c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
There's a stranger in a car Driving down your street Acts like he knows who you are Slaps his hand on the empty seat and says "Are you gonna get in Or are you gonna stay out?" Just a stranger in a car Might be the one they told you about Well you never were one for cautiousness You open the door He gives you a tender kiss And you can't even hear them no more --All the voices of choices Now only one road remains And strangers in a car Two hearts Two souls Tonight Two lanes You don't know where you're goin' You don't know what you're doin' Hell it might be the highway to heaven And it might be the road to ruin But this is a song For strangers in a car Baby maybe that's all We really are Strangers in a car (Driving down your street) Just strangers in a car (Driving down your street) Strangers in a car
— Marc Cohn
The choir sang and the old man sang and Drake couldn't sing, and suddenly he began to cry because of the music, because of the sound of the boys' voices, because of what they might turn into.
— Sarah Winman, A Year of Marvellous Ways
I have no doubt that, had I actually been growing up in the 1930s or 1940s, I would have been grooving to turn-of-the-century beats.
— Emma Brockes, What Would Barbra Do?: How Musicals Changed My Life
My loathings are simple. stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.
— Vladimir Nabokov
Artistes breathe and dream creativity!
— Avijeet Das
A translation is no translation,’ he said, ‘unless it will give you the music of a poem along with the words of it.
— John Millington Synge
There is no doubt that even the greatest musical geniuses have sometimes worked without inspiration. This guest (inspiration) does not always respond to the first invitation. We must always work, and a self-respecting artist must not fold his hands on the pretext that he is not in the mood. If we wait for the mood, without endeavouring to meet it half-way, we easily become indolent and apathetic. We must be patient, and believe that inspiration will come to those who can master their disinclination.
— Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
How many victims must that be? Slaughtered in vain across the land,And how many strugles must that be?Before we choose to live the profits planEverybody sing- Every day create your History,Every path you take you're leaving your legacyEvery soldier dies in his gloryEvery legend tells of conquest and liberty.
— Michael  Jackson
They say that the eyes of some paintings can follow you around the room, a fact that I doubt, but I am wondering whether some music can follow you for ever.
— Terry Pratchett, Snuff
‎"The less random stuff you hear about, the more room in your ears for music, that's what I always say" -Paisley
— Lynn Weingarten, The Secret Sisterhood of Heartbreakers
Well," he said with equanimity, "you see, in my opinion there is no point at all in talking about music. I never talk about music. What reply, then, was I to make to your very able and just remarks? You were perfectly right in all you said. But, you see, I am a musician, not a professor, and I don't believe that, as regards music, there is the least point in being right. Music does not depend on being right, on having good taste and education and all that.""Indeed. Then what does it depend on?""On making music, Herr Haller, on making music as well and as much as possible and with all the intensity of which one is capable. That is the point, Monsieur. Though I carried the complete works of Bach and Haydn in my head and could say the cleverest things about them, not a soul would be the better for it. But when I take hold of my mouthpiece and play a lively shimmy, whether the shimmy be good or bad, it will give people pleasure. It gets into their legs and into their blood. That's the point and that alone. Look at the faces in a dance hall at the moment when the music strikes up after a longish pause, how eyes sparkle, legs twitch and faces begin to laugh. That is why one makes music.
— Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf
To transform a grimace into a sound sounds impossible, yet it is possible to transform a vision into music, to go outside an enslaved personality, to become impersonal by transforming into sand, into water, into light.
— Dejan Stojanovic
I closed my eyes during a flute solo, wishing I could wrap the silvery sound around me like armor.
— Jodi Meadows, Incarnate
Ever hear a song you love so much you wanna break sh*t?
— Juliet Simms
The music of rebellion makes you want to rageBut it's made by millionaires who are nearly twice your age
— Porcupine Tree
He was making music - Howells, Finzi, Holst - so you could see the sounds in the serried air.Serried. Then just as suddenly empty when his sound-proof right hand closed off the notes.
— Craig Raine
Lyrics belongs to us ina specific language, but music is universal.
— Abrar Ahmed chowdhury
To dance to fey music is the beginning of the end.
— Kate McCafferty, Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl
There are many ties that bind, and as many walls that divide. Music and madness. Love and unending time. Race and war. Strum weaves together each element into a larger human tapestry of light and shadow, where a combination of fate and decision can define a family's legacy.
— Nancy  Young, Strum
Pong had mutated into large stand-up Sega consoles by '82 and here was some extra revenue the guys were well up for. So the space on the left of the entrance was to be the games room. Until two weeks to opening."Where's the cloakroom?""The what?""The cloakroom, the fucking cloakroom.""What's your problem?""We don't have a cloakroom. We have special polished South African granite bar tops that we haven't told Erasmus about 'cause he has a thing about apartheid, we have a balcony balustrade made of shaped QE-fucking-2 mahogany, but we seem to have built an entire club without a cloakroom.""Fuck."Hence you did not pass the games room but the cloakroom, the only cloakroom in the Manchester with forty-two power points. if you ever wanted to do a bit of ironing, these people were there for you.
