music Quotes

“Ah, music,” he said, wiping his eyes. “A magic beyond all we do here!”

“We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.”

“There is nothing more to be said or to be done tonight, so hand me over my violin and let us try to forget for half an hour the miserable weather and the still more miserable ways of our fellowmen.”

“Do you remember what Darwin says about music? He claims that the power of producing and appreciating it existed among the human race long before the power of speech was arrived at. Perhaps that is why we are so subtly influenced by it. There are vague memories in our souls of those misty centuries when the world was in its childhood.′ That’s a rather broad idea,′ I remarked. One’s ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature,′ he answered.”

“If you cannot teach me to fly, teach me to sing.”

“Without music, life would be a blank to me.”

“Tax not so bad a voice to slander music any more than once.”

“For the first time, he heard something that he knew to be music. He heard people singing. 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.”

“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.”

“It seemed to travel with her, to sweep her aloft in the power of song, so that she was moving in glory among the stars, and for a moment she, too, felt that the words Darkness and Light had no meaning, and only this melody was real.”

“June played with her eyes closed, as if May’s spirit getting into heaven depended solely on her. You have never heard such music, how it made us believe death was nothing but a doorway.”

“I hadn’t realized that music could unlock things in you, could transport you to somewhere even the composer hadn’t predicted. It left an imprint in the air around you, as if you carried its remnants with you when you went.”

“I have lived through much, and now I think I have found what is needed for happiness. A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one’s neighbor - such is my idea of happiness. And then, on top of all that, you for a mate, and children, perhaps - what more can the heart of a man desire?”

“Performing isn’t easy—in fact, it’s heartbreaking. You spend months, maybe years, mastering a piece; you become a part of it, and it becomes a part of you. Playing for an audience is like giving blood; it leaves you feeling empty and a bit light-headed.”

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

“No one can sing who has smog in his throat.”

“With a smile to his soul, he descended Mount Crumpet Cheerily blowing “Who! Who!” on his trumpet.”

“Where words fail, music speaks.”

“It is fun to sing if you sing with a Ying. My Ying can sing like anything.”

“I sing high and my Ying sings low, and we are not too bad, you know.”

“The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils; The motions of his spirit are dull as night, And his affections dark as Erebus. Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.”

“He loves no plays, . . . he hears no music; Seldom he smiles, and smiles in such a sort As if he mock’d himself and scorn’d his spirit That could be moved to smile at any thing.”

“Most of all loved, when she went to sleep, to hear the Angel of Music.”

“Every great musician, every great artist received a visit from the Angel at least once in his life.”

“Sometimes the Angel leans over their cradle, as happened to Lotte, and that is how there are little prodigies who play the fiddle at six better than men at fifty, which, you must admit, is very wonderful.”

“Sometimes, the Angel comes much later, because the children are naughty and won’t learn their lessons or practise their scales. And sometimes, he does not come at all, because the children have a bad heart or a bad conscience.”

“No one ever sees the Angel; but he is heard by those who are meant to hear him.”

“Then their ears suddenly perceive celestial harmonies, a divine voice, which they remember all their lives.”

“Persons who are visited by the Angel quiver with a thrill unknown to the rest of mankind.”

“And they can not touch an instrument, or open their mouths to sing, without producing sounds that put all other human sounds to shame.”

“People who do not know that the Angel has visited those persons say that they have genius.”

“She wore so many brooches and necklaces and earrings that she jingled and jangled just like a brass band.”

“Thank God for books and music and things I can think about.”

It was pitch dark. I could hear only the violin, and it was as though Juliek’s soul were the bow. He was playing his life. The whole of his life was gliding on the strings--his last hopes, his charred past, his extinguished future. He played as he would never play again.

“I am no king, and I am no lord, And I am no soldier at-arms,” said he. “I’m none but a harper, and a very poor harper, That am come hither to wed with ye.” “If you were a lord, you should be my lord, And the same if you were a thief,” said she. “And if you are a harper, you shall be my harper, For it makes no matter to me, to me, For it makes no matter to me.” “But what if it prove that I am no harper? That I lied for your love most monstrously?” “Why, then I’ll teach you to play and sing, For I dearly love a good harp,” said she.”

“Don’t worry about the bits you can’t understand. Sit back and allow the words to wash around you, like music.”

“He grew until he was a teenager. He had strange friends and he wore strange clothes and he listened to strange music.”

