Quotes About Music

sing the prettiest songs

He yearned for a thousand tremulous dreams, for cool and delicate images, transparent tints, fleeting scents, and exquisite music from streams of highly strung, tensely drawn silvery strings — and then silence, the innermost heart of silence, where the waves of air never bore a single stray tone, but where all was rest unto death, steeped in the calm glow of red colors and the languid warmth of fiery fragrance.

Jeri Smith-Ready

I never knew you played the banjo! cried Harris and I, in one breath. Not exactly, replied George: but it's very easy, they tell me; and I've got the instruction book! From Three Men in a Boat

George got out his banjo after supper, and wanted to play it, but Harris objected: he said he had got a headache, and did not feel strong enough to stand it.  George thought the music might do him good—said music often soothed the nerves and took away a headache; and he twanged two or three notes, just to show Harris what it was like. Harris said he would rather have the headache.

They took him to Wagner festivals and Burne-Jones's private views. They read him all the minor poets. They booked seats for him at all Ibsen's plays. They introduced him into all the most soulful circles of artistic society. His days were one long feast of other people's enjoyments.

George got out his banjo after supper, and wanted to play it, but Harris objected: he said he had got a headache, and did not feel strong enough to stand it. George thought the music might do him good - said music often soothed the nerves and took away a headache; and he twanged two or three notes, just to show Harris what it was like. Harris said he would rather have the headache.

What's he want to howl like that for when I'm playing?" George would exclaim indignantly, while taking aim at him with a boot. "What do you want to play like that for when he is howling?" Harris would retort, catching the boot.  "You let him alone.  He can't help howling.  He's got a musical ear, and your playing makes him howl.

The music of life would be mute if the chords of memory were snapped asunder.

I'm not Beethoven!

A leaf of all colors plays a golden-string fiddle To a double-e waterfall over my back

She's alone, they kept telling themselves, and surely she danced in no one's arms, yet somehow that seemed to matter less and less. As the night went on, and clarinet and coyote call mingled beyond the lantern light, the magic of their own powder-blue jackets and orchids seemed to fade, and it came to them in small sensations that they were more alone than she was.

Accents don't show up in music.

His quarry parties were the stuff of legend—trash cans brimming with wapatuli, music that was cool on the coasts but wouldn't reach Midwest airwaves for another six months, daring leaps from the highest granite cliffs into the inky pools below, some more than a hundred feet straight down. No gradual decline, just a fathomless, aching cavity scooped out of the earth, a wound that cold water seeped in to fill like blood.

world tasting like hope and blue sky. Turn it up! Your hips can't help but wiggle. Man, it feels like that song was written for you, like you're gorgeous and loved and the entire planet is in order.

You need songs that make you feel. Some make you string, some make you weak. Some build determination, some tear you apart. But you need all of those...Run through the pain.

We'll listen to old-school Kelly Clarkson power songs and sing until we lose our voices." "That is not a good plan." Celeste turned and peered into the back of the car.

You need songs that make you feel. Some make you strong, some make you weak. Some build determination, some tear you apart. But you need all of those.

Years later, as a professor, Martin would try to find the words to articulate the power of togetherness in a world where togetherness had been corrupted—and to explore the effect of the music, the surprising lengths the people had gone to to hear it and to play it, as evidence that music, and art in general, are basic requirements of the human soul. Not a luxury but a compulsion.

Martin was swept up in the sound—no longer blood and bone, frozen feet and hungry belly, but an empty vessel filling with notes, carried by something older and bigger and more permanent than himself.

I think that the power of art is the power to wake us up, strike us to our depths, change us. What are we searching for when we read a novel, see a film, listen to a piece of music?We are searching, through a work of art, for something that alters us, that we aren't aware of before. We want to transform ourselves, just as Ovid's masterwork transformed me.

I don't actually listen to much music since I need quiet to work.

That's just the way people's brains work. If you want to talk about something, you have to reduce it to a form that can be understood. That's one of the reasons I'm not good about boiling down music.

It's really about making the best music you can make. It's really about working hard.