Quotes About Sound

Excerpt from Leaving Things Alone) You train your eye and your vision lusts after colour. You train your ear, and you long for delightful sound. You delight in doing good, and your natural kindness is blown out of shape. You delight in righteousness, and you become righteous beyond all reason.

The silences here are retreats of sound, like the retreat of the surf before a tidal wave: sound draining away, down slopes of acoustic passage, to gather, someplace else, to a great surge of noise.

Listen to anything and take it apart again. Spectrum analysis, in my head. I can break down chords, and timbres, and words too into all the basic frequencies and harmonics, with all their different loudnesses, and listen to them, each pure tone, but all at once.

call God the Great Architect, because the first thing He designed was sound," Bach replied. "'In the Beginning was the Word,' you remember? Who knows? Perhaps it was not only a word. Perhaps it was music. Maybe God sang an endless canon of His own invention, and through it, the universe was wrought.

It's a soft-sounding word, "never", but its velvety timbre can't hide its sharp edges.

The crickets were rubbing their hind legs together, unrolling that endless band of sound that when combined with the sound of the sycamore trees losing their heads in the heat-thickened breeze could cause even a girl as unsentimental as Mary to feel like she'd just left something behind on the porch stoop she couldn't bear to live without.

A gunshot is the loudest sound in the universe. Especially if the bullet is coming at you.

Vowels thicker than caramel on a Granny Smith.

I felt like the echo instead of the sound.

It is not how you walk, or where, or how far. It is all in the sound of the steps and how the night receives them.

The sound of life has divine silence.

We've got the sound and we know we can find it one way or another if we've got the song - we'll chase the damn thing all around the room, up to the ceiling. We know we've got it and we'll lock on to it and find it.

Then the bass player would be battened off, so they were all in their little pigeonholes and cubicles. And you're playing this enormous room and not using any of it. This idea of separation is the total antithesis of rock and roll, which is a bunch of guys in a room making a sound and just capturing it. It's the sound they make together, not separated.

If your opinion is sound, and you forego it for the love of God and follow that of another, you will win great merit. I have often heard that it is safer to accept advice than to give it. It may even come about that each of two opinions is good; but to refuse to come to an agreement with others when reason or occasion demand it, is a sign of pride and obstinacy.

Galway is one of those cities where sound carries along the breeze like the faintest whisper of prayers you never said, muted but present.

So it turns out that if you bang two halves of a horse together, it doesn't make the sound of a coconut.

Gribshin considered what he had just seen. He knew it was important. It belonged to the future, he was sure, but was it his future. He too was pleased by the sound the lock made as it closed: it was something predictive. In the echoing tintinnabulation of the lock's components colliding hard against each other were conjured the sonances of rifle shots and beyond them smoky images of milling crowds. The sounds and images vanished without revealing to Gribshin exactly what they promised.

A sound of cornered-animal fear and hate and surrender and defiance… like the last sound the treed and shot and falling animal makes as the dogs get him, when he finally doesn't care any more about anything but himself and his dying.

On the other hand, without excess mental baggage, playing music produces a feeling more exquisite than the sweetest nectar this world has to offer. It is the sound, smell and taste of grace.

When I'm in the car and somebody comes on the radio singing the high notes, I try to sing along.

A statesman of the school of sound common sense, and a philanthropist of the most practical type, a patriot without a superior - his monument is a country preserved.

Washington is the only place where sound travels faster than light.

For an inwardly sound and self-confident person will be more adequate to his social tasks than one who is not on good terms with his unconscious.

there is no sound in nature that makes men move along faster than the pumping of a shotgun. Except maybe a chainsaw