c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Once we got out of Jefferson Park, we rolled down the one window that worked so the world would know we had good taste in music.
— John Green, Paper Towns
I want music, I don't want stupidity, (Hey)... (mey)... I don't give a shit, so far it sounds like stupidity changes tracks and it's on the track and it waits to appear!
— Deyth Banger
Bach's simple and basic themes ultimately engage and appeal to my adolescent side while the seemingly complex arrangements, though perhaps patronizingly in some cases, also reflect my juvenile perception of what looks and sounds 'grown-up,' intelligent, refined and sophisticated. There were few composers and musicians in my youth that I could say understood me and really got me, almost all were classical. J. S. Bach was one one of them.
— Anastasia Lily, Master of the Universe:  Classical Favorites- Ana's Piano- BACH
Innocent and joyfulI take your handfor I know you judge not,you simply understand.You are my companionon this voyage of discovery,singing sweet soft musicto the universe inside of me.
— Jay Woodman
Band has really been the one thing that allows me to experience somewhat of a distraction. They say music heals, right? I'm able to exist in all my weirdness right in the middle of a big crowd of people, but all I really have to focus on is playing my own part, marching with the correct foot, and being where I’m supposed to be on the field. - Rigby Raines
— R.K. Slade, Because
I’m basically a nobody in the trumpet section. I like it that way. I hate being in front of people. I think I’m too nervous, or anxious, or something. The only time I ever played a solo was that time during concert band that I accidentally played during a rest. The whole band was silent and I honked out a right note at the wrong time. I was so embarrassed that I wanted to hide in my band locker. - Rigby Raines
— R.K. Slade, Because
If tears were liquor, I'd have drunk myself sick.
— Mark Lanegan
Music does not have a race or a disposition! ... Every instrument has a voice that contributes. Music is a universal language...Music surpasses all distinctions between people.
— Pam Muñoz Ryan, Echo
I [Music] was born in the open air, in the breaks of waves and the whistling of sandstorms, the hoots of owls and the cackles of tui birds. I travel in echoes. I ride the breeze. I was forged in nature, rugged and raw. Only man shapes my edges to make me beautiful. [Chapter 2]
— Mitch Albom, The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto
and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground – because I am afraid –
— Emily Dickinson, Selected Letters
I fall so hard inside the idea of you
— Dave Matthews Band
That's one of the greatest things about music. You can sing a song to 85,000 people and they'll sing it back for 85,000 different reasons.
— Dave Grohl
O friends, no more these sounds!Let us sing more cheerful songs, more full of joy!
— Friedrich Schiller
There is a love that binds us allIt's in our blood, it's who we areand it's nested in the branches of this treeand it's rooted in the Earth where we keepall of our stories
— Prairie Empire
There is no music, just the sound of the wind and the leaves it touches. But hopefully that'll be music enough, for you.
— pleasefindthis, I Wrote This For You
This is how early age people heard music, not through their ears above the cacophony of modern life but directly from the universe into their souls.
— Bryan Islip, Like an Angel Sings
Everything sings, the whole universe and all the other universes. It's in our genes, see, not just in our ears.
— Bryan Islip, Like an Angel Sings
If I never get to see the Northern lights. Or if I never get to see the Eiffel Tower at night. Oh, if all I got, is your hand in my hand, baby I could die, a happy man.
— Thomas Rhett
..moments of transport, and of comfort, and of a bracing vastness of possibility. That was all there for me sometimes when I plunged my mind into the Bible’s puzzles; and it was always there in the music of church. I wouldn’t have said it this way then. But I would feel all the cells in my body as I sang hymns that connected my little life with the grandeur of the cosmos, the Christian drama across space and time. This was my earliest experience of breath and body, mind and spirit soaring together, alive to both mystery and reality, in kinship with others both familiar and unknown. That’s one way I’d define the feeling of faith now.
— Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living
Back then, I was still just a fan of music. And to be a fan of music also meant to be a fan of cities, of places. Regionalism—and the creative scenes therein—played an important role in the identification and contextualization of a sound or aesthetic. Music felt married to place, and the notion of “somewhere” predated the Internet’s seeming invention of “everywhere” (which often ends up feeling like “nowhere”)
— Carrie Brownstein, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl
A fresh bottle of Jack waited on the end table, but for the first time in weeks I didn’t feel the need to pour a nightcap. The music was better.
— Craig Schaefer, The Long Way Down
All the music I write is a search for myself.
— Bruce Hornsby
You float like a feather," sings Radiohead, "In a beautiful world." I've listened several times to the Radiohead songs, because it was nice of Raymond to say he heard a bit of them in what I sang. I'm not sure I hear it myself, but I am pleased and touched. Sometimes that's what you need, just a quick casual word of knowledgeable encouragement. Radiohead reminds me a little of the songs in Garden State soundtrack. Now, that's a soundtrack. They were all songs that Zach Braff liked, so he put them in his movie. And there's that beautiful moment near the beginning where Natalie Portman hands him the headphones and she watches him listen to the song and she smiles her huge, innocent Natalie Portman smile.
— Nicholson Baker, Traveling Sprinkler
A sad, plangent music. In the British camp, Sharpe thought, they would be singing, but no one was singing here.
