten ließe, obgleich keineswegs auch umgekehrt dieser schon dort zu finden ist. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. Leipzig 1819. Vorrede. pp.XII-XIII books.google https://books.google.de/books?id=0HsPAAAAQAAJ&pg=PR12 The World as Will and Representation (1819; 1844; 1859)

Wisdom, Hostility, School, Literature

“A thought struck me: if my new album sounds this good on a walkman, what would eating a bacon sandwich and listening to a solo Ferry album, which turned me vegetarian.”

Robyn Hitchcock (1953) English singer-songwriter and guitarist

' CD booklet (Chapel Hill, NC: Yep Roc Records, 2007) p. 4.

“It's fun to sit at a terminal and let the code flow. It sounds strange, but it just comes out my brain; once I'm started, I don't have to think about it.”

Gary Kildall book Programmers at Work: Interviews with 19 Programmers who Shaped the Computer Industry

Programmers at Work (1986)

Thinking

“The sound of 'igh words
very soon reached the ears of an officer, Lieutenant Bird,
Who said to the Sergeant, 'Now what's all this here?'
And the Sergeant told what had occurred.”

Stanley Holloway (1890–1982) English stage and film actor, comedian, singer, poet and monologist

Sam, Sam, Pick Oop Tha' Musket

Bird

“The phone rang.
It was a thing that had been sitting here, black and quiet like a holstered gun, unlisted, unknown to anybody, used only for local outgoing calls, and when it was triggered it had the soft, muted sound of a silenced automatic. The first ring was a warning sound. The second time would be death calling.”

Mickey Spillane book Black Alley

Black Alley (1996)

Death, Silence, Time

“My first memory of Nirvana was getting a cassette of demos, which ended up becoming Bleach. Everybody's response was that this was an amazing band and these were amazing songs. It was another indication that the Northwest had something special that you couldn't argue with.
It was pretty shocking to see a threepiece that sounded like that, and trying to get inside the head of a guy who writes a song like "Floyd the Barber" – where does the kernel of a song like that start?
The Seattle scene benefitted from an MTV culture, and it was because of the way Nirvana looked and presented themselves that created this kind of unanimous support worldwide. Rock music had become kind of hedonistic – 35-year-old men taking a helicopter to the stage and dating supermodels, and going out of their way to separate themselves from their audience. Nirvana, more than any other band, rocked way harder, had significant originality, while looking like guys you went to high school with. I think that was their secret. There was an inclusion that was long overdue, and it was what rock was supposed to be about.
The legend isn't simply going to be the way that he took his life; I believe it will always be the songs.”

Chris Cornell (1964–2017) American singer-songwriter, musician

Soundgarden Era

Life, Men, Secret, School

“How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand? How do you keep a wave upon the sand?' These words from The Sound of Music bring out the elusive nature of chaos. In life, most things cannot be captured for long. It is like trying to encapsulate time itself.”

L. K. Samuels (1951) American writer

Source: In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action, (2013), p. vii.

Life, Music, Nature, Time

“There’s a passage where [the Buddha] contrasts his way of teaching with what he calls training in bombast. Training in bombast is where you’re taught things that are very poetic, that sound very high, very lovely, very inspiring, but no one is encouraged to ask what, precisely, they mean. After all, in bombast there really is no precise meaning. It’s all just vague, high-sounding words. But, as the Buddha said, he taught cross-questioning. Your training with him was in cross-questioning. When there was a teaching you didn’t understand, he encouraged you to ask, “What’s the meaning of this? What’s the purpose of that? How far should this word be taken?””

Thanissaro Bhikkhu (1949) Theravadin Buddhist Monk and Scholar

That way, wherever there are any doubts or uncertainties, you can clear them up.
Conviction and Confidence (2010)

Love, Way, Understanding, Question

“True and constant vigour of body is the effect of health, which is much better preserved with watery, herbaceous, frugal, and tender food, than with vinous, abundant, hard, and gross flesh. And in a sound body, a clear intelligence, and desire to suppress the mischievous inclinations, and to conquer the irrational passions, produces true worth.”

