Quotes About Violin

Life' wrote a friend of mine, 'is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.

A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin.

I hear it still. As I lay down my pen and take to my bed, I am aware of the bow being drawn across the bridge and the music rises into the night sky. It is far away and barely audible - but there it is! A pizzicato. Then a tremelo. The style is unmistakable. It is Sherlock Holmes who is playing. It must be. I hope with all my heart that he is playing for me . . .

I always have loved the Stradivarius. My teacher, Josef Gingold, he had a Stradivarius. As a treat, he would put it under my chin and let me play a few notes, and I remember that feeling of the overtones, the complexity of the sound. It's like a great wine.

He had even tried the violin a few years earlier. Anything to switch talents, but there was no escape. The compulsion was identical to that of any composer or poet for whom the meaning of his life was creation. One could only wonder what Picasso would have done to the world if he had been born a physicist. Terrifying thought . . .

The violin speaks to the mind, and the fiddle speaks to the heart

I basically started playing violin at the age of six. That lasted about three years because my previous teacher died and the second teacher didn't really know how to successfully get me going.

Life, said Samuel Butler, is like giving a concert on the violin while learning to play the instrument—that, friends, is real wisdom.

I was much distressed by next door people who had twin babies and played the violin but one of the twins died, and the other has eaten the fiddle, so all is peace.

To regard ones immortality as an exchange of matter is as strange as predicting the future of a violin case once the expensive violin it held has broken and lost its worth.

She had the revelation one Sunday that while the other instruments played for everyone the violen played for her alone .

Take a sound from whatever source, a note on a violin, a scream, a moan, a creaking door, and there is always this symmetry between the sound basis, which is complex and has numerous characteristics which emerge through a process of comparison within our perception.

For me, even my break time I like to pull out the bow and just go over a Vivaldi sonata and keep my head sharp, keep everything sharp.

It made a sound, did it not, that no one had ever heard in the ancient world, a sound so human and so powerfully affecting that men thought the violin the work of the devil and accused its finest players of being possessed.

The darkness enveloped us. All I could hear was the violin and it was as if Juliek's soul had become the bow. He was playing his life...He played that which he would never play again.

So much the worse for the wood if it finds that it has become a violin, and I feel nothing but contempt for those ignoramuses who argue over things that they know nothing about.

Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes along.

One major difference between imagination and reason is that imagination often operates beneath the surface of analytical thought. Here I can't help thinking of Sherlock Holmes, musically brooding with his violin till the solution to the mystery presents itself.

Let me be very honest and just say that if any airline would let me take the violin and the laptop on board I would fly that airline all the time.

Oh, it was wonder of wonders. And then, a bird of like rarest spun heavenmetal, or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now, came the violin solo above all the other strings, and those strings were like a cage of silk round my bed. Then flute and oboe bored, like worms of like platinum, into the thick thick toffee gold and silver.

Draw your chair up, and hand me my violin, for the only problem which we have still to solve is how to while away these bleak autumnal evenings.

A sandwich and a cup of coffee, and then off to violin-land, where all is sweetness and delicacy and harmony, and there are no red-headed clients to vex us with their conundrums.

Look here, Watson; you look regularly done. Lie down there on the sofa, and see if I can put you to sleep." He took up his violin from the corner, and as I stretched myself out he began to play some low, dreamy, melodious air,—his own, no doubt, for he had a remarkable gift for improvisation. I have a vague remembrance of his gaunt limbs, his earnest face, and the rise and fall of his bow.

Draw your chair up and hand me my violin, for the only problem we have still to solve is how to while away these bleak autumnal evenings.