— Bernard Cornwell, Sharpe's Triumph
Anything you say can and will be used against you, so only say my name.
— Fall Out Boy
If life was a piano light and darkness would be the keys. And shadows would be the melody that creates the harmony.
— Joe Rodriguez
Everything about you resonates happinessNo I won't settle for less
— Muse
Difficult do you call it, Sir? I wish it were impossible. [on hearing a famous violinist]
— Samuel Johnson
Sometimes it's to your advantage for people to think you're crazy.
— Thelonious Sphere Monk
I just don't— Ronan. My ears are bleeding!"Ronan turned down the music.
— Maggie Stiefvater, Blue Lily, Lily Blue
....harmony that would fittingly imitate the utterances and accents of a brave man who is engaged in warfare or in any enforced business, and who, when he has failed […] confronts fortune with steadfast endurance and repels her strokes
— Plato, The Republic
I didn't say much; my head was still ringing with the music, and I didn't want it to fade. I kept thinking back to it, the way that Will's friend had been so lost in what he was playing. I hadn't realized that music could unlock things in you, could transport you to somewhere even the composer hadn't predicted. It left an imprint in the air around you, as if you carried its remnants with you when you went.
— Jojo Moyes, Me Before You
Love is silent. Yet it could fill the spaces no other sound can ever do. Truth is there’s no sound without silence. We can listen to all the beautiful songs, but unless we can hear where the music is coming from, the empty spaces of our lives can never be filled and the song we sing will have no meaning.
— Frederick Espiritu, The Path to Awesomeness: Becoming Super, Being Human
Jazz is the assassination, the murdering, the slaying of syncopation. I would even go so far as to confess that we are musical anarchists.
— Nick La Rocca
Now me and musicplay hide and seek.
— Anna Jae
If movements were a spark every dancer would desire to light up in flames.
— Shah Asad Rizvi
Show me a person who found love in his life and did not celebrate it with a dance.
— Shah Asad Rizvi
Classical music is the best, and cheapest, mind-altering drug in the world.
— Kamand Kojouri
When there is nothing left to burn, you have to set yourself on fire.
— Torquil Campbell
I am a man ruled by music- I live, die, fight and survive for it.
— Corey Taylor
Name a song. Any song at all."She thought for a moment and said, "'Claire de Lune.'"I placed my hands on the keyboard. I closed my eyes and tilted my head back and struck a key, sounding a single note. "There you go. Gimme another one. I can play the first note of anything. As long as I get to choose the key it's in.
— Michael  Darling, Got Luck
We make our own music. We paint our own future.
— A.P. Sweet, dead, but dreaming
What is music? What does it do to us? And why does it do to us what it does? People say that music has an uplifting effect on the soul: what rot! It isn’t true. It’s true that it has an effect, it has a terrible effect on me, at any rate, but it has nothing to do with any uplifting of the soul. Its effect on the soul is neither uplifting nor degrading — it merely irritates me.
— Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata
The resulting amalgam - an exotic mixture of European, Caribbean, African, and American elements - made Louisiana into perhaps the most seething ethnic melting pot that the nineteenth century world could produce. This cultural gumbo would serve as breeding ground for many of the great hybrid musics of modern times; not just jazz, but also cajun, zydeco, blues, and other new styles flourished as a result of this laissez-faire environment. In this warm, moist atmosphere, sharp delineations between cultures gradually softened and ultimately disappeared.
— Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz
Punk had picked the locks, sluiced out into the grid.
— Garth Risk Hallberg
Satan," he said, "couldn't undo anything God had done. She could at least try to make existence for His little toys less painful. She could see what He couldn't: To be alive was to be either bored or scared stiff. So she filled an apple with all sorts of ideas that might at least relieve the boredom, such as rules for games with cards and dice, and how to fuck, and recipes for beer and wine and whiskey, and pictures of different plants that were smokeable, and so on. And instructions on how to make music and sing and dance real crazy, real sexy. And how to spout blasphemy when they stubbed their toes."Satan had a serpent give Eve the apple. Eve took a bite and handed it to Adam. Hee took a bite, and then they fucked.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Puzzle pieces, people and their gifts seek to fit instay true to yourself; don't cram or trim.
— James     Valentine, The Valentine Constitution for The United States of America
...the sole test of music is its power to exalt the soul.
— Aleister Crowley, Eight Lectures on Yoga
A demigod who reaches his apotheosis never mourns for himself.It is the business of his many adulators to mourn for him. He cannot feel sadness to be so great, leaving all the rest of us to champion in trembling misery.I, surprisingly, have very few words to offer, only because this year has taken so many sensational performers from us. There comes a time when the agony of loss is too great, when we feel it too much-- there is nothing left but painful astonishment. My grievances lie more with the Gods for taking him away from us than they do with his parting. I suppose I shall reach the stage of unconscionable sorrow at some point; now I am half confusion and half indignation. It should be impossible for people to be so deeply affected by someone whom we have never formally met, but this is existence: it is a bold measure we take, this stake in sufferance; we must all go through everything together, another proof of the mask of division. We all feel the same things, and Prince's passing is felt no less by anybody. Between him and Bowie, there is now a musical chasm in the world, a place where Gods once dwelt that is now abandoned, and in the Age of Pseudolotry, where what is nonsensical reigns over what is intelligent, we are likely never to see one of his kind again.Goodnight, sweet Prince. We shall go on trundling through this 'thing called life' with hearts defrauded of our greatest love.--On the death of Prince
— Michelle Franklin
The right music and lyrics can infiltrate your soul.