Antonio Cocchi (1695–1758) Italian physician and naturalist

The Pythagorean Diet: for the Use of the Medical Faculty

Health, Food, Intelligence, Passion

“We have got to stop sending jobs overseas. It's pretty simple: If you're paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor,…have no health care—that's the most expensive single element in making a car— have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don't care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south…when [Mexico's] jobs come up from a dollar an hour to six dollars an hour, and ours go down to six dollars an hour, and then it's leveled again. But in the meantime, you've wrecked the country with these kinds of deals.”

Ross Perot (1930–2019) American businessman

1992 Presidential Debate, regarding the effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) Transcript http://www.nytimes.com/1992/10/16/us/the-1992-campaign-transcript-of-2d-tv-debate-between-bush-clinton-and-perot.html

Money, Health, Cars, Country

“Oh wearisome Condition of Humanity!
Born under one law, to another bound:
Vainly begot and yet forbidden vanity,
Created sick, commanded to be sound:
What meaneth Nature by these diverse laws?
Passion and reason, self-division cause.
Is it the mark, or Majesty of Power
To make offences that it may forgive?”

Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke (1554–1628) English politician

Chorus Sacerdotum.
Mustapha (1609)

Law, Forgiveness, Nature, Passion

“Rising and leaping,
Sinking and creeping,
Swelling and sweeping,
Showering and springing,
Flying and flinging,
Writhing and ringing,
Eddying and whisking,
Spouting and frisking,
Turning and twisting,
Around and around
With endless rebound:
Smiting and fighting,
A sight to delight in;
Confounding, astounding,
Dizzying and deafening the ear with its sound.”

Robert Southey (1774–1843) British poet

St. 4. The Cataract of Lodore http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/652.html (1820)

Spring, Fight, Flying

“Mr. Peres, you are older than I am. And your voice is genuinely loud. I know that it is because you are, in fact, in a psychology of feeling guilty, thus you better know that I will not sound that loud. And when killing is the case, you know how to kill very well. I know how you killed the children on the beaches, I know how you shot them. Two ex-PMs of your country once told me important things. You have had such prime ministers who said, "When I enter Palestine on a tank, I feel happy — in a different way." You have had PMs who said to me "I feel happy when I am on a tank while entering Palestine." And you give me those numbers. I would release their names, in case some of you might be curious of. I also condemn those who acclaim this cruelty, because I think it is a crime against humanity as well.”

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (1954) 12th President of Turkey from 2014

As quoted during a discussion panel at 2009 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, in "Turkish PM storms off in Gaza row" http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/davos/7859417.stm, BBC (January 29, 2009)

Children, Way, Feeling, Thinking

“My father, William C. Boulding, was a working plumber in business for himself. At the back of the house was the yard, a corrugated iron shed full of pipes, wrenches, and blow torches, and other mysterious and rather frightening apparatus. He had two faithful employees, Billy Fox, who was moody and regarded as a little queer, and Billy Sankey, who was short and cheerful. They and my father always smelled strongly of some kind of grease. My father was a gentle man. I never I never heard his voice raised in anger. He had had a very hard childhood. His father died soon after he was born; his mother married again, a man known in the family legends as "Pa Hardacre," about whom endless stories were told. He was a bigamist. He drove my father out of the house at the age of twelve to earn his own living on the streets of Liverpool. He constantly mistreated my half-aunts, Ethel and Rosie. He died before I was born, but my mother's accounts of him sounded like something out of Dickens.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1980s, Illustrating Economics: Beasts, Ballads and Aphorisms, 1980, p. 5

Age, Family, Faith, Business

“Imprisoned under all our layers of long underwear, thick socks, shirts, vests, jackets, coats and hoods were these tropical bodies; the steam and hot water brought color back into the pallor, found the nacreous hollow in a hip, detected the subtly raised triceps, rinsed a sharp clavicle in a softening flood, swirled dull brown hair into a smooth black cap and pulled evening gloves of light over raw hands and skinny, blue-veined forearms.Just as each shell held to the ears roars with a different ocean timbre, each of these bodies spoke to me with a different music, though all sounded to me unlike my own and only with the greatest effort could I remember I was longing after my own sex. Indeed, each of these beings seemed to possess his very own sex.”

