Quotes About Music

Cora hoped the musicians wouldn't think them rude for their inattention. It was unlikely. Playing their music as freemen and not chattel was probably still a cherished novelty. To attack the melody without the burden of providing one of the sole comforts of their slave village. To practice their art with liberty and joy.

George sawed with his fiddle, the notes swirling up into night like sparks gusted from a fire.

Tonight the song you always despised strides from the jukebox full-bodied and you hear the lyrics for the first time, understand the lyrics for the first time after all these years. This new you with an older soul. Now it's your favorite. All this time singing the wrong words.

He's at ease, his body sculpted to the music, his shoulder searching the other shoulder, his right toe knowing the left knee, the height, the depth, the form, the control, the twist of his wrist, the bend of his elbow, the tilt of his neck, notes digging into arteries, and he is in the air now, forcing the legs up beyond muscular memory, one last press of the thighs, an elongation of form, a loosening of human contour, he goes higher and is skyheld.

There was something in the music of the accent that Douglass liked: it was as if the Cork people put long lazy hammocks in their sentences.

The Irish are great for their tunes, but all their lovesongs are sad and their warsongs happy.

The German writer Goethe said that the tone of mind produced by architecture approaches the effect of music—that to look upon a thing is to hear it. Music is liquid architecture, he wrote, and architecture is frozen music. 131

Everything falls into the hands of music eventually. The only thing that ever rescued me was listening to a big voice. There are years accumulated in a sound.

Seriez-vous un iceberg ? On m'a dit beaucoup de mal des Anglaises, mais je vous préviens ! Notre soleil ne va pas tarder à vous faire fondre, d'autant plus qu'il s'allie à notre musique et à notre vin.

What madness destroyed me and you, Orpheus?

The way to write American music is simple. All you have to do is be an American and then write any kind of music you wish.

First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.

It appeared that nobody ever said a thing they meant, or ever talked of a feeling they felt, but that was what music was for.

For I hear music, they were saying. Music wakes us. Music makes us see the hidden, join the broken. Look and listen.

It was a great mistake to have come. He should have stayed at home and read his book, thought Peter Walsh; should have gone to a music hall; he should have stayed at home, for he knew no one.

But none speaks with a single voice. None with a voice free from the old vibrations. Always I hear corrupt murmurs; the chink of gold and metal. Mad music...

The green garden, moonlit pool, lemons, lovers, and fish are all dissolved in the opal sky, across which, as the horns are joined by trumpets and supported by clarions there rise white arches firmly planted on marble pillars...

Music goes straight for things. It says all there is to say at once. With writing it seems to me there's so much... scratching on the matchbox

I can't imagine anything nicer than to sit out in the moonlight and listen to music—

She didn't know their names, but friends she knew they were, friends without names, songs without words, always the best.

this diminished the entire joy, the pure joy, of the two notes sounding together, and let the sound die on her ear now with a dismal flatness.

Here is a hall where one pays money and goes in, where one hears music among somnolent people who have come here after lunch on a hot afternoon. We have eaten beef and pudding enough to live for a week without tasting food. Therefore we cluster like maggots on the back of some thing that will carry us on.

It appeared that nobody ever said a thing they meant, or ever talked of a feeling they felt, but that was what music was for. Reality dwelling in what one saw and felt, but did not talk about, one could accept a system in which things went round and round quite satisfactorily to other people, without often troubling to think about it, except as something superficially strange.

London thou art a jewel of jewels, & jasper of jocunditie -- music, talk, friendship, city views, books, publishing, something central & inexplicable.