— Tony Wilson, 24-Hour Party People
Honouring the youth of their town they provided a décor that a £20-a-Martini fleecing parlour could not have amortized. They had bought eighty low Alvar Aalto stools for the alcove and coctail bar seating. Also, twenty tall numbers in the same bent bleach wood classic style. Extremely expensive and brought in from Finland at equally great expense.And in the first twelve months, ninety percent had disappeared. Compared to the catastrophic damage done every other week to one of the toilets just off the main dance floor --the level of masonry demolition going deep into the floor implied the use of a full-sized pneumatic drill-- the loss of a bunch of stools was incidental.The fact that thirty-two then turned up in New Order's rehearsal room was therefore coincidental. If you couldn't join in the public in stealing from your own club, what was the point of opening it?
— Tony Wilson, 24-Hour Party People
The string slices into the skin of his fingers and no matter how tough the calluses, it tears. But this beat is fast and even though his joints are aching, his arm's out of control like it has a mind of its own and the sweat tat drenches his hair and face seems to smother him, but nothing's going to stop Tom. He;s aiming for oblivion.
— Melina Marchetta, The Piper's Son
Simply handing over your iPod to a friend, your blind date, or the total stranger sitting next to you on the plane opens you up like a book." (Steven Levy)
— Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs
That’s the thing about jazz: it’s free flowing, it comes from your soul.
— Billy Crystal
Music itself was color-blind but the media and the radio stations segregate it based on their perceptions of the artists.
— Anthony Kiedis, Scar Tissue
Bowman was aware of some changes in his behavior patterns; it would have been absurd to expect anything else in the circumstances. He could no longer tolerate silence; except when he was sleeping, or talking over the circuit to Earth, he kept the ship's sound system running at almost painful loudness. / At first, needing the companionship of the human voice, he had listened to classical plays--especially the works of Shaw, Ibsen, and Shakespeare--or poetry readings from Discovery's enormous library of recorded sounds. The problems they dealt with, however, seemed so remote, or so easily resolved with a little common sense, that after a while he lost patience with them. / So he switched to opera--usually in Italian or German, so that he was not distracted even by the minimal intellectual content that most operas contained. This phase lasted for two weeks before he realized that the sound of all these superbly trained voices was only exacerbating his loneliness. But what finally ended this cycle was Verdi's Requiem Mass, which he had never heard performed on Earth. The "Dies Irae," roaring with ominous appropriateness through the empty ship, left him completely shattered; and when the trumpets of Doomsday echoed from the heavens, he could endure no more. / Thereafter, he played only instrumental music. He started with the romantic composers, but shed them one by one as their emotional outpourings became too oppressive. Sibelius, Tchaikovsky, Berlioz, lasted a few weeks, Beethoven rather longer. He finally found peace, as so many others had done, in the abstract architecture of Bach, occasionally ornamented with Mozart. / And so Discovery drove on toward Saturn, as often as not pulsating with the cool music of the harpsichord, the frozen thoughts of a brain that had been dust for twice a hundred years.
— Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey
Out of sorrow entire worlds have been builtOut of longing great wonders have been willed
— Nick Cave, Complete Lyrics
He knows how to market himself well. Nowadays, that's all that seems to count. He's rebellious in a way that appeals to people with vain, shallow taste. So of course he manipulates his audiences with the blessing of his recording company and the financial investors behind his brand.
— Jess C. Scott, SVEN, Incubus Story.02
What's the difference between a classical guitar and a pizza? A pizza can feed a family of four.
— Faye Kellerman, Hangman
He would much rather hear a piano being demolished by illegal bulldozers than a Mozart concerto
— Andy Stanton, You're a Bad Man, Mr Gum!
Learning to read music in Braille & play by ear helped me develop a [very] good memory.
— Ray Charles
I wanna show that gospel, country, blues, rhythm and blues, jazz, rock ‘n’ roll are all just really one thing. Those are the American music and that is the American culture.
— Etta James
I'm an alien 'cause I'm not of this world. I have a name but I've been changed and now I can't stay the same.And I'm a loser if that means I've been lost before...I'm a monster if that means I'm misunderstood. 'Cause it's alive and I can't hide it. The energy is rising.And I'm a traitor if that means I've turned on myself. I can't deny it, it's like a riot. I can't keep it quiet.
— Thousand Foot Krutch
You can't speak Music with notes alone, but you can speak Music without notes at all!
— Victor L. Wooten, The Music Lesson: A Spiritual Search for Growth Through Music
The Song of the Winged Ones is a song of celebration, written as though the singer were standing on the Dragon Isle watching the dragons flying in the sun. The words are full of wonder at the beauty of the creatures; and there is a curious pause in the middle of one of the stanzas near the end, where the singer waits a full four measures in silence for those who listen to hear the music of distant dragon wings. It seldom fails to bring echoes of something beyond the silence, and is almost never performed because many bards fear it.I love it.
— Elizabeth Kerner
There was something about words and music together that allowed people to get nearest to honest truth about what was most difficult to say. Paradoxically, only through the essential instantaneity of music could you approach its eternal pertinence.
