Quotes About Voices

Everyone agrees. The dead singers have the best voices. At four o'clock in the morning the dead singers have the best voices.

But when melody wells up in thrushes' throats, and bees buzz honeysong, and rock and river clap like hands in summer sun, then misery's drowned in minstrelsy, and Godric's glad in spite of all. Yet sometimes too he's sad in spite of all, God knows, for there are other voices than the poor's.

I think the best voices, the most creative voices, and the best content always wins.

One of my greatest inspirations for stand-up was Jonathan Winters. He was a genius. One thing about him, and also Lenny Bruce, is that they were in the tradition of the one-man show. That's why Richard Pryor was so great, and George Carlin, too. They prowled the stage, they used voices, they were really talents.

The music of ABBA is not that happy. It might sound happy, in some strange way, but deep within, it's not happy music. It has that Nordic melancholic feeling to it. What fools you is the girls' voices. You know, I do think that is one of the secrets about ABBA. Even when we were really quite sad, we always sounded jubilant.

Because if a woman can only direct women, and men can only direct men, and Black directors can only direct Black actors, then we are missing out on opening up voices to different perspectives.

I think Thomas Jefferson would have said the more speech, the better.

Socialists, communists, fascists all believe in an ever stronger government. Anarchists think just the opposite. They want to eliminate central government entirely so that people would live in small collectives where their voices could be heard and where all would work together for the good of all.

To shift to a voice metaphor, the gospels contain two voices: the voice of Jesus and the voice of the community. Both layers and voices are important. The former tell us about the pre-Easter Jesus; the latter are the witness and testimony of the community to what Jesus had become in their experience in the decades after Easter.5

Among the world's religions, perhaps the best-known examples are Lao Tzu in China and the Buddha in India. Within the tradition of Israel, the authors of Job and Ecclesiastes are voices of an alternative wisdom that challenged the conventional wisdom of their day.

As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our day.

People need such stories, because however dark, a darkness with voices in it is better than a silent void.

We may call Eurydice forth from the world of the dead, but we cannot make her answer; and when we turn to look at her we glimpse her only for a moment, before she slips from our grasp and flees. As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and, try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day.

The ancestral voices were prophesying war because ancestral voices never shut up, and they hate to be wrong, and war is a sure thing, sooner or later.

Had she believed all that? Old Pilar's folklore? No, not really; or not exactly. Most likely Pilar hadn't quite believed it either, but it was a reassuring story: that the dead were not entirely dead but were alive in a different way; a paler way admittedly, and somewhat darker. But still able to send messages, if only such messages could be recognized and deciphered. People need such stories, Pilar said once, because however dark, a darkness with voices in it is better than a silent void.

We all know that a book is not really a person. It isn't a human being. But if you are a lover of books as books – as objects, that is – and ignore the human element in them – that is, their voices – you will be committing an error of the soul, because you will be an idolator, or else a fetishist.

and each of his voices left his body in a different colored soul and floated up towards the sun still singing.

The past is a great darkness, and filled with echos. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and, try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day.

and when we spoke / we spoke / the sounds of our voices fell / into the air single and / solid and rounded and really / there / and then dulled, and then like sounds / gone, a fistful of gathered / pebbles there was no point / in taking home, dropped on a beachful / of other coloured pebbles

however dark, a darkness with voices in it is better than a silent void.

I feel certain that I'm going mad again, I feel we can't go thru another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices

The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today.

Who says great literatue has to be written by men? Who says great literature has to be about scary, creepy stuff like adulterers being punished and black slaves breaking loose and giant whales eating people? Why can't literature just be stories about women? Refined, respectable women have just as much to say as ignorant black slaves or bloodthirsty Indians or mad white whaling captains. Why do we have to pretend those people's lives matter more than our own?

We have long known that in closed societies, the arrival of democracy, with its clashing voices and differing opinions, can be "complex and frightening," as Stenner puts it, for people unaccustomed to public dissent.