“That day, I learned that I could be a giver by simply bringing a smile to another person. The ensuing years have taught me that a kind word, a vote of support is a charitable gift. I can move over and make another place for someone. I can turn my music up if it pleases, or down if it is annoying. I may never be known as a philanthropist, but I certainly am a lover of mankind, and I will give freely of my resources.”

“Edna was what she herself called very fond of music. Musical strains, well rendered, had a way of evoking pictures in her mind. She sometimes liked to sit in the room of mornings when Madame Ratignolle played or practiced. One piece which that lady played Edna had entitled “Solitude.” It was a short, plaintive, minor strain.”

“Your music was beautiful, man, the most beautiful I have ever heard, and such singing we will never hear again.”

“To love music is everything. First I will teach you to love music, after this slowly we shall learn to play.”

“I don’t know if a little music aint about the nicest thing a fellow can have.”

“I asked Doc about German poets, and he replied that Goethe was the only one in his opinion who could be considered worthy, but he personally found him a terrible bore and that the Germans put all their poetry to music. He declared I should study the English for their poetry and the Germans for their music.”

“The truth was, I could no sooner quit cello cold turkey than I could stop breathing.”

“‘All relationships are tough. Just like with music, sometimes you have harmony and other times you have cacophony.’”

“She has acquired a taste for classical music over the years - ‘it’s like learning to appreciate a stinky cheese.’”

“Great day to sing up on a wire.”

“When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog followed a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calendar that showed the wrong month. I cried over it…I spent my life learning to feel less.”

“Music is a proud, temperamental mistress. Give her the time and attention she deserves, and she is yours. Slight her and there will come a day when you call and she will not answer.”

“Don’t you hear it? She asked & I shook my head no & then she started to dance & suddenly there was music everywhere & it went on for a very long time & when I finally found words all I could say was thank you. ”

“Music to hear, why hear’st thou music sadly? Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy.”

“The further I wake into this life, the more I realize that God is everywhere and the extraordinary is waiting quietly beneath the skin of all that is ordinary. Light is in both the broken bottle and the diamond, and music is in both the flowing violin and the water dripping from the drainage pipe. Yes, God is under the porch as well as on top of the mountain, and joy is in both the front row and the bleachers, if we are willing to be where we are.”

“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.”

“I didn’t do it for the money. I did it because the music is better if someone is listening to it.”

“The older the violin, the sweeter the music.”

“Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.”

“Sometimes she wished her father had started her on the electric guitar. Or at the very least, singing lessons. What was she supposed to do with an ability to play the piano?”

″‘I finished your song,’ she said. ‘Our last song.‘”

“He had come here with the intention of embarrassing a snide assassin, and had instead found a young woman pouring her secrets into a pianoforte.”

“She used to play - oh, she’d loved to play, loved music, the way music could break and heal and make everything seem possible and heroic.”

“No matter how bright your star became, I never cared about the music half as much as I cared about you as a daughter... I want you to know that.”

“It so happened that Lucy, who found daily life rather chaotic, entered a more solid world when she opened the piano. She was then no longer either deferential or patronizing; no longer either a rebel or a slave. The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected. The commonplace person begins to play, and shoots into the empyrean without effort, whilst we look up, marvelling how he has escaped us, and thinking how we could worship him and love him, would he but translate his visions into human words, and his experiences into human actions. Perhaps he cannot; certainly he does not, or does so very seldom. Lucy had done so never.”

“If a man be without the virtues proper to humanity, what has he to do with the rites of propriety? If a man be without the virtues proper to humanity, what has he to do with music?”

“While pounding on the piano keys may produce noise, removing them doesn’t exactly further the creation of music.””

“If music be the food of love, play on, Give me excess of it that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken and so die.”

“It is said that the Devil has all the best tunes. This is broadly true. But Heaven has the best choreographers.”

“‘I like music,’ she said slowly, ‘because when I hear it, I . . . I lose myself within myself, if that makes any sense. I become empty and full all at once, and I can feel the whole earth roiling around me. When I play, I’m not . . . for once, I’m not destroying. I’m creating.’”

“What came first - the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person? ”

“It seems to me that if you place music (and books, probably, and films, and plays, and anything that makes you feel) at the center of your being, then you can’t afford to sort out your love life, start to think of it as the finished product.”

“Surrounded by the music, I felt like someone else, riding into unknown territory, some adventurous woman in a movie.”