— Gregory Maguire, The Next Queen of Heaven
When I played Lady Day, I took Aba onstage with me as a joke. He started singing—in tune!—and the audience loved it.Eartha Kitt, when asked what tricks her poodle did.
— Eartha Kitt
The Who got paid 4000 pounds during those days, but we always smashed our equipment that cost more than 5000 pounds.
— Pete Townshend
I think my knowledge of music theory is rooted in jazz theory, and a lot of the writers of standards – Rodgers and Hart, and Gershwin.
— Zooey Deschanel
Man, if you have to ask what it [jazz] is, you’ll never know.
— Louis Armstrong
Natasha, with a vigorous turn from her heel on to her toe, walked over to the middle of the room and stood still... Natasha took the first note, her throat swelled, her bosom heaved, a serious expression came into her face. She was thinking of no one and of nothing at that moment, and from her smiling mouth poured forth notes, those notes that anyone can produce at the same intervals, and hold for the same length of time, yet a thousand times leave us cold, and the thousand and first time they set us thrilling and weeping.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
With the new technology that keeps entering the media, film composers are constantly being placed in new learning situations. Acknowledging this and realizing that one must keep up, I maintain, nonetheless, that the real creative power is in the mind and heart of the composer.
— Henry Mancini, Did They Mention the Music?: The Autobiography of Henry Mancini
Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.
— Thelonious Monk
Brian came in heavy at that moment on his guitar, the rapid, high-pitched squeal ranging back and forth as his fingers flew along the frets. As the intro's tempo grew more rapid, Bekka heard Derek's subtle bass line as it worked its way in. After another few seconds Will came in, slow at first, but racing along to match the others' pace. When their combined efforts seemed unable to get any heavier, David jumped into the mix.As the sound got nice and heavy, Bekka began to rock back-and-forth onstage. In front of her, hundreds of metal-lovers began to jump and gyrate to their music. She matched their movements for a moment, enjoying the connection that was being made, before stepping over to the keyboard that had been set up behind her. Sliding her microphone into an attached cradle, she assumed her position and got ready. Right on cue, all the others stopped playing, throwing the auditorium into an abrupt silence. Before the crowd could react, however, Bekka's fingers began to work the keys, issuing a rhythm that was much softer and slower than what had been built up. The audience's violent thrash-dance calmed at that moment and they began to sway in response.Bekka smiled to herself.This is what she lived for.
— Nathan Squiers, Death Metal
Jobs had begun to drop acid by then, and he turned Brennan on to it as well, in a wheat field just outside Sunnyvale. "It was great," he recalled. "I had been listening to a lot of Bach. All of a sudden the whole field was playing Bach. It was the most wonderful feeling of my life up to that point. I felt like the conductor of this symphony with Bach coming through the wheat.
— Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs
The Dave Matthews Band’s “Crash into Me” played over the montage, not that the lyrics had anything to do with the images the song was played over but it was “haunting”, it was “moody”, it was “summing things up”, it gave the footage an “emotional resonance” that I guess we were incapable of capturing ourselves. At first my feelings were basically so what? But then I suggested other music: “Hurt” by Nine Inch Nails, but I was told that the rights were sky-high and that the song was “too ominous” for this sequence; Nada Surf’s “Popular” had “too many minor chords”, it didn’t fit the “mood of the piece,” it was – again – “too ominous.” When I told them I seriously did not think things could get any more fucking ominous than they already were, I was told, “Things get very much more ominous, Victor,” and then I was left alone.
— Bret Easton Ellis, Glamorama
Did you hear what I was playing, Lane?I didn't think it polite to listen, sir.
— Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
That innate love of melody, which she had inherited from her ballad-singing mother, gave the simplest music a power which could well-nigh drag her heart out of her bosom at times.
— Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Destiny is the music of the improbable. Were it otherwise, almost anyone could exist.
— Kenneth Patchen, Poemscapes
I did not know then that words and music are more deadly than any spear.
— India Edghill, Queenmaker: A Novel of King David's Queen
There'll be no more music, Father. But there'll be this!" He stepped into the dark, picked up the knife, and held it under their noses. "Go home. Tell your people what you saw and heard here tonight. And tell 'em that anyone we catch on these roads after dark anymore... this is what they'll get. Now that I know we're never to see the face o' God, we have nothing to lose. So, make sure you have your message right, Father, 'cause there'll be no other warning.
— Eddie Lenihan
Got to go sing in a few minutes... no, that's GOT to go sing in a few minutes, as in... GOT TO GO SING in a few minutes... hahaha It's an all consuming compassion/obsession... a drawing... a wonderful bliss... a union of soul and spirit, of notes and voice, of all of life's vibrating essence. String theory... all of life is vibrating, is alive, and the life of that essence is music itself!!
— Gloria Smith
You know when I'm down to my socks it's time for businessThat's why they're called business socksIt's business, it's business time
— Flight of the Conchords, Flight of the Conchords
My teacher, Ben Johnston, was convinced that our tuning is responsible for much of our cultural psychology, the fact that we are so geared toward progress and action and violence and so little attuned to introspection, contentment, and acquiescence. Equal temperament could be described as the musical equivalent to eating a lot of red meat and processed sugars and watching violent action films. The music doesn't turn your attention inward, it makes you want to go out and work off your nervous energy on something.
