Music Quotes

He considered for a moment, then started to play a piece that was very familiar to Ruth, although she had no idea what it was. It was lilting and wistful, and she could have sung the melody if she had wished.Alright? He raised his eyebrows inquiringly.Yes. Exactly.It was effortless and perfect, and he played it through to the end, closing with the softest and most delicate chords, which hung and faded in the quiet hall like the grains of dust raining through the evening light. Ruth was touched. It was all she had wanted. He did not move until there was complete silence again, then he closed the lid without saying anything, and stood up, shoving back the chair. ... What was that piece? A Brahms waltz.Hasn't it got a name? she wanted it to remember.Number fifteen. Opus thirty-nine. It hadn't sounded like numbers to Ruth.

~ K.m. Peyton

It is a second-generation Seattle-scene record label; all of its artists are young people who came to Seattle after they graduated college in search of the legendary Seattle music scene and discovered that it didn't really exist--it was just a couple of dozen guys who sat around playing guitar in one another's basements--and so who were basically forced to choose between going home in ignominy or fabricating the Seattle Music scene of their imagination from whole cloth. This led to the establishment of any number of small clubs, and the foundation of many bands, that were not rooted in any kind of authentic reality whatsoever but merely reflected the dreams and aspiration of pan-global young adults who had flocked to Seattle on the same chimera hunt.

~ Neal Stephenson

How do you imagine Hell, sir Blacksad ? For me, it's a place without music... of complete silence.

~ Juan Díaz Canales

Connection, he explained, was the essence of pop music, according to his boss, Jimmy Iovine: “Jimmy always says it’s all about the connection between the artist and the fans,” he says. “This whole business, it’s just about that connection.

~ John Seabrook

Love is the only song I sing.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

If the only song you sing is love, it is the greatest.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Music is music.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

The red-jacketed band stirred to life. The first musician raised his trumpet. The trombone dipped. The drumstick rose. Lea lowered her clarinet. It had been Brent's idea not to have their insturments rise and fall in unison. The staggered motion gave it a more exciting rhythm.

~ Paul Fleischman

But nobody is born being able to hear [intervals], and many people never master them. Some people never even notice that Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star and The Alphabet Song follow the same melody (and hence consist of the same sequence of intervals).

~ Gary F. Marcus

There is a reason you glance up when you first hear a melody, or tap your foot to the sound of a drum. All humans are musical. Why else would the Lord give you a beating heart?

~ Mitch Albom

The morning was, therefore, a mixture of a plenitude of densities, from the presence of the placid birds, to the mundane premonition, to the spring of small glisters which accompanied that autumnal rain. The music, in a simple whistle, recreated a new universe with the parish and all the hearts that were witness to it- padre, pigeons, swallows, the world!- were clothed in a new carnivalesque colouring: a celebration from within.

~ Ondjaki

... after daybreak is when I will already have died. At that moment I will only know of beautiful things: the certainties, the desires. When the sun bathes me, I will be something else: without mirrors, without sadness. I will have passed away, but will have been reborn. I will whistle mellifluous melodies. Discredited but, in the end, light.

~ Ondjaki

The elders say- difficult to prove- that winged creatures also dream. The birds are lovers of heights, always searching out landing spots, never constant here at the foot of the human race. 'It's that they discovered a magical advantage...' they say, 'the sound of silence.'At the foot of the clouds the raindrops come earlier, it's true, and the silence of the sky is something unattainable for those who don't fly- we have never experimented. The dream of the birds was that man of them headed for a land where they experienced a similar magic to that lived by them.In the final analysis, music is the only human sound similar to that of silence.

~ Ondjaki

Rock stars have many of the same qualities as athletes—millions for doing what they love, fans, easy pussy, fame, status, the ability to do whatever they want when they want. While what they do is still cool, the main difference is that it’s less masculine. You connect with your fans in this intense, intimate, emotional way that is less about you and more about them, how you make them feel. When you’re an athlete, it’s all about you. They cheer you on. When you make music, you cheer them on, provide the soundtrack to their little lives, and all they do is cheer you back to say “Thanks.