— Brownell Landrum, Repercussions: DUET stories Volume IV - Adult Version
The most disappointing part of real life is there's no soundtrack.I think life would be far more wonderful if a corresponding song played during key moments to expressed the tone & feeling of the situation.
— Trevor Driggers
Music will live in my hearth and I will try to shoot with my heart.
— Deyth Banger
If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God.
— Emil M. Cioran
As for me horror is the genre which makes my life more interesting, mysteries my life to be something like a riddle which people go and hard go outside...But the music build my personality!
— Deyth Banger
Let the base louder...!?
— Deyth Banger
And then the great music of which the world is made took him over, beyond thought, beyond control until he heard her cry his name and they fell together off the edge of the world.
— Jean Gill, Song at Dawn: 1150 in Provence
She poured her heart into the song and filled it with everything she felt
— Andrew Peterson, North! or Be Eaten
Driving home I switch on the radio and one of those old Motown voices comes on and reaches my heart.
— Ellen Van Neerven, Heat and Light
Sexual union is only truly fulfilling when both parties are at the same level and definition of love. The same exchange of energy. It’s like music. Alone you have your own tune, but when it’s combined with another it can a magical, divine experience. Each part has to know when it leads, like the melody, and when it complements, like the harmony.
— Brownell Landrum, A Chorus of Voices: DUET stories Volume III - Adult Version
And stay, my dearstay...forever, as my quiet song,in my lilac dawn.
— Sanober  Khan, A Thousand Flamingos
Kids don't care about rock and roll as much as they used to, as the other generations have. It's already turned into nothing but a fashion statement and an identity for kids to use as a tool for them to fuck and have a social life.
— Kurt Cobain
If you dance to rhythm of music in your heart, you will restore your soul, and revive your spirit.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
what the fuck
— Luke Hemmings
A silent street always welcome a good music!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
The Church acknowledges Gregorian chant as specially suited to the Roman liturgy: therefore, other things being equal, it should be given pride of place in liturgical services. But other kinds of sacred music, especially polyphony, are by no means excluded from liturgical celebrations, so long as they accord with the spirit of the liturgical action.
— Pope Paul VI, Sacrosanctum Concilium: Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy
You will not find it in the words of poets or the longing eyes of sailors. If you want to know of love, look to a trouper's hands as he makes his music. A trouper knows.
— Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear
Enjoy the ecstasy of daily dance.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Beautiful music stimulates beautiful thoughts.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
You only need to move your body to the rhythm of the music.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
If people listen to music and dance every day, they find happiness and sacred solutions to any problem.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Music moves the body, soul and spirit to the bliss.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Like Garth Brooks said about it, you need to live where you could honestly choose, if you had to, on whether to give up one yesterday for one more tomorrow, you have to be able to say no to that.
— John Schmidt
Every talent you have is not wasted. It is there because of a reason and God will open that door when the right time comes along to use it.
— Shannon L. Alder
While my body might say, "I'm small and vulnerable," my hair warns, "DON'T MESS WITH ME.
— Lindsey Stirling
You needed love to win at the game of music...I played of sadness. I played of loneliness. Despair. Love found and lost. I played of tragic misunderstanding and weary cynicism and defeat. I played of perseverance, endurance beyond all suffering. Endurance in the face of hopelessness, hope when even hope was a betrayal...And yet, though I played so much sadness, the music at the same time denied despair. How could anyone despair while music was being played?
— Katherine Applegate
I have to admit. Saying goodbye—leaving Bonnie. Was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my entire life. It actually hurt…
— A.R. Von, Jailhouse Rock
7 Up soda pop mixed with bright pink grenadine with a chemical-tasting maraschino cherry stuck to the plastic straw. It was one of those drinks marketed for children, but Mandy could see that she wasn’t the only adult ordering one. For some reason or other these old-fashioned restaurants always seemed to attract old ladies ordering strawberry Jell-O with whipped cream, truck drivers ordering “worms and dirt” (chocolate pudding with Oreo cookies squished over the top in a glass bowl, fruit-flavoured gummy worms over the cookie crumbs) and businessmen trying not to get syrup from their hot fudge sundaes on their neckties and tailored suits. Mandy figured that maybe they were all trying to grasp a time way back in the past when they were all little children, excitedly ordering desert for a special occasion under the warm incandescent light from above, cheerful and bouncing music filling their minds. Hurriedly she ate the food, paid the tab and hurried back to her car in the bitter wind, not wanting to stick around for very long.
— Rebecca McNutt, Shadowed Skies: The Third Smog City Novel
Led Zeppelin created their music from a diet of Bert Jansch, Memphis Minnie, John Fahey, Billy Fury, Phil Spector, Richard 'Rabbit' Brown, Moby Grape, Manitas De Plata and Om Kalsoum. Those who came afterwards were content with a diet of Led Zeppelin, which is not the same thing at all.