— Kyle Gann
Toward the end, a band that had a young fellow from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania—I remember on account of him saying it two or three times and laughing every time that he did—played a song called 'All She Gets from the Iceman is Ice.' It made the grown folks, most of them anyway, howl laughing. I don’t think I ever seen Mama laugh so hard. When it was about over, the sheriff come up and made them stop playing it, but he was grinning, too, so I figured he was just making them stop as part of the show.
— Eddie Whitlock, Evil Is Always Human
Robert Kapilow is a born teacher, an enthusiast who can think on his feet, a 110 percent believer in the project at hand ... It’s a cheering thought that this kind of missionary enterprise did not pass from this earth with Leonard Bernstein. Robert Kapilow is awfully good at what he does. We need him.
— The Boston Globe
I don't know how you hear music. I imagine that if you like music at all then it has, in your head, some kind of third dimension to it, a dimension suggesting space as well as surface, depth of field as well as texture.Speaking for myself, I used to hear "buildings"... three-dimensional forms of architectural substance and tension. I did not "see" these buildings in the classic synaesthetic way so much as sense them. These forms had "floors", "walls", "roofs", "windows", "cellars". They expressed volume. Music to me has always been a handsome three-dimensional container, a vessel, as real in its way as a Scout hut or a cathedral or a ship, with an inside and an outside and subdivided internal spaces.I'm absolutely certain that this "architecture" had everything to do with why music has always exerted such a hold over me. I think music was the structure in which I learned to contain and then examine emotion.
— Nick Coleman
If I had some of Jesus' tools, I'd build a big house that has no rules. And a bed that's big enough for 13 babies, and me & Miss Olivia Brown.
— Kevin Dalton
On the boardwalk the arcade jukebox plays all night surrounded by teenagers--sometimes twenty bodies deep, bare-skinned and full of energy for the music, for one another, for life, for the little bit of freedom they taste in the salt air and their skin. My father finds his place in this crowd. They are a force together. They don't do drugs. They don't drink. But they do music, and their power comes from their numbers and the thrill of being young on the beach at night.
— Laura Schenone, The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken: A Search for Food and Family
I'd sooner have died than admit that the most valuable thing I owned was a fairly extensive collection of German industrial music dance mix EP records stored for even further embarrassment under a box of crumbling Christmas tree ornaments in a Portland, Oregon basement. So I told him I owned nothing of any value.
— Douglas Coupland, Generatie X: Vertellingen voor een versnelde cultuur
You can't be like pop stars, but you can be part of their story. You can be their fan.
— Simon Cheshire, Plastic Fantastic
Thousands of cars and a million guitarsScreaming with power in the air!We've found the place where the decibels raceThis army of rock will be thereTo ram it downRam it down!Straight to the heart of this town.Ram it down.Ram it down.Razing the place to the ground,Ram it down!
— Rob Halford
For in music there is no material to be deducted.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maxims and Reflections
Song of myselfWith music strong I come, with my cornets and my drums, I play not marches for accepted victors only, I play marches for conquer'd and slain persons. Have you heard that it was good to gain the day? I also say it is good to fall, battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won. I beat and pound for the dead, I blow through my embouchures my loudest and gayest for them. Vivas to those who have fail'd! And to those whose war-vessels sank in the sea! And to those themselves who sank in the sea! And to all generals that lost engagements, and all overcome heroes! And the numberless unknown heroes equal to the greatest heroes known!
— Walt Whitman
They [the critics] deal with Schoenberg’s early works and all their wealth by classifying them, with the music-historical cliché, as late romantic post-Wagnerian. One might just as well dispose of Beethoven as a late-classicist post-Haydnerian.
— Theodor W. Adorno, Essays on Music
Shining like a work of artHanging on a wall of starsAre you what I think you are?You're my satelliteYou're riding with me tonightPassenger side, lighting the skyAlways the first star that I findYou're my satelliteElevator to the moonWhistling our favorite tuneTrying to get a closer viewYou're my satelliteYou're riding with me tonightPassenger side, lighting the skyAlways the first star that I findYou're my satelliteMaybe you will always beJust a little out of reach
— Guster, Guster: A Collection of Songs
Brahms' Variations are better than mine, but mine were written before his.
— Franz Liszt
The living take a part of the dead with them, carrying them around in their minds, like a song that lingers after the music has been turned off.
— Fern Schumer Chapman, Motherland: Beyond the Holocaust: A Mother-Daughter Journey to Reclaim the Past
Emblematic of this era was the prolific Viennese surgeon Theodor Billroth. Born in 1821, Billroth studied music and surgery with almost equal verve. (The professions still often go hand in hand. Both push manual skill to its limit; both mature with practice and age; both depend on immediacy, precision, and opposable thumbs.)
— Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
Shrouded as he was for a decade in an apparent cloak of anonymity and obscurity, Osama bin Laden was by no means an invisible man. He was ubiquitous and palpable, both in a physical and a cyber-spectral form, to the extent that his death took on something of the feel of an exorcism. It is satisfying to know that, before the end came, he had begun at least to guess at the magnitude of his 9/11 mistake. It is essential to remember that his most fanatical and militant deputy, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, did not just leave his corpse in Iraq but was isolated and repudiated even by the minority Sunnis on whose presumed behalf he spilled so much blood and wrought such hectic destruction. It is even more gratifying that bin Laden himself was exposed as an excrescence on the putrid body of a bankrupt and brutish state machine, and that he found himself quite unable to make any coherent comment on the tide—one hopes that it is a tide, rather than a mere wave—of demand for an accountable and secular form of civil society. There could not have been a finer affirmation of the force of life, so warmly and authentically counterposed to the hysterical celebration of death, and of that death-in-life that is experienced in the stultifications of theocracy, where womanhood and music and literature are stifled and young men mutated into robotic slaughterers.
— Christopher Hitchens, The Enemy
Song of myselfNow I will do nothing but listen, To accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds contribute toward it. I hear bravuras of birds, bustle of growing wheat, gossip of flames, clack of sticks cooking my meals, I hear the sound I love, the sound of the human voice, I hear all sounds running together, combined, fused or following, Sounds of the city and sounds out of the city, sounds of the day and night, Talkative young ones to those that like them, the loud laugh of work-people at their meals, The angry base of disjointed friendship, the faint tones of the sick, The judge with hands tight to the desk, his pallid lips pronouncing a death-sentence, The heave'e'yo of stevedores unlading ships by the wharves, the refrain of the anchor-lifters, The ring of alarm-bells, the cry of fire, the whirr of swift-streaking engines and hose-carts with premonitory tinkles and color'd lights, The steam-whistle, the solid roll of the train of approaching cars, The slow march play'd at the head of the association marching two and two, (They go to guard some corpse, the flag-tops are draped with black muslin.) I hear the violoncello, ('tis the young man's heart's complaint,) I hear the key'd cornet, it glides quickly in through my ears, It shakes mad-sweet pangs through my belly and breast. I hear the chorus, it is a grand opera, Ah this indeed is music--this suits me.
— Walt Whitman
The powerful chords that emanated from the radio heated me from the inside out, like a microwave.
— Sandy Ward Bell, In Zoey's Head
We live in a world packed with desensitising forces, that strip the world of magic. The world is full of negativity, but we fight back with positivity. We're inspired by oceans, forests, animals, Marx Brothers films. We can't help but project uplifting vibrations, because we love each other so much and get off on playing together.
— Dave Thompson, Red Hot Chili Peppers: By the Way: The Biography
She observed the dumb-show by which her neighbour was expressing her passion for music, but she refrained from copying it. This was not to say that, for once that she had consented to spend a few minutes in Mme. de Saint-Euverte's house, the Princesse des Laumes would not have wished (so that the act of politeness to her hostess which she had performed by coming might, so to speak, 'count double') to shew herself as friendly and obliging as possible. But she had a natural horror of what she called 'exaggerating,' and always made a point of letting people see that she 'simply must not' indulge in any display of emotion that was not in keeping with the tone of the circle in which she moved, although such displays never failed to make an impression upon her, by virtue of that spirit of imitation, akin to timidity, which is developed in the most self-confident persons, by contact with an unfamiliar environment, even though it be inferior to their own. She began to ask herself whether these gesticulations might not, perhaps, be a necessary concomitant of the piece of music that was being played, a piece which, it might be, was in a different category from all the music that she had ever heard before; and whether to abstain from them was not a sign of her own inability to understand the music, and of discourtesy towards the lady of the house; with the result that, in order to express by a compromise both of her contradictory inclinations in turn, at one moment she would merely straighten her shoulder-straps or feel in her golden hair for the little balls of coral or of pink enamel, frosted with tiny diamonds, which formed its simple but effective ornament, studying, with a cold interest, her impassioned neighbour, while at another she would beat time for a few bars with her fan, but, so as not to forfeit her independence, she would beat a different time from the pianist's.
— Marcel Proust, Swann's Way
I've probably been spit on more that any person alive outside of, I would say, a member of the prison system.
— Iggy Pop, I Need More
A digital sound sample in angry rap doesn't correspond to the graffiti but the wall.
— Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget
We have seen year after year the passion you have for music, and the way you have always been incredibly passionate fans, even though Hanson has not always been the coolest thing to be into.
— Hanson
For the most basic assumption that dictated my early attempts to respond to creative music commentary was the mistaken belief that western journalists had some fundamental understanding of black creativity—or even western creativity—but this assumption was seriously in error.
— Anthony Braxton, The Tri-Axium Writings
Does not… the ear of Handel predict the witchcraft of harmonic sound?