Edmund White book A Boy's Own Story

Source: A Boy's Own Story (1982), Chapter Six (p. 153).

Music, Sex, Color, Effort

“Some stories, she'd say, the more you tell them, the faster you use them up. Those kind, the drama burns off, and every version, they sound more silly and flat. The other kind of story, it uses you up. The more you tell it, the stronger it gets. Those kind of stories only remind you how stupid you were. Are. Will always be.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Haunted

Haunted (2005)

Stupidity

“I have two principle aims, two life works. The second is my sonata [Schwitters' 'UrSonata' - a long sound poem of 35 minutes]”

Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) German artist

Source: 1940s, I is Style (2000), p. 48 : quoted by Margareth Miller to Oliver Kaufmann [the first principle aim is his Merzbau]

Life

“I knew that I must paint not what I saw, but only what was in me, in my soul. Figuratively speaking, it was like this: In my heart I felt as if there were an organ, which I had to sound. And nature, which I saw before me, only prompted me. And that was a key that unlocked this organ and made it sound... They are songs without words.”

Alexej von Jawlensky (1864–1941) Russian painter

from: 'Lebenserinnerungen', 1938
Source: 1936 - 1941, Life Memories' (1938), p. 186

Soul, Nature, Heart, Painting

“But now, as throughout history, financial capacity and political perspicacity are inversely correlated. Long run salvation by men of business has never been highly regarded if it means disturbance of orderly life and convenience in the present. So inaction will be advocated in the present even though it means deep trouble in the future. Here, at least equally with communism, lies the threat to capitalism. It is what causes men who know that things are going quite wrong to say that things are fundamentally sound.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Great Crash, 1929

Source: The Great Crash, 1929 (1954 and 1997 https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929), Chapter X, Cause and Consequence, p. 199

Life, Men, History, Communication

“So, music does not attempt to imitate Nature's sounds, but it does interpet and embody emotions awakened by Nature through a convention of its own, in a way to be aesthetically pleasing. In some such way, we, taking our hint from Nature, construct decoratively pleasing harmonies and symphonies of color expression of our sentiments.”

Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) French painter

Quote of Metzinger in 'The Wild Men of Paris', by Gelett Burgess https://monoskop.org/images/f/f3/Burgess_Gelett_1910_The_Wild_Men_of_Paris.pdf, in 'The Architectural Record, Vol XXVII, May 1910, p. 414

Music, Color, Way, Nature

“The running gag of the Grand Prix series is that whereas Murray [Walker], safe in the commentary box, sounds like a blindfolded man riding a unicycle on the rim of the pit of doom, the men actually facing the danger are all so taciturn that you might as well try interviewing the cars themselves.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

'Hot pistils'
Essays and reviews, Glued to the Box (1983)

Men, Cars, Box

“I suppose I ought to think up some dramatic, quotable phrase for Public Information and the history books, but I'm damned if any of them come to mind. Besides, admitting the truth wouldn't sound too good (…) The truth, Russell, is that now the moment's here, I'm scared shitless. Somehow I don't think even Public Information could turn that into good copy.”

David Weber (1952) author

quote from Havenite Admiral Amos Parnell, after ordering his fleet to depart for the opening attack of the Haven-Manticore War.
"Honorverse", The Short Victorious War (1994)

Truth, Books, History, Thinking

“It is really — one of the things in it that I heard yesterday in his testimony that I thought was disturbing was this — what did he call it? — a massive persuasion campaign. That sounded a little bit like Goebbels or Gore-bels.”