~ A.d. Aliwat

Even more than music, rock-and-roll is sex.

~ A.d. Aliwat

The sound circulated like an autonomous being whose tentacles needed to experience a sensitive awareness of the terrain.

~ Ondjaki

be my sonata, my cantata, my lovesing me something sweetbut not too sweet(or i may grow deaf to our harmonyas we decrescendo into silence)

~ Nenia Campbell

He's rigged a tiny cassette player with a small set of foam earphones to listen to demo tapes and rough mixes. Occasionally he'll hand the device to Mindy, wanting her opinion, and each time, the experience of music pouring directly against her eardrums - hers alone - is a shock that makes her eyes well up; the privacy of it, the way it transforms her surroundings into a golden montage, as if she were looking back on this lark in Africa with Lou from some distant future.

~ Jennifer Egan

We may now briefly enumerate the elements of style.  We have, peculiar to the prose writer, the task of keeping his phrases large, rhythmical, and pleasing to the ear, without ever allowing them to fall into the strictly metrical: peculiar to the versifier, the task of combining and contrasting his double, treble, and quadruple pattern, feet and groups, logic and metre—harmonious in diversity: common to both, the task of artfully combining the prime elements of language into phrases that shall be musical in the mouth; the task of weaving their argument into a texture of committed phrases and of rounded periods—but this particularly binding in the case of prose: and, again common to both, the task of choosing apt, explicit, and communicative words.  We begin to see now what an intricate affair is any perfect passage; how many faculties, whether of taste or pure reason, must be held upon the stretch to make it; and why, when it is made, it should afford us so complete a pleasure.  From the arrangement of according letters, which is altogether arabesque and sensual, up to the architecture of the elegant and pregnant sentence, which is a vigorous act of the pure intellect, there is scarce a faculty in man but has been exercised.  We need not wonder, then, if perfect sentences are rare, and perfect pages rarer.-ON SOME TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF STYLE IN LITERATURE

~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Music and literature, the two temporal arts, contrive their pattern of sounds in time; or, in other words, of sounds and pauses.  Communication may be made in broken words, the business of life be carried on with substantives alone; but that is not what we call literature; and the true business of the literary artist is to plait or weave his meaning, involving it around itself; so that each sentence, by successive phrases, shall first come into a kind of knot, and then, after a moment of suspended meaning, solve and clear itself.-ON SOME TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF STYLE IN LITERATURE

~ Robert Louis Stevenson

There isn't a better feeling in the world—not an orgasm, not a first kiss, not even that glorious soaring sensation you get when those first few notes of a new song pierce your chest and fill your whole body with absolute bliss—than acknowledgment that your mix tape was not only received and played but enjoyed. It's a dance of sorts, balancing songs you think the listener will love while trying to say everything that otherwise dries up in your throat before you can get out the words.

~ Libby Cudmore

Ah, yes, the mix tape. The mating call of the introvert.

~ Sophia Dembling

Listening to music makes me creative in all spheres of life.

~ Nelson Nshekanabo

People began to join in, quietly at first to match her mood, but as the song built up at the end, their voices did as well, so that by the time they got to the final “Free to be you and me,” the whole school could hear them. Caught in the pure delight of it, Jess turned and his eyes met Leslie’s. He smiled at her. What the heck? There wasn’t any reason he couldn’t. What was he scared of anyhow? Lord. Sometimes he acted like the original yellow-bellied sapsucker. He nodded and smiled again. She smiled back. He felt there in the teachers’ room that it was the beginning of a new season in his life, and he chose deliberately to make it so.He did not have to make any announcement to Leslie that he had changed his mind about her. She already knew it. She plunked herself down beside him on the bus and squeezed over closer to him to make room for May Belle on the same seat. She talked about Arlington, about the huge suburban school she used to go to with its gorgeous music room but not a single teacher in it as beautiful or as nice as Miss Edmunds.