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson
I suppose what I mean is, I never felt like I was part of a gang. No, that's the wrong word. Part of a MOVEMENT! That's it. It feels like there's a swirling, shining wind of change sweeping right at you, sweeping over everyone, and you're inside it. It feels like there is something that transcends you, that goes beyond whatever you are, that is great and whole and good. Great, because when it all comes together it's so much more than all its individual pieces. Whole because you're part of it and if you weren't, then both you and it would be diminished. Good because at its core is pure talent and skill, like you know you'll never have yourself.
— Simon Cheshire, Plastic Fantastic
Accusing us of being a gimmick is a bit like accusing Jesus Christ of having ‘a bit of a messiah complex’. True, maybe, but when faced with the undeniable genius of what we put out, does that really still matter?
— Gorillaz, Gorillaz: Rise of the Ogre
We needed germans in Paris to hear Wagner.
— Marcel Proust
It reset and mended my freshly damaged and distorted view of life, and made me recognize that this thing we call music, this primal expression that we reshape and refine and define ourselves with, is the gift I was given. The ability to communicate what others feel but cannot fully express, the passing down and around of songs and stories, from Pete Townshend to Joey Ramone to me, to the audiences who take the time and effort to support our work and give us a way to support ourselves -- I'm thinking this is what I am supposed to be doing.
— Bob Mould, See A Little Light: The Trail of Rage and Melody
Out of the choked Devonian waters emerged sight and sound and the music that rolls invisible through the composer's brain. They are there still in the ooze along the tideline, though no one notices. The world is fixed, we say: fish in the sea, birds in the air. But in the mangrove swamps by the Niger, fish climb trees and ogle uneasy naturalists who try unsuccessfully to chase them back to the water. There are things still coming ashore. 
— Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey
For the first time in four billion years a living creature had contemplated himself and heard with a sudden, unaccountable loneliness, the whisper of the wind in the night reeds.
— Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey
I knew it was coming. I knew they didn't have the nerve.Three days in and they've got faces like vexed tomatoes, their skins flaking sci-fi style: burnt to fuck. They were an embarrassment; not only to me and the wife and The Fall fans but to their own generation.
— Mark E. Smith, Renegade
The only bit I have pictured in any detail is the music (maybe 'The Book of Love' by the Magnetic Fields. Or Johnny Cash's 'It Ain't Me, Babe'). It doesn't matter if the selection is slow or fast, but couples shouldn't scramble to select it. If you have ever gone dancing or on a road trip or had a romantic bout of serenaded sex on a winter night, you should have a few to pick from. If not, you probably shouldn't be getting married.
— Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake
I tell you before God, and as an honest man, your son is the greatest composer known to me by person and repute, he has taste and what is more the greatest skill in composition." (Said to Leopold Mozart)
— Joseph Haydn
But no, music lasted longer than anything it inspired. After LPs, cassettes, and CDs, when matrimony was about to decay into its component elements—alimony and acrimony—the songs startled him and regained all their previous, pre-Rachel meanings, as if they had not only conjured her but then dismissed her, as if she had been entirely their illusion. He listened to the old songs again, years later on that same dark promenade, when every CD he had ever owned sat nestled in that greatest of all human inventions, the iPod, dialed up and yielding to his fingertip’s tap. The songs now offered him, in exchange for all he had lost, the sensation that there was something still to long for, still, something still approaching, and all that had gone before was merely prologue to an unimaginably profound love yet to seize him. If there was any difference now, it was only that his hunger for music had become more urgent, less a daily pleasure than a daily craving.
— Arthur Phillips, The Song Is You
With a feeling of despondency so intense that it was almost pleasurable, he got out his guitar.So this was to be his condition now.What was he but a fragment of broken churned-uphumanity washed up on this faraway shore? This was where his journey had brought him.... There mus be a song in this...
— Marina Lewycka, Two Caravans
I tell you before God, and as an honest man, your son (W A Mozart)is the greatest composer known to me by person and repute, he has taste and what is more the greatest skill in composition.
— Joseph Haydn
...It is a well known fact that most artists produce their best work early in their career. They may refine what they do but you usually get the measure of what they are about on their first outing.
— Bill Drummond, 17
I may not believe in myself, but I believe in what I'm doing.
— Jimmy Page
You will only be great at the things you love to do.Don't pursue a career in something you hate to do.
— Dave Grohl
If somebody tells you there's a rule, break it.
— Hans Zimmer
By the way, this tells you why Auto-Tuned vocals on many contemporary records sound so shallow and lifeless. It’s almost as if everything we learned from African American music during the twentieth century was thrown out the window by technologies in the twenty-first century. The goal should not be to sing every note dead center in the middle of the pitch---we escaped from that musical prison a hundred years ago. Why go back? In an odd sort of way, much of contemporary pop music resembles opera, with all the subtle shadings of bent notes and microtonal alterations abandoned in the quest for mathematically pure tones.
— Ted Gioia, How to Listen to Jazz
In every sphere of social interaction, that hermeneutic leap—that ability to put yourself in the mind frame of the other—is a virtue and a blessing.
— Ted Gioia, How to Listen to Jazz
All my ways of being are musical and mysterious.Yet I embrace you openly.Ripe with expectancy.