Glenn Beck (1964) U.S. talk radio and television host

on Al Gore's March 21 testimony before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works
2000s

“In this world, everything has a pulse or a vibration. This sound is unique to each living or non-living thing and in itself creates a music that no-one can hear. I believe that this has a very powerful resonance with, and a deep effect on, our lives. What would happen if we took this further and applied it to bigger things, more powerful things; like an entire solar system or galaxy say, what would that sound like?
Musica Universalis is the ancient theory that every celestial body, the sun, the moon and the stars, has an inner music. This is a harmonic and mathematical concept derived from the movements of the planets in the solar system. The music created is inaudible to the human ear.
Music of the Spheres is my interpretation of this theory. Every planet and every star; the whole universe has music within it that no-one can hear. This is what it would sound like if it was set free. This is Music of the Spheres.”

Mike Oldfield (1953) English musician, multi-instrumentalist

from the introduction to Music of the Spheres

World, Music, Star, Mathematics

“I shall detain you no longer in the demonstration of what we should not do, but straight conduct ye to a hillside, where I will point ye out the right path of a virtuous and noble education; laborious indeed at the first ascent, but else so smooth, so green, so full of goodly prospect and melodious sounds on every side that the harp of Orpheus was not more charming.”

John Milton (1608–1674) English epic poet

Tractate of Education (1644)

Education

“I lost all connection with the outside world and was immersed in a world of darkness. I was scared that my existence would fade silently. No one knew where I was, and no one would ever know. I was just like a small soybean—once fallen to the ground, it rolls into a crack in the corner. Being unable to make any sounds, it will forever be forgotten.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

Wong, Veronica, and Gisela Sommer. “ Ai Weiwei Describes Mental Torment in Captivity http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/china-news/ai-weiwei-describes-mental-torment-in-captivity-59915.html.” Epoch Times, August 3, 2011. 2010-, 2011

World

“(DVD introduction) Well, welcome to your very own DVD of me, DVB, and ‘Mind Control’. If you weren’t expecting me and thought you were buying Reginald Perrin, then press eject now before you begin vomiting. Otherwise, please, please ensure that you are sitting in an extreme level of comfort, preferably in pre-worn slippers and, I trust, with your extended family around you. If you have seen the film ‘Signs’ and would like to wear the pointy tin foil hats now would be a good time to put them on you can’t be too careful. Well, pphhh, goodness me, er, it’s been a meteoric rise over these last years. The money and sex are exhausting and I have you the viewer to thank. Thanks. We’ve put together some of the pieces from the specials and series in glistening digital format, each pixel hand picked and gently polished and brought to you in wide-sound, surround-screen enjoyment. I hope you enjoy watching them as much as I’ll enjoy the royalties from this, which is enormously. If you don’t like it and HMV won’t take it back because you’ve got sticky all over it then the disc makes an excellent beer coaster or wheels for a space truck or can be immense fun just putting it on your finger and [waggling it], like that. But I hope you do like it. When I first started developing these techniques I had no idea that they were going to prove at all popular and for all my nancing about and staring I’m actually really excited to have a DVD out and can’t wait to go and find it in Discount Books & Puzzles next to the Dizzie Gillespie CD box sets and disappointing erotica. I hope you like it and if you do, please go and buy another one.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Mind Control (1999–2000) or Inside Your Mind on DVD

Money, Books, Family, Hope

“Strange though this may sound, not knowing where one is going – being lost, being a loser – reveals the greatest possible faith and optimism, as against collective security and collective significance. To believe, one must have lost God; to paint, one must have lost art.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

undated quotes, The Daily Practice of Painting, Writings (1962-1993)

God, Faith, Art, Optimism

“Somewhere at the heart
of the universe sounds the
true mystic note: Me.”

Peter Porter (1929–2010) British poet

"Japanese Jokes", p. 63.
The Last of England (1970)

Universe, Heart

“I can write no more today. The contemplation of my sorry state has reduced me to so deep a melancholy that I contemplate opening my wrist like Petronius Arbiter and lapsing quietly into oblivion. Unlike Petronius, however, I shall have neither the sound of music nor the gentle talk of friends. I still have time to choose a better moment — besides, who knows to what nightmares I might awake.”