— David Hepworth
You get a few of them together and don’t be surprised if pipes and drums appear out of nowhere. It is a sort of magic people believe in…
— Thomm Quackenbush, Flies to Wanton Boys
The music has teased and tickled me in an empty space that the most vacuous.
— Dina Zettira Putri
If you listen to music every day, you will be happy.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
A man who hates music can't be trusted.
— George R.R. Martin, A Storm of Swords
Music makes my soul happy.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Why would we need music if our lives were exactly as we wanted them to be?
— Mo Daviau, Every Anxious Wave
I dance daily to the music in my heart.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
How can your life without listen to music?
— Lailah Gifty Akita
I can’t live without books, music and wonder.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
There’s a little tagline in there that I throw out to our fans, I like to call them my sinners, and I’m a fellow sinner, and so I think that’s a special little throw-out to them.
— brendon urie
Something tugged inside him. A flutter of unease.Do you sing? Those had been her first words to him, the day she had bought him. A band of nausea circled Arin’s throat, just as it had when she had asked him that question, in part for the same reason. She’d had no trace of an accent. She had spoken in perfect, natural, mother-taught Herrani.
— Marie Rutkoski, The Winner's Kiss
The actual things behind the stories and behind the lyrics had a lot to do with…I hate saying depression, but there was a really rough patch in my head and really difficult time and I didn’t know why…A lot of the ghosts that appeared in the record is a metaphor for that depression at that time in my head and all the things going on in it. It’s mainly about that, and there’s little things here and there about certain people.
— Lynn Gunn
Words are weapons stronger than he knows. And songs are even greater. The words wake the mind. The melody wakes the heart.
— Pierce Brown, Red Rising
music was the only beautiful thing he owned
— Jeff Zentner, The Serpent King
She has her eyes closed, looking lost to the song and completely oblivious to what’s happening around her, or at how she’s affecting everyone in the room. I wonder if she’s aware of how amazing she is?
— A.R. Von, Jailhouse Rock
Wow! This woman is doing a lot of strange things to me and I want more. Much more.
— A.R. Von, Jailhouse Rock
He laughs and switches lanes. "All right. So, favorite song?""Ever?"He nods. I bite my lip and watch the just-budding trees flash by outside."I don't think I've found it yet."His mouth twists with a smile I've never seen before. And I've seen every smile."That's the right answer.
— Michelle  Painchaud, Pretending to Be Erica
First you learn the instrument, then you learn the music, then you forget all that s**t and just play.
— Charlie Parker
I had hooked up my iPod to the speakers. The air was filled with the raw, sexy purr of Etta James. "The thing that's great about the blues," I told Luke, pausing to sip from my glass of wine, "is that it's about feeling, loving, wanting without the brakes on. No one's brave enough to live that way. Except maybe musicians.
— Lisa Kleypas, Smooth Talking Stranger
If you dance daily, you will find strength within thy soul.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
And when one song stops playing write the one that will save your life.
— Shannon L. Alder
Music is either sacred or profane. What is sacred accords completely with its nobility, and this is where music most immediately influences life; such influence remains unchanged at all times and in every epoch. Profane music should be altogether cheerful.Music of a kind that mixes the sacred with the profane is godless and shoddy music wich goes in for expressing feeble, wretched, deplorable feelings, and is just insipid. For it is not serious enough to be sacred and it lacks the chief quality of the opposite kind: cheerfulness.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Between where you stand today and where God needs you to be is a thousand lies, a thousand reasons to give up and an army of people willing to break down your spirit and motivation. You will be hurt. You will be labeled. You will be betrayed. You will get lost. You will make mistakes. You might even want to give up because a few people that say they stand for Christ appear to stand against you. Don't do it! God only gives you what he knows you can handle. So, guess what? If God knew that you could travel through hell and get to the other side then you must be one ---BADASS WOMAN!
— Shannon L. Alder
I could turn up the volume on their songs and that loudness matched all my panic and fear, anger and emotions that seemed up until that point to be uncontrollable, even amorphous.
— Carrie Brownstein
Music not only saved my life, it gave me a life
— Nick Carter
Song
—  an intangible medicine that heals both the body and the soul intangibly for a moment.
I am eating this noise like mouthfuls of freezing, glittering fog. I am filling with it. I am using it as energy. Because what you are, as a teenager, is a small, silver, empty rocket. And you use loud music as fuel, and then the information in books as maps and coordinates, to tell you where you're going.
— Caitlin Moran
I’m not sorry it stopped. [on Lady Gaga’s ”Poker Face”]
— David        Mitchell
I knew there was something special between us, knew it as surely as a lyric that belonged in a song. But as with all good songs, I needed time to figure out the melody and chords.
— Cari Quinn, Manaconda
roughly 90 percent of songs have mating as their central theme, and this holds true regardless of cultural setting or historical period.
— Gad Saad, The Consuming Instinct: What Juicy Burgers, Ferraris, Pornography, and Gift Giving Reveal About Human Nature
They only want to be there while you’re on top, and when you haven’t gotten a gig in a while and you don’t know how you’re going to pay your rent at the end of the month and the glamor they thought they signed up for is gone, they’re walking out the door, leaving you to pick up the pieces.