— Maya Angelou, Now Sheba Sings The Song
ROCK STATE OF MINDThe lights go outDarkness takes over my mindI can see only the unreal…The sound of the pianoWhispers in my earsProvoking the sea of tearsBreaking down the stringsAttaching me to my fearsThe violin wakens the dreamsCreating the willDetaching from the groundLifting me upTo be one with the dark cloudsTo feel the storm whelming up insideThe strings of the guitar cinchesThe cords binding me to youLuring me to the ends of the galaxiesGluing me to an inaccessible timeWhere time stands stillAnd pain continuously spillsBut your voice slithers in betweenRising with each beatStretching out its wingsSheltering me from the windFighting my warsRisking it allSilence…..The pulsation of the drumsJoin with the beats of my heartStating their case in syncAwakening me to your presenceAnd in a flash of lightningHeaven and earth become oneThe piano severing the strings to my fearsThe violin forging a stormThe guitar freezing timeYour voice fighting my warsThe drums breathing life into meThat’s rock for meThe rock state of mind
— Evy Michaels
A memory of her father flitted through her consciousness. The time he played a slow, melodic tune on the saxophone in the misty rain of the yard on a summer’s night, surrounded by the patio’s twinkling lights. She remembered peering out the window and feeling like she was catching a glimpse of another world. One that was timeless and majestic. She touched his saxophone after that as if she were touching the hand of God, wishing to hold onto that feeling forever.
— Sage Steadman, Ann, Not Annie
PEOPLE WITH THE SMARTEST MOUTHSHAVE THE DUMBEST BRAINS
— Qwana Reynolds-Frasier, Friend In Your Pocket Conversations Session One
MOST DAYS MY LIFE CAN BE SUMMED UP IN MOVIE QUOTESANDHIP HOP AND R&B LYRICS
— Qwana Reynolds-Frasier, Friend In Your Pocket Conversations Session One
Words are made by history, we build them and they change meaning through time, but the music they play...
— Claire North, The End of the Day
The bravest thing David Bowie ever did was to go on stage after Queen at Live Aid.
— Stewart Stafford
As his hands fell upon the keyboard, it was still possible to believe a beautiful harmony had been formed at random, in spite of him. But a second later the music came surging out, the power of it sweeping away all doubts, voices, sounds, wiping away the fixed grins and exchanged glances, pushing back the walls, dispersing the light of the reception room out into the nocturnal immensity of the sky beyond the windows.He did not feel as if he were playing. He was advancing through a night, breathing in its delicate transparency, made up as it was of an infinite number of facets of ice, of leaves, of wind. He no longer felt any pain. No fear about what would happen. No anguish or remorse. The night through which he was advancing expressed this pain, this fear, and the irremediable shattering of the past, but this had all become music and now only existed through its beauty.
— Andreï Makine, Music of a Life
When stealing from other players, an older musician wisely advised me, choose a different instrument from your own, and people won’t notice the theft.
— Ted Gioia, How to Listen to Jazz
Viva fui in silvis sum dura occisa securi dum vixi tacui mortua dulce cano” is inscribed on the fingerboard of a 16th-century viola da gamba made by Kaspar Tieffenbrucker. It translates, “I was alive in the woods; I was cut down by the cruel axe. While I lived I was silent; In death I sweetly sing.
— Anonymous
Music is either good or it isn’t, it’s not someone’s opinion.
— Toscanini
There is no theory. You have only to listen. Pleasure is the law. I love music passionately. And because l love it, I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it. It is a free art gushing forth — an open-air art, boundless as the elements, the wind, the sky, the sea. It must never be shut in and become an academic art.
— Claude Debussy
Bo put a record on the stereo and the speakers crackled, that moment of anticipation before the needle found its way to the first song.An organ, in rhythm. A chord. “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.”Mum cheered. It was her favorite, the soundtrack to a movie called The Big Chill.
— Favel Parrett, When the Night Comes
Music , literature with poetry makes a perfect paradise.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Some guy on the radio is asking me to take it slow, switches to a commercial and I wait for the next song. Feel very much in need of getting lost in speed of electric notes.
— Gayendra Abeywardane, Broken Maps to Miniature Flights
I am not a fan of books.
— Kanye West
These babies ain’t just guitars; these babies are living, breathing instruments.
— Brenda Sutton Rose
When you scratch these guitars, they bleed.
— Brenda Sutton Rose
Music- a country one can inhabit only in music.
— Marty Rubin
Greatness is measured by those who like to think. Success is measured by those who like to receive.
— Christopher George Smithers
Rainbow on the inside!” He giggles. “Can you imagine if we all took them for Pride? Dozens of us. Hundreds. Thousands? All of us marching, rainbow to the core?
— Fox Benwell, Kaleidoscope Song
In a roundabout way, Boba Fett created Pearl Jam.
— Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto
Inscribed on the fingerboard of a viola da gamba by Kaspar Tieffenbrucker: "Viva fui in silvis sum dura occisa securi dum vixi tacui mortua dulce cano." (I was alive in the woods; I was cut down by the cruel axe. While I lived I was silent; In death I sweetly sing.)