Morris West (1916–1999) Australian writer

Last lines which West had written for his unfinished work The Last Confession, about the last days of Giordano Bruno.
The Last Confession (2000)

Music, Time

“For him no silver cressets shed their light,
No eager joy-bells sounded through the night
From city minster, or from village tower;
No loud "hurrahs," sent from deep-chested men,
Lifted the midnight mist from off the glen
In celebration of his natal hour.”

John Stanyan Bigg (1828–1865) British writer

Ode to the Centenary of Burns http://www.gerald-massey.org.uk/massey/dmc_burns_centenary2.htm#7 (1858)

Men, Light, Joy, Night

“I woke last night to the sound of thunder,
"How far off," I sat and wondered.
Started hummin' a song from 1962.
Ain't it funny how the night moves,
When you just don't seem to have as much to lose.
Strange how the night moves, with autumn closin' in.”

Bob Seger (1945) American singer-songwriter

Night Moves.
Song lyrics, Night Moves (1976)

Autumn, Night

“There is no doubt that our grievances against the British Empire had a sound basis for. As the painstaking statistical work of the Cambridge historian Angus Maddison has shown, India's share of world income collapsed from 22.6% in 1700, almost equal to Europe's share of 23.3% at that time, to as low as 3.8% in 1952. Indeed, at the beginning of the 20th Century, "the brightest jewel in the British Crown" was the poorest country in the world in terms of per capita income.”

Manmohan Singh (1932) 13th Prime Minister of India

On the effect of British colonialism on India's economy, as quoted in "Address by Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh at Oxford University" https://web.archive.org/web/20070213050232/http://www.thehindu.com/thehindu/nic/0046/pmspeech.htm, The Hindu (8 July 2005) 2001-2005

World, Time, Country

“Part of the inner world of everyone is this sense of emptiness, unease, incompleteness, and I believe that this in itself is a word from God, that this is the sound that God’s voice makes in a world that has explained him away. In such a world, I suspect that maybe God speaks to us most clearly through his silence, his absence, so that we know him best through our missing him.”

Frederick Buechner (1926) Poet, novelist, short story writer, theologian

Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons (2006)

God, World, Sense, Silence

“The development of the human mind has practically extinguished all feelings, except a few sporadic kinds, [like] sound, colors, smells, warmth, etc., which now appear to be disconnected and separate.”

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist

The Law of Mind (1892)

Color, Feeling, Appearance

“The force of the idea was such that I drew the car to the side of the road and stopped and, for some reason, laughed. It was a loud laugh, unsteady, and sounded, even to my own ears, slightly maniacal. Thinking back now, I realise it was less a laugh than the birth-cry of my dark and twin brother Benjamin Black.”

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

John Banville on the birth of his dark twin, Benjamin Black (2011)

Cars, Idea, Birth, Thinking

“We all know the beautiful hymn commencing with the cheerful line: "Hark from the tombs, a doleful sound." Nothing could have been more appropriate for children. It is well to put a coffin where it can be seen from the cradle. When a mother nurses her child, an open grave should be at her feet. This would tend to make the babe serious, reflective, religious and miserable.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

Why I Am an Agnostic (1896)

Children, Beauty

“And so never ending, but always descending,
Sounds and motions forever and ever are blending
All at once and all o'er, with a mighty uproar, —
And this way the water comes down at Lodore.”

Robert Southey (1774–1843) British poet

St. 8. The Cataract of Lodore http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/652.html (1820)

Way, Water

“On sound volume and arrangement: "No, high volume levels cause less harm than the awkward arrangement of sounds. Assuming that the sound is a wave: if this wave is not balanced by itself, it causes great damage when it enters the ear. I have tested this on a few people in my studio. I made them listen to two tracks. The first track was considered too loud, whereas the second track was actually louder but more balanced".”

