Quotes About Dissonance

When she'd finally cranked up her favorite Godsmack CD in an effort to tune him out, he'd let out a roar that had rattled the windows in her car: By all that's holy, woman, what is that hideous noise? Cease and desist! A battlefield at full charge could be no more cacophonous!

Oprah: Yes, I believe every environment has a tone. If you were to walk into any home as a stranger, not speaking the language, you could absolutely feel whether this is a place where people are loved. Just as you can sense when something's off. You may not know what it is, but something feels off.

musical dissonance must be the most effective artistic means of representing the pain of individual existence.

In Mexico, wealth and poverty live next to each other and are cordial with each other - in my experience.

I've been living with the minor second all my life and I finally found a way to handle it.

Events did not rhyme quite as he had thought.

Our moods meet in the wrong places.

Onto Chastity Bjornsen's car radio came the drawling irreverent brass and subhip syncopation of a Herb Alpert arrangement, which Doc realized with growing horror was a cover of Ohio Express's "Yummy Yummy Yummy." He

Today, despite free speech and the mass media, the prevailing social vision is dangerously close to sealing itself off from any discordant feedback from reality.

if we could tax Americans' cognitive dissonance we could balance the budget. The American people want all kinds of incompatible things, they're human beings, and they want high services, low taxes, and an omnipresent, omniprominent welfare state.

I'm a guy where my perfect pitch has been altered by the fact that I usually tune up to what's going on. When I was a kid, it was horrible! If two notes were playing right next to each other, and they were dissonant, it would drive me nuts. If it was something that sounded like it was in between notes, it'd make me cringe.

You put a tuxedo on me, it's like putting a saddle on a hog.

Neurosis is an inner cleavage-the state of being at war with oneself.

Beyond that was all uncertainty, the way life almost always is. It would remain a story without end, like a suspended chord in the last measure of a song—that singular, dissonant, open sound that makes you ache to hear something more.

No, it's a Bb. It looks wrong and it sounds wrong, but it's right.

I was glad I wasn't in love, that I wasn't happy with the world. I like being at odds with everything.

It was worse than Music Appreciation.

Standing just behind them, pretending to be a part of their group and yet so obviously not, was a shape that did not belong.

After Caracas I no longer had a piano teacher, but I played for several hours every day and became pretty good; the first sonata by the Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera was a favorite, for it looks and sounds much harder than it is and is so dissonant that only a trained listener is able to discern any mistakes.

lies drive a wedge between who you really are and who you act like you are, and the greater the distance between those two, the greater the dissonance in your life will be.

Is the brain designed to make us flare in anger when we think we are being attacked? Fine—but most of us learn to count to ten and find alternatives to beating the other guy with a cudgel. An appreciation of how dissonance works, in ourselves and others, gives us some ways to override our wiring. And protect us from those who can't.

The brain is designed with blind spots, optical and psychological, and one of its cleverest tricks is to confer on its owner the comforting delusion that he or she does not have any. In a sense, dissonance theory is a theory of blind spots—of how and why people unintentionally blind themselves so that they fail to notice vital events and information that might make them question their behavior or their convictions.

Dissonance is bothersome under any circumstances, but it is most painful to people when an important element of their self-concept is threatened—typically when they do something that is inconsistent with their view of themselves.

Confabulation, distortion, and plain forgetting are the foot soldiers of memory, and they are summoned to the front lines when the totalitarian ego wants to protect us from the pain and embarrassment of actions we took that are dissonant with our core self-images: