Quotes About Music

I'm not terribly happy about rock and roll. Certain rock music is uninspiring, numbing it makes you feel like an idiot.

La musica doveva avere il volto di una donna da seddure. Chiudevo gli occhi per immaginarla, per dare colore ai suoi capelli e ai suoi occhi, ma compresi che finché dal mio sax fossero usciti soltanto ragli d' asino, quella ragazza non sarebbe mai esistita.

Do dead people like music? I hope they listen to mine if they do, in their coffins, in the cold underworld, between the mind and the body in an insomniac wall of sleep.

Det var fullt mulig å være personlig selv om du hadde fem andre musikere i ryggen.

behaviors that will nourish my soul (doing spiritual reading, communing with nature, sitting in silence, listening to classical music, etc.)?

That was a time when I did love music, I couldn't get enough of what was going on. Maybe it was Nirvana that brought me back. I guess it was a comfort because something that sounded so right - and non-commercial - had become so influential, so immediately.

Och tro mig, musiken syns i dina ögon också. Till och med när du blundar.

It's the irony or maybe the tragedy of being a fan that it's not enough to let the music enter you like a drug or define and shape the world for you. You also want to somehow touch it and have it affirm you in more direct ways, whether you're playing a riff like Chuck Berry or singing like Buddy Holly or buying Keith Richards's guitar—or actually meeting your idols. In

getting things wrong is part of a music critic's life … That's probably the most crucial advice I could give a young critic—plan on getting a lot of things wrong.

Most rock journalism is people who can't write, interviewing people who can't talk, for people who can't read.

Music and silence combine strongly because music is done with silence, and silence is full of music.

Perhaps it is not-being that is the true state, and all our dream of life is inexistent; but, if so, we feel that these phrases of music, these conceptions which exist in relation to our dream, must be nothing either. We shall perish, but we have as hostages these divine captives who will follow and share our fate. And death in their company is somehow less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps even less probable.

I wondered whether music might not be the unique example of what might have been - if the invention of language, the formation of words, the analysis of ideas had not intervened - the means of communication between souls.

Maybe it is nothingness that is real and our entire dream is nonexistent, but in that case we feel that these phrases of music, and these notions that exist in relation to our dream, must also be nothing. We will perish, but we have for hostages these divine captives who will follow us and share our fate. And death in their company is less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps less probable.

There is an inanimate object which has a capacity to exasperate which no human being will ever attain: a piano.

Once he has outgrown his youth, a man will rarely remain a prisoner to his insolence. He had thought it was the only way to behave; then he suddenly discovers that, even for a prince, there are such things as music, literature, not to speak of standing for the post of deputy.

Good God! Think of listening to Wagner for a whole fortnight with a woman who takes about as much interest in music as a tone-deaf newt - that would be fun!

It was true that Odette played vilely, but often the most memorable impression of a piece of music is one that has arisen out of a jumble of wrong notes struck by unskilful fingers upon a tuneless piano.

often the fairest impression that remains in our minds of a favourite air is one which has arisen out of a jumble of wrong notes struck by unskillful fingers upon a tuneless piano.

But ever since, more than a year before, discovering to him many of the riches of his own soul, the love of music had, for a time at least, been born in him, Swann had regarded musical motifs as actual ideas, of another world, of another order, ideas veiled in shadow, unknown, impenetrable to the human mind, but none the less perfectly distinct from one another, unequal among themselves in value and significance.

The sea thus enchants us like music, which, unlike language, never bears the traces of things, never tells us anything about human beings, but imitates the stirrings of the soul.

We needed germans in Paris to hear Wagner.

For, since a purely musical work contains none of those logical sequences, the interruption or confusion of which, in spoken or written language, is a proof of insanity, so insanity diagnosed in a sonata seemed to him as mysterious a thing as the insanity of a dog or a horse, although instances may be observed of these.

Or bid the soul of Orpheus sing Such notes as warbled to the string, Drew Iron tears down Pluto's cheek, And made Hell grant what Love did seek.