Vangelis (1943) Greek composer of electronic, progressive, ambient, jazz, pop rock, and orchestral music

1979

People

“Even things without life that give sound, whether pipe or harp, except they give a distinction of sounds, how shall it be known what is piped or harped? For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle? So likewise you, except you utter by the tongue plain speech, how shall it be known what is said? For you shall be speaking into the air.”

Paul of Tarsus book First Epistle to the Corinthians

1 Corinthians 14:7-9 (as quoted in Catholic Bible Douay-Rehims http://www.biblebible.com/text-bible/Catholic-Bible/1_corinthians_14.asp) First Epistle to the Corinthians

Life

“Now come and join the living, its not so far from you
And its getting nearer, soon it will all be true
Oh peace train sounding louder”

Cat Stevens (1948) British singer-songwriter

Peace Train
Song lyrics, Teaser and the Firecat (1971)

Peace, Training

“I have often asked myself whether, given the choice, I would choose to have manic-depressive illness. … Strangely enough, I think I would choose to have it. It's complicated. Depression is awful beyond words or sounds or images … So why would I want anything to do with this illness? Because I honestly believe that as a result of it I have felt more things, more deeply; had more experiences, more intensely; … worn death 'as close as dungarees', appreciated it - and life - more; seen the finest and most terrible in people … But, normal or manic, I have run faster, thought faster, and loved faster than most I know. And I think much of this is related to my illness - the intensity it gives to things”

Kay Redfield Jamison (1946) American bipolar disorder researcher

An Unquiet Mind

Love, Life, Death, People

“Thus when Plotinus speaks of "the flight of the alone to the Alone," and the positivist or the empiricist asserts that these words are meaningless, he is right. Yet this does not import that the words are nonsense locutions, mere senseless noises which a man makes like a cough or a sneeze though it is possible that this is what the positivist intends. If this were so, it would be impossible to explain why generations of men have quoted those famous words. The explanation is that the words evoke in us a measure of the same experience which the author of them had. Our experience may be but a dim reflection of what was in him bright and clear. Our spirits vibrate faintly in unison with the soul of the great mystic, as a tuning fork vibrates faintly in response to the sound of the clear bell. But it is our own spontaneous experience which is evoked; it is not his experience which is communicated to us. His words are as grappling irons let down into the depths of our subconsciousness, which draw our own inner experiences nearer to the conscious threshold. But they are not, for most of us, drawn above the threshold. They remain below the surface faintly visible. Therefore they appear at the upper levels of our consciousness as faint hints, glimpses, and sometimes as mere vague feelings.”

Walter Terence Stace (1886–1967) British civil servant, educator and philosopher.

p. 91-92.

Men, Feeling, Quotes, Soul

“"You must tell them that there must be a new union or there will be chaos," he [Shevardnadze] implored me. That evening, when I hosted republic leaders for dinner — a mixed group of presidents, prime ministers, and foreign ministers — I saw around the table and in the conversation a microcosm of the post-coup Soviet Union’s potential — and its problems. Whatever euphoria that they felt with their post-putsch independence declarations had given way to a marked degree of realism. "Independence sounds nice, but we have to live, and we have to be practical," observed the Prime Minister of Moldova, Valeriu Muravsky. That was the persistent theme that I heard from every one of the republic leaders, with the sole exception of the Georgian Prime Minister, Vissarion Gugushvili, though even he spoke of the need for economic cooperation once Georgian independence was recognized internationally.”

James Baker (1930) Former U.S. Secretary of State

The Politics of Diplomacy: Revolution, War and Peace 1989-1992 (1995) by James Addison Baker, p. 531
1995

Way, Problem

“These plays and stories have for their continual theme the passing away of gods and men and cities before the mysterious power which is sometimes called by some great god's name but more often 'Time.' His travellers, who travel by so many rivers and deserts and listen to sounding names none heard before, come back with no tale that does not tell of vague rebellion against that power, and all the beautiful things they have seen get something of their charm from the pathos of fragility. This poet who has imagined colours, ceremonies and incredible processions that never passed before the eyes of Edgar Allen Poe or of De Quincey, and remembered as much fabulous beauty as Sir John Mandeville, has yet never wearied of the most universal of emotions and the one most constantly associated with the sense of beauty; and when we come to examine those astonishments that seemed so alien we find that he has but transfigured with beauty the common sights of the world.”