“...and for a great deal it seemed good to him, for in the music there were no flaws.”

“And thou, Melkor, shalt see that no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite. For he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined.”

“Dancing is sometimes more important than listening to the music.”

“Lara was not religious. She did not believe in rites. But sometimes, in order to endure life, she needed it to be accompanied by some inner music.”

“The point is precisely this, that for centuries man has been raised above the animals and borne aloft not by the rod, but by music: the irresistibility of the unarmed truth, the attraction of its example.”

“Well, I was thinking, we don’t really have any photographs of us. And I thought this song could be like a photo that captures us in this moment in our life together.”

“They have charts that show which chords are the most thumbs-up. Music is marketing. They have lists of key changes that get thirteen-year-old girls screaming. There’s no difference between a song and an advertising jingle anymore. Songs are their own jingles.”

“I think, for me, listening to music is a very solitary thing.”

“He kisses like Elliott Smith sings.”

“She had never been able to count clave, but she had always assumed it would come to her eventually. That the rhythm of her homeland would one day whisper its secrets to her soul. But would she ever hear it now? Like trading her trumpet, had she swapped the one thing that was really hers—her music—for the chance to keep her family together?”

“She was finally counting clave. Lito was wrong. She didn’t have to be in Havana to hear it. To feel it. She had brought Cuba with her to Miami.”

“Music does not have a race or a disposition! Every instrument has a voice that contributes. Music is a universal language. A universal religion of sorts. Certainly it’s my religion. Music surpasses all distinctions between people”

″‘As much as your playing filled my heart, it pains me to say you must leave the piano be. It’s never to be touched.’ Her eyes filled with regret. ‘It’s a shame, beautiful instrument like that, just begging to be played. And to think of all the music that used to come from it.‘”

“The word itself is music.”

“I was a loosened, a top whirling around and around, and I didn’t know who I danced with or what they looked like, only that I had become the music and the fire and the night, and there was nothing that could slow me down.”

“Music is pleasing not only because of the sound but because of the silence that is in it: without the alternation of sound and silence there would be no rhythm.”

“What would the world be like without music or rivers or the green and tender grass? What would this world be like without dogs?”

″... the music of the pearl was shrilling with triumph in Kino.”

“You couldn’t not like someone who liked the guitar.”

“Hell’s Bells ringing, my secret music...”

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

“He spent his days as he wanted: He wandered through the rooms of the castle, staring dreamily at the light streaming in through the stained-glass windows. He went to the library and read over and over again the story of the fair maiden and the knight who rescued her. And he discovered, finally, the source of the honey-sweet sound. The sound was music.”

“She thought to herself, ‘This is now.’ She was glad that the cozy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.”

With barely enough hours in the day for school and his music, J.J. has no time left over to contemplate the shocking revelation that his grandfather may have been a murderer. To make matters worse, this time problem seems to affect everyone in Kinvara.

″ You can learn to read music and play a Huz-Zut if you keep your eyes open. But not with them shut.”

“It’s good for tongues and necks and knees of people, bees and chimpanzees.”

“I could eat three bowls of goolash, half a pound of wuzzled wheat.”

“I could eat a frittered flum.”

“Oh, the stuff that I could eat!”

“Let us all sing! It’s good for almost anything.”

“Uncle Terwilliger waltzes with bears.”

“David thought that if a ray of light from the sun could have made a drop of water speak, its voice would have been like the clearest notes of the violin.”

“You can’t own my soul. What I have, I made, what I have is mine. What I have I made, what I have is mine.”

″...maybe this is why Papi stopped listening to music, because it can make your body want to rebel. To speak up. And even that young I learned music can become a bridge between you and a total stranger.”

“The voice so filled with nostalgia that you could almost see the memories floating through the blue smoke, memories not only of music and joy and youth, but perhaps, of dreams. They listened to the music, each hearing it in his own way, feeling relaxed and a part of the music, a part of each other, and almost a part of the world. ”

“She’s pretty, but her face doesn’t transform into sunlight when she talks about music.” He did that clench thing with his jaw and said, “She’s funny, but not spit-out-your-drink-in-astonishment funny.” It felt like my heart was going to explode as his eyes moved down to my lips under the glow of the buzzing streetlight. He moved his face a little closer to mine, looked into my eyes, and rumbled, “And when I see her, I don’t feel like I have to talk to her or mess up her hair or do something—anything—to get her to swing that gaze on me.”