— Courtney Giardina, Behind the Strings
I sing about life. I am happy, but life is sad.
— Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove
An old Russian folk song is like water held back by a dam. It looks as if it were still and were no longer flowing, but in its depths it is ceaselessly rushing through the sluice gates and the stillness of its surface is deceptive. By every possible means, by repetitions and similes, the song slows down the gradual unfolding of its theme. Then at some point it suddenly reveals itself and astounds us. That is how the song’s sorrowing spirit comes to expression. The song is an insane attempt to stop time by means of its words.
— Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago
All I needed to know, all true knowledge, the only really essential knowledge, was to be found in the books I read and the music I listened to
— Karl Ove Knausgård
Life is dance. Dance with your own rhythm.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
My hobbies are reading, writing, listening to music and dancing.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Life is . Life is dance. Dance with your own rhythm. . Dance with your own rhythm.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Jacques wants a pancake shaped like Mozart's Symphony No. 40! In G minor!
— Michelle Cuevas, Confessions of an Imaginary Friend
The macabre melodies were a surreal audible example of just who I’d been before and a stark contrast to who I was now.
— K.A. Hill, The Winners' Guide
You're not going to hear me singing songs about Wall Street because I don't know anything about that.
— Jason Aldean
He slid his saxophone under the bed before we got naked on it, and I think it made the whole thing better. I really do.
— Charlie Close, Before the Ripcord Broke: Stories
Music felt married to place, and the notion of "somewhere" predated the Internet's seeming invention of "everywhere" (which often ends up feeling like "nowhere").
— Carrie Brownstein
Repetition sometimes works in poetry, but rarely in prose. The musical provocateur John Cage once wrote a lecture in which a single page was repeated fourteen times, with the refrain "If anybody is sleep let him go to sleep" (Cage, 1961). Midway through, the artist Jean Reynal stood up and screamed, "John, I dearly love you, but I can't bear another minute.
— Gary F. Marcus, Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning
When i look to my past i'm not believe in god but for future god is hope.
— Kjiva
I'm trap in marriage with gangsta rhyme and my street life.
— Kjiva
Her technique was not perfect. Here and there he heard an off-pitch note, and her run of sixteenths was uneven. But her attack was fierce, her bow digging into the strings with such confidence that even her mistakes sounded intentional, every note played without apology.
— Tess Gerritsen, Playing with Fire
It was some of Solomon’s favorite music because it was dense and intellectually complicated and he wasn’t expected to dance to it.
— James S.A. Corey, Drive
I never liked hearing anyone say I was the new George Gershwin, because I knew I could have never even carried that man's music case. If George Gershwin hadn't died when he was thirty-nine years old, there is no knowing how much more great music he would have written.
— Burt Bacharach
Well I'll be waiting for a long, long time in the line which is your arms.
— Ethan Hopkins
Sometimes guitar riffs get repeated over and over ("vamping," in the lingo of musicians), but generally there is a soloist proving variation that runs above that background, lest the song sound monotonous. Philip Glass's minimalist compositions (such as the soundtrack to 'Koyaanisqatsi') deviate from much of the classical music that preceded them, with much less obvious movement than, say, the Romantic-era compositions that his work seems to rebel against, yet his works, too, consist not only of extensive repetition but also of constant (though subtle) variation. Virtually every song you've ever heard consists of exactly that: themes that recur over and over, overlaid with variations.
— Gary F. Marcus, Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning
Our sense of a composition largely inheres in how we feel about the individual parts; narrative arcs are almost always essential in drama but (unless there are lyrics involved) often less essential in music. All of this is, I suspect, again symptomatic of human memory limitations. We live, to a remarkable degree, in the present; what happened thirty seconds ago is already rapidly fading from our memory (or at least rapidly becomes harder for us to retrieve).
— Gary F. Marcus, Guitar Zero
The gentle pulsing and flickering of stars and nebulae made a kind of music, a sweet easy mesh of whispered tones and sighing harmonies that held him in its force like the earth [holding] the moon.
— Aberjhani, Songs from the Black Skylark zPed Music Player
She closed her eyes and began to weave a song. She abandoned the familiar melodies she’d played so many times before and went in search of something new, no longer wanting a song fed on pain or guilt. She needed one that could replace those wounds with strength, with resolve, with confidence. She needed a song that could not only assuage, but heal and build anew. The notes stumbled around the room, tripping over beds and empty stools and hollow men sleeping. They warbled and fell, haphazard, chaotic, settling without flight. Fin’s forehead creased and she persisted. She let her fingers wander, reached out with her mind. She chased the fleeting song she’d glimpsed once before. In Madeira she’d felt a hint of it: something wild, untameable, a thing sprung whole and flawless from the instant of creation.
— A.S. Peterson, Fiddler's Green
I'll admit that writing doesn't always come, but I'm totally against walking around looking at the sky when you're experiencing a block, waiting for inspiration to strike you. Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov didn't like each other and agreed on very few things, but they were of one opinion on this: you had to write constantly. If you can't write a major work, write minor trifles. If you can't write at all, orchestrate something.
— Dmitri Shostakovich
She chased the song like a hound fast upon a scent. She pursued it through a forest primeval: a dark land planted with musical staves and rests and grown thick with briars of annotation. On she went and on still until she caught sight of the song ahead of her, fleeting and sly. “I see it,” she said aloud, though she didn’t mean to.
— A.S. Peterson, Fiddler's Green
And then she caught the song. She fell upon it and music poured from the fiddle’s hollow, bright and liquid like fire out of the heart of the earth. Pierre-Jean drew back and stood mesmerized. The room around Fin stirred as every ear bent to the ring of heartsong. It rushed through Fin and spread to the outermost and tiniest capillary reaches of her body. Her flesh sang. The hairs of her arms and neck roused and stood. She sped the bow across the strings. Her fingers danced on the fingerboard quick as fat raindrops. Every man in the room that night would later swear that there was a wind within it. They would tell their children and lovers that a hurricane had filled the room, toppled chairs, driven papers and sheets before it and blew not merely around them but through them, taking fears, grudges, malice, and contempt with it, sending them spiraling out into the night where they vanished among the stars like embers rising from a bonfire. And though the spirited cry of the fiddle’s song blew through others and around the room and everything in it, Fin sat at the heart of it. It poured into her. It found room in the closets and hollow places of her soul to settle and root. It planted seeds: courage, resolve, steadfastness. Fin gulped it in, seized it, held it fast. She needed it, had thirsted for it all her days. She saw the road ahead of her, and though she didn’t understand it or comprehend her part in it, she knew that she needed the ancient and reckless power of a holy song to endure it. She didn’t let the music loose. It buckled and swept and still she clung to it, defined it in notes and rhythm, channeled it like a river bound between mountain steeps. And a thing happened then so precious and strange that Fin would ever after remember it only in the formless manner of dreams. The song turned and spoke her name—her true name, intoned in a language of mysteries. Not her earthly name, but a secret word, defining her alone among all created things. The writhing song spoke it, and for the first time, she knew herself. She knew what it was to be separated out, held apart from every other breathing creature, and known. Though she’d never heard it before and wouldn’t recall it after, every stitch of her soul shook in the passage of the word, shuddered in the wake of it, and mourned as the sound sped away. In an instant, it was over. The song ended with the dissonant pluck of a broken string.
— A.S. Peterson, Fiddler's Green
As important as color is to a painting, or wings to a bird. Music injects vibrancy to film and makes it soar!
— Gerard de Marigny
Music is the sound of unspoken thoughts.
— Dan Groat
Then she took up the bow and began to play. The tone was warm and deep, storied with layers of age.
— A.S. Peterson, Fiddler's Green
He considered for a moment, then started to play a piece that was very familiar to Ruth, although she had no idea what it was. It was lilting and wistful, and she could have sung the melody if she had wished.'Alright?' He raised his eyebrows inquiringly.'Yes. Exactly.'It was effortless and perfect, and he played it through to the end, closing with the softest and most delicate chords, which hung and faded in the quiet hall like the grains of dust raining through the evening light. Ruth was touched. It was all she had wanted. He did not move until there was complete silence again, then he closed the lid without saying anything, and stood up, shoving back the chair. ... 'What was that piece?''A Brahms waltz.''Hasn't it got a name?' she wanted it to remember.'Number fifteen. Opus thirty-nine.'It hadn't sounded like numbers to Ruth.
— K.M. Peyton, The Beethoven Medal
He considered for a moment, then started to play a piece that was very familiar to Ruth, although she had no idea what it was. It was lilting and wistful, and she could have sung the melody if she had wished."Alright?" He raised his eyebrows inquiringly."Yes. Exactly."It was effortless and perfect, and he played it through to the end, closing with the softest and most delicate chords, which hung and faded in the quiet hall like the grains of dust raining through the evening light. Ruth was touched. It was all she had wanted. He did not move until there was complete silence again, then he closed the lid without saying anything, and stood up, shoving back the chair. ... "What was that piece?" "A Brahms waltz.""Hasn't it got a name?" she wanted it to remember."Number fifteen. Opus thirty-nine." It hadn't sounded like numbers to Ruth.
— K.M. Peyton
It is a second-generation Seattle-scene record label; all of its artists are young people who came to Seattle after they graduated college in search of the legendary Seattle music scene and discovered that it didn't really exist--it was just a couple of dozen guys who sat around playing guitar in one another's basements--and so who were basically forced to choose between going home in ignominy or fabricating the Seattle Music scene of their imagination from whole cloth. This led to the establishment of any number of small clubs, and the foundation of many bands, that were not rooted in any kind of authentic reality whatsoever but merely reflected the dreams and aspiration of pan-global young adults who had flocked to Seattle on the same chimera hunt.
— Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
How do you imagine Hell, sir Blacksad ? For me, it's a place without music... of complete silence.
— Juan Díaz Canales
Connection, he explained, was the essence of pop music, according to his boss, Jimmy Iovine: “Jimmy always says it’s all about the connection between the artist and the fans,” he says. “This whole business, it’s just about that connection.
— John Seabrook, The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory
Love is the only song I sing.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
If the only song you sing is love, it is the greatest.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Music is music.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
The red-jacketed band stirred to life. The first musician raised his trumpet. The trombone dipped. The drumstick rose. Lea lowered her clarinet. It had been Brent's idea not to have their insturments rise and fall in unison. The staggered motion gave it a more exciting rhythm.
— Paul Fleischman, Whirligig
But nobody is born being able to hear [intervals], and many people never master them. Some people never even notice that "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" and "The Alphabet Song" follow the same melody (and hence consist of the same sequence of intervals).
— Gary F. Marcus, Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning
There is a reason you glance up when you first hear a melody, or tap your foot to the sound of a drum. All humans are musical. Why else would the Lord give you a beating heart?
— Mitch Albom, The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto
The morning was, therefore, a mixture of a plenitude of densities, from the presence of the placid birds, to the mundane premonition, to the spring of small glisters which accompanied that autumnal rain. The music, in a simple whistle, recreated a new universe with the parish and all the hearts that were witness to it- padre, pigeons, swallows, the world!- were clothed in a new carnivalesque colouring: a celebration from within.
— Ondjaki, The Whistler
... after daybreak is when I will already have died. At that moment I will only know of beautiful things: the certainties, the desires. When the sun bathes me, I will be something else: without mirrors, without sadness. I will have passed away, but will have been reborn. I will whistle mellifluous melodies. Discredited but, in the end, light.
— Ondjaki, The Whistler
The elders say- difficult to prove- that winged creatures also dream. The birds are lovers of heights, always searching out landing spots, never constant here at the foot of the human race. 'It's that they discovered a magical advantage...' they say, 'the sound of silence.'At the foot of the clouds the raindrops come earlier, it's true, and the silence of the sky is something unattainable for those who don't fly- we have never experimented. The dream of the birds was that man of them headed for a land where they experienced a similar magic to that lived by them.In the final analysis, music is the only human sound similar to that of silence.
— Ondjaki, The Whistler
Rock stars have many of the same qualities as athletes—millions for doing what they love, fans, easy pussy, fame, status, the ability to do whatever they want when they want. While what they do is still cool, the main difference is that it’s less masculine. You connect with your fans in this intense, intimate, emotional way that is less about you and more about them, how you make them feel. When you’re an athlete, it’s all about you. They cheer you on. When you make music, you cheer them on, provide the soundtrack to their little lives, and all they do is cheer you back to say “Thanks.
— A.D. Aliwat, Alpha
Even more than music, rock-and-roll is sex.
— A.D. Aliwat, Alpha
The sound circulated like an autonomous being whose tentacles needed to experience a sensitive awareness of the terrain.
— Ondjaki, The Whistler
be my sonata, my cantata, my lovesing me something sweetbut not too sweet(or i may grow deaf to our harmonyas we decrescendo into silence)
— Nenia Campbell, The Pocketbook of Sunshine and Rain
He's rigged a tiny cassette player with a small set of foam earphones to listen to demo tapes and rough mixes. Occasionally he'll hand the device to Mindy, wanting her opinion, and each time, the experience of music pouring directly against her eardrums - hers alone - is a shock that makes her eyes well up; the privacy of it, the way it transforms her surroundings into a golden montage, as if she were looking back on this lark in Africa with Lou from some distant future.
— Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad
We may now briefly enumerate the elements of style.  We have, peculiar to the prose writer, the task of keeping his phrases large, rhythmical, and pleasing to the ear, without ever allowing them to fall into the strictly metrical: peculiar to the versifier, the task of combining and contrasting his double, treble, and quadruple pattern, feet and groups, logic and metre—harmonious in diversity: common to both, the task of artfully combining the prime elements of language into phrases that shall be musical in the mouth; the task of weaving their argument into a texture of committed phrases and of rounded periods—but this particularly binding in the case of prose: and, again common to both, the task of choosing apt, explicit, and communicative words.  We begin to see now what an intricate affair is any perfect passage; how many faculties, whether of taste or pure reason, must be held upon the stretch to make it; and why, when it is made, it should afford us so complete a pleasure.  From the arrangement of according letters, which is altogether arabesque and sensual, up to the architecture of the elegant and pregnant sentence, which is a vigorous act of the pure intellect, there is scarce a faculty in man but has been exercised.  We need not wonder, then, if perfect sentences are rare, and perfect pages rarer.-ON SOME TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF STYLE IN LITERATURE
— Robert Louis Stevenson, Essays in the Art of Writing
Music and literature, the two temporal arts, contrive their pattern of sounds in time; or, in other words, of sounds and pauses.  Communication may be made in broken words, the business of life be carried on with substantives alone; but that is not what we call literature; and the true business of the literary artist is to plait or weave his meaning, involving it around itself; so that each sentence, by successive phrases, shall first come into a kind of knot, and then, after a moment of suspended meaning, solve and clear itself.-ON SOME TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF STYLE IN LITERATURE
— Robert Louis Stevenson, Essays in the Art of Writing
There isn't a better feeling in the world—not an orgasm, not a first kiss, not even that glorious soaring sensation you get when those first few notes of a new song pierce your chest and fill your whole body with absolute bliss—than acknowledgment that your mix tape was not only received and played but enjoyed. It's a dance of sorts, balancing songs you think the listener will love while trying to say everything that otherwise dries up in your throat before you can get out the words.
— Libby Cudmore, The Big Rewind
Ah, yes, the mix tape. The mating call of the introvert.
— Sophia Dembling, Introverts in Love: The Quiet Way to Happily Ever After
Listening to music makes me creative in all spheres of life.
— Nelson Nshekanabo
I've never listened to music lying down. Listening's reading if you close your eyes.Music's a wood you walk through.
— David Mitchell
People began to join in, quietly at first to match her mood, but as the song built up at the end, their voices did as well, so that by the time they got to the final “Free to be you and me,” the whole school could hear them. Caught in the pure delight of it, Jess turned and his eyes met Leslie’s. He smiled at her. What the heck? There wasn’t any reason he couldn’t. What was he scared of anyhow? Lord. Sometimes he acted like the original yellow-bellied sapsucker. He nodded and smiled again. She smiled back. He felt there in the teachers’ room that it was the beginning of a new season in his life, and he chose deliberately to make it so.He did not have to make any announcement to Leslie that he had changed his mind about her. She already knew it. She plunked herself down beside him on the bus and squeezed over closer to him to make room for May Belle on the same seat. She talked about Arlington, about the huge suburban school she used to go to with its gorgeous music room but not a single teacher in it as beautiful or as nice as Miss Edmunds.
— Katherine Patterson
Lundin says, “Denniz was an arrangement genius.” He adds, “like Steve Jobs, he knew what to take out. ‘You can get rid of that, that. Keep it simple.’ ” As Denniz put it, “A great pop song should be interesting, in some way. That means that certain people will hate it immediately and certain people will love it, but only as long as it isn’t boring and meaningless. Then it’s not a pop song any longer; then it’s something else. It’s just music.
— John Seabrook
They told me exactly how it worked, the marketing of it. Our target market was always going to be young teenage girls, because boys are into sports, and they like buying jerseys and caps and so on, for baseball or football, things of that nature, whereas the girls are totally enthralled with the band. . . . They don’t have money, but they have access to a large supply of it: their aunts, uncles, grandmas, grandpas, who would spend money on them for a concert or merchandise sooner than they would spend it on themselves.
— John Seabrook, The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory
You can get in a car in Maine and drive all the way to California and hear the same Top 40 songs on the same chain broadcasters,” bemoaned the report.
— John Seabrook, The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory
Free the fire fluttering inside her rib cage. Work her muscles, the bow, the violin, until she played herself to ash and embers and left the rest of the world behind to smolder.
— Alexandra Bracken, Passenger
Country music was the most segregated kind of music in America, where even whites played jazz and even blacks sang in the opera. Something like country music was what lynch mobs must have enjoyed while stringing up their black victims. Country music was not necessarily lynching music, but no other music could be imagined as lynching’s accompaniment. Beethoven’s Ninth was the opus for Nazis, concentration camp commanders, and possibly President Truman as he contemplated atomizing Hiroshima, classical music the refined score for the high-minded extermination of brutish hordes. Country music was set to the more humble beat of the red-blooded, bloodthirsty American heartland.
— Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer
when you come to a show do you feel the same thing that i feel when i’m on that stage? i mean, i know you’re not standing on the stage… but surely you can feel the same energy that i’m feeling, to some degree. it’s so much more powerful than all the trivial nonsense that people chalk our band up to be. it means something great and it feels empowering. it’s the grace of knowing that we can all totally suck and be a little messed up and then stand in a room with thousands of other people who are exactly the same way, no matter how dressed up they look on the outside, and we can be broken all the same.
— Hayley Williams
A melody occurs to you; you sing it silently, inwardly ... ; you steep your being in it; it takes possession of all your strength and emotions, and during the time it lives in you, it effaces all that is fortuitous, evil, coarse and sad in you; it brings the world into harmony with you, it makes burdens light and gives wings to the benumbed.
— Hermann Hesse, Gertrude
alone, drinking coffee, listening to the playlist that include the songs that remember you with the best and bad moments of your life.what a hard emotional moment !!
— Nabil TOUSSI
Well that's very kind of you, but voices ought not be measured by how pretty they are. Instead they matter only if they convince you that they are telling the truth.
— Sam Cooke
There’s still other songs that I think that would never be on the radio that get, it’s a different kind of response. Part II, there’s just nothing like that. That song will never be on a radio station. … that song doesn’t need that sort of following in order to connect.
— Hayley Williams
One did not need to penetrate David's secret counsels or insinuate a man in his bodyguard. All one needed was a pair of years and access to the royal precincts. Just to eavesdrop upon his singing was to develop an accurate idea of his state of mind.
— Geraldine Brooks, The Secret Chord
To hear for the duration of a heartbeat the universe and the totality of life in its mysterious, innate harmony.
— Hermann Hesse, Gertrude
The music of kindness may be short lived, but its echoes are everlasting.
— Debasish Mridha
Music fills the gap between the conscious and the subconscious mind with endless joy and bliss.
— Debasish Mridha