Lord Dunsany (1878–1957) Irish writer and dramatist

About

Men, God, World, Beauty

“Time is that which is measured by a clock. This is a sound way of looking at things. A quantity like time, or any other physical measurement, does not exist in a completely abstract way. We find no sense in talking about something unless we specify how we measure it. It is the definition by the method of measuring a quantity that is the one sure way of avoiding talking nonsense about this kind of thing.”

Hermann Bondi (1919–2005) British mathematician and cosmologist

Hermann Bondi (1980), Relativity and Common Sense: A New Approach to Einstein, p. 65

Way, Sense, Time

“One has not great hopes from Birmingham. I always say there is something direful in the sound…”

Jane Austen book Emma

Emma (1815)
Works, Emma

Hope

“This is a painful movie to watch. But it is also exhilarating, as all good movies are, because we are watching the director and actors venturing beyond any conventional idea of what a modern movie can be about. Here there is no plot, no characters to identify with, no hope. But there is care: The filmmakers care enough about these people to observe them very closely, to note how they look and sound and what they feel.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/naked-1994 of Naked (18 February 1994) Reviews, Four star reviews

Pain, People, Hope, Feeling

“This bubbling and whirling of forms and lights, composed of sounds, noises, and smells has been partly achieved by me in my 'Anarchical funeral' [the painting Carra painted ca 1910-1911, ed. ].... by Umberto Boccioni in his 'States of Minds' and 'Forces of a Street' [both paintings Boccioni painted in 1911], by Russolo in 'Rebellion' (1911) and Severini in 'Pan-Pan [the first version, Severini painted in 1909-1911], paintings which were violently discussed at our first Paris exhibition in 1912.”

Carlo Carrà (1881–1966) Italian painter

Quote in La Pittura dei suoni, rumori, odori Carrà, 11 Aug 1913, as quoted in Futurism, ed. By Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 142
1910's

Light, Painting

“One of the fundamental things is in a jihad. That sounds like a country western term like, "Jiii-had!"”

Robin Williams (1951–2014) American actor and stand-up comedian

Robin Williams: Live on Broadway (2002)

Country

“For physical fitness is not only one of the most important keys to a healthy body; it is the basis of dynamic and creative intellectual activity. The relationship between the soundness of the body and the activities of the mind is subtle and complex. Much is not yet understood. But we do know what the Greeks knew: that intelligence and skill can only function at the peak of their capacity when the body is healthy and strong; that hardy spirits and tough minds usually inhabit sound bodies.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1960, Sport at the New Frontier: The Soft American

Intelligence, Strong

“Senator Obama said that he wants to spread the wealth and he wants government to take your money and decide how to best to redistribute it according to his priorities. Joe suggested that sounded a little bit like socialism. Whatever you call it, I call it bad medicine for an ailing economy and it's what Barack Obama will do to those who want to create jobs.”

Sarah Palin (1964) American politician

Rally in West Chester, Ohio, , quoted in [2008-10-17, Palin Aligns Obama’s Economic Policies with ‘Socialism’, Elizabeth, Holmes, Washington Wire, The Wall Street Journal, http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2008/10/17/palin-aligns-obamas-economic-policies-with-socialism/] Referring to Senator Barack Obama saying to Samuel "Joe the Plumber" Wurzelbacher on about progressive taxation, "And I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody" and Wurzelbacher saying of it http://www.toledoblade.com/Politics/2008/10/16/Joe-the-plumber-isn-t-licensed.html to the Toledo Blade, "That's a pretty socialist comment." 2014

Money, Wealth