“Music made everything better.”

″...it was glorious, if glory is a magnificent and raptured exaltation. It was what love would be like, if love was a sin. It was what music would be, if music could kill you.”

″‘That was just lovely, Menolly. Oharan? Come over here; Menolly has a new harmony for that one.’ ‘No, no, I couldn’t.’ ‘Why not?’ demanded T’gellan, and poured a bit more wine in her glass. ‘A little music would give us all heart.‘”

A rich and almost gothic drama unfolds, full of dastardly villains, cold hearted aristocrats, devoted friends and passionate lovers, and set against a background of cruelty, music, murder and the neglect of children. The story sweeps along with great exuberance.

“I can’t go to sleep. The music’s turned up and the arguments have started. There’s something funny about the night that makes grown-ups go stupid and call each other names. Maybe it’s their way of scaring off the Hairyman. Maybe it’s just the grog in them.”

“The sad group passed slowly out of sight; but as it disappeared there fell upon the ear the sounds of sweet music, lovelier far than she had heard before - lovelier than the magic cuckoo’s most lovely songs - and somehow in the music, it seemed to the child’s fancy there were mingled the soft strains of a woman’s voice.”

“The sad group passed slowly out of sight; but as it disappeared there fell upon the ear the sounds of sweet music, lovelier far than she had heard before - lovelier than the magic cuckoo’s most lovely songs - and somehow in the music, it seemed to the child’s fancy there were mingled the soft strains of a woman’s voice.”

“I was utterly content with the content of being in the right place at the right time. I, Marigold Green, a figure properly set in a picture, an equation on a page, a note in a bit of music, non-transposable, irreplaceable.”

″‘I heard your music,’ said Roland. ‘Why were you playing so far away from people?’ ‘I was near you. Are you not people?’

“Alfanhui would have been unable to say whether there was a dark solitude in his eyes and an unfathomable silence in his ears because the music and the colors came from that other place from which concrete knowledge never comes, a place abandoned on the very first day behind the farthermost wall of memory where that other memory is born;”

“The fog of silence and solitude vanished, and forgotten visions awoke as the music of the wind and the rain met the dead colors of the birds.”

″‘I want to go to art school and learn commercial art, but Dad wants me to be a barrister.’ ‘That’s like me,’ put in Jeremy. ‘I want to study music, but I’ve got to go into father’s office.‘”

“The sex and drugs are thrilling, but it’s the rock and roll she loves most.”

“Now I saw in his eyes the richness of summer soil. His nose looked endearingly ruddy from being in the cold, and his voice was like a favorite song I never tired of hearing. Funny how he’d stolen his way into my heart when I’d been the thief the day we met.”

“I liked how he said my name. As if the syllables were the first notes to a song he loved to sing.”

“Now, carols are always beautiful, but if you are sad they can make you feel sadder.”

His liking for Mozart’s music brought him sometimes to an opera or a concert: these were the only dissipations of his life.

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

“Come now, brother, give us a tune.”

Bleeding hearts, and dry bones of the churchyard, and tears that burn as they fall—all dance together to the music that he make with that smileless mouth of him.

“Come now, brother, give us a tune.”

“After I’d seen as much of the world as I want to, I’d like to settle in Germany and have just as much music as I choose. I’m to be a famous musician myself, and all creation is to rush to hear me. And I’m never to be bothered about money or business, but just enjoy myself and live for what I like. That’s my favorite castle.”

“Ask them to sing one more song; it is so delightful to hear music in the distance, when the musicians are unrestrained by observation.”

Gregor’s sister was playing so beautifully. Her face was leant to one side, following the lines of music with a careful and melancholy expression. Gregor crawled a little further forward, keeping his head close to the ground so that he could meet her eyes if the chance came. Was he an animal if music could captivate him so?

She knew that in politics, in philosophy, in theology, Alexey Alexandrovitch often had doubts, and made investigations; but on questions of art and poetry, and, above all, of music, of which he was totally devoid of understanding, he had the most distinct and decided opinions. He was fond of talking about Shakespeare, Raphael, Beethoven, of the significance of new schools of poetry and music, all of which were classified by him with very conspicuous consistency.

“I am afraid I don’t think so, Lady Henry. I never talk during music—at least, during good music. If one hears bad music, it is one’s duty to drown it in conversation.”