~ Katherine Patterson

They told me exactly how it worked, the marketing of it. Our target market was always going to be young teenage girls, because boys are into sports, and they like buying jerseys and caps and so on, for baseball or football, things of that nature, whereas the girls are totally enthralled with the band. . . . They don’t have money, but they have access to a large supply of it: their aunts, uncles, grandmas, grandpas, who would spend money on them for a concert or merchandise sooner than they would spend it on themselves.

~ John Seabrook

You can get in a car in Maine and drive all the way to California and hear the same Top 40 songs on the same chain broadcasters,” bemoaned the report.

~ John Seabrook

Free the fire fluttering inside her rib cage. Work her muscles, the bow, the violin, until she played herself to ash and embers and left the rest of the world behind to smolder.

~ Alexandra Bracken

Country music was the most segregated kind of music in America, where even whites played jazz and even blacks sang in the opera. Something like country music was what lynch mobs must have enjoyed while stringing up their black victims. Country music was not necessarily lynching music, but no other music could be imagined as lynching’s accompaniment. Beethoven’s Ninth was the opus for Nazis, concentration camp commanders, and possibly President Truman as he contemplated atomizing Hiroshima, classical music the refined score for the high-minded extermination of brutish hordes. Country music was set to the more humble beat of the red-blooded, bloodthirsty American heartland.

~ Viet Thanh Nguyen

when you come to a show do you feel the same thing that i feel when i’m on that stage? i mean, i know you’re not standing on the stage… but surely you can feel the same energy that i’m feeling, to some degree. it’s so much more powerful than all the trivial nonsense that people chalk our band up to be. it means something great and it feels empowering. it’s the grace of knowing that we can all totally suck and be a little messed up and then stand in a room with thousands of other people who are exactly the same way, no matter how dressed up they look on the outside, and we can be broken all the same.

~ Hayley Williams

A melody occurs to you; you sing it silently, inwardly ... ; you steep your being in it; it takes possession of all your strength and emotions, and during the time it lives in you, it effaces all that is fortuitous, evil, coarse and sad in you; it brings the world into harmony with you, it makes burdens light and gives wings to the benumbed.

~ Hermann Hesse

alone, drinking coffee, listening to the playlist that include the songs that remember you with the best and bad moments of your life.what a hard emotional moment !!

~ Nabil Toussi

One did not need to penetrate David's secret counsels or insinuate a man in his bodyguard. All one needed was a pair of years and access to the royal precincts. Just to eavesdrop upon his singing was to develop an accurate idea of his state of mind.

~ Geraldine Brooks

To hear for the duration of a heartbeat the universe and the totality of life in its mysterious, innate harmony.

~ Hermann Hesse

The music of kindness may be short lived, but its echoes are everlasting.

~ Debasish Mridha

Music fills the gap between the conscious and the subconscious mind with endless joy and bliss.

~ Debasish Mridha

You feel the same hum at a Cohen concert that you do at a church or a synagogue, a feeling that emanates from the realization that the words and tunes you're about to hear represent the best efforts we humans can make to capture the mysteries that surround us, and that by listening and closing your eyes and singing along, you, too can somehow transcend.

~ Liel Leibovitz

Music is the language of soul, it can express the deepest feelings of life which language cannot touch.

~ Debasish Mridha

If you listen to music every day, you will strengthen your soul.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

There were some low moments out there on the road tonight—abandonment and what’s the point?—but then I pulled in a radio station from Albuquerque playing historical rap and breakdance circa 1982. Kurtis Blow and disco synthesizers made me feel like I could drive all night.

~ Chris Kraus

The forlorn notes of Cristofori’s Dream replaced the eerie silence, sending a chill up my neck. The piano sang in desperation. Lamenting strings pierced the air as if grieving on my behalf. The notes edged through my mind, and I stared across the room, right through the beige wall to the void beyond. My eyes labored through nothingness, searching for the tiniest fragment of hope to no avail.

~ Anderson