— Anonymous
Hearts are feeling                                         Baez and Dylan Singing Voices pulsating Messages Ringing Thoughts of Resistance Sounds of being
— Brent M. Jones
That night in Cartagena he again requested the songs of his youth, some so old he had to teach them to Iturbide, who was too young to remember them. The audience slipped away as the General bled inside, and he was left alone with Iturbide beside the embers.
— Gabriel García Márquez, The General in His Labyrinth
If music can shine, Sophie thought, this music shone... 'It's like eight thousand birds, Charles!'When the music closed, she clapped until the rest of the audience had stopped and until her hands were hot and blotched with red... There was something in the music that felt familiar to Sophie. 'It feels,' she said to Charles, 'like home.
— Katherine Rundell, Rooftoppers
Music is the final piece of filmmaking—the essential element that pulls emotion from an audience and puts the goosebumps on the screen.
— Artie Kane,
In starlit nights I saw you,So cruelly you kissed me.Your lips a magic world,Your sky all hung with jewels.The killing moonWill come too
— Echo and the Bunnymen, Echo And The Bunnymen
Was there ever any question on how much I could take? You kept feeding me your bullshit hoping I would break.
— Five Finger Death Punch
You can take my heart, you can take my breath when you pry it from my cold, dead chest.
— Skillet
Katsumi Hosokawa - (he) believed that life, true life, was something that was stored in music.
— Ann Patchett, Bel Canto
If somebody tells you a rule, break it. That's the only way to move things forward.
— Hans Zimmer
I would never understand how hurt and confused and hopeless he must have felt, to decide it wasn't worth trying, and I wasn't mad at him anymore for doing it...
— Michelle Falkoff, Playlist for the Dead
Music-a country one can inhabit only in music.
— Marty Rubin
Music is the melody that longs to be heard by someone who can appreciate it.
— Suzette Vearnon
BE the music, DO the math, HAVE the dream!
— Suzette Vearnon
If you're reading this book, there is probably an artist or band whose music you have an intense personal relationship with. I would also guess that this artist or band came into your life during a time when you were highly vulnerable. if this is the case, this artist or band might be the closest thing you had to a confidant. in fact, he, she, or it was better than a confidant, because his/her/its music articulated your own thoughts and feeling better than you ever could. This music elevated the raw materials of your life to the heights of art and poetry. It made you feel as if your personal experience was grander and more meaningful than it might otherwise have been. And naturally you attributed whatever that music was doing to your heart and brain to the people who made the music, and you came to believe that the qualities of the music were also true of the music's creators. "If this music understands me, then the people behind the music must also understand me," goes this line of thought.
— Steven Hyden, Your Favorite Band Is Killing Me: What Pop Music Rivalries Reveal About the Meaning of Life
And the movement in your brainSends you out into the rain
— Nick Drake
Sappho isn't really meant to be read. It's meant to be sung and there were dances for the songs, also. Sappho was a performance artist, and now she exists as a textual project. She was saved by her critics, and by people who wrote of her in letters to each other. As the morning sun lathers the pool through the long windows and stripes the opposite walls in gold, I look at the fragment translations. She's paper, too. A paper poet for a paper boy. People claim to be translating her but they don't, really, they use her to write poems from as they fill in the gaps in the fragments. A duet. She may have meant for these to be solos but they're duets now, though the second singer blends in with the first. The first singer in this case is offstage, like in the old days of stars who couldn't sing, a real singer hidden behind a curtain, which is the velvet drape of history.
— Alexander Chee, Edinburgh
I just wanna drink chocolate milk with my lovely!
— Walter Mitty
Jazz is the only lever used by all the riffraff of Tram 83 to switch social class as one would subway cars.
— Fiston Mwanza Mujila, Tram 83
Music gives you a certain high that any drug in the world cannot.
— Vineet Goel
sombre, anxious, melancholic, atmospheric, surreal, cold, lonely, cryptic, abstract, apathetic, male vocals, mysterious, dark, nocturnal, complex, mechanical, progressive, lush, disturbing'Descriptors' - Radiohead - Amnesiac
— RateYourMusic
It’s always Fun, Honor And a great Pleasure Creating Italo- Disco Music ……. Creatures of the Night ( Italo – Soundtrack Mix )
— Sami Abouzid
If you are all set for an enjoyable weekend then simply head towards the magnificent Her Majesty’s Theatre! The popular London Westend theatre is running the award winning London show, The Phantom of the Opera with packed houses. The show has already made its remarkable entry into its third decade. The blockbuster London show by Andrew Lloyd Webber is a complete treat for music lovers. The popular show has won several prestigious awards. The show is set against the backdrop of gothic Paris Opera House. The show revolves around soprano Christine Daae who is enticed by the voice of Phantom. The show features some of the heart touching and spell binding musical numbers such as 'The Music of the Night', 'All I Ask of You' and the infamous title track, The Phantom of the Opera. The Phantom of the Opera is a complete audio visual treat for theatre lovers. In the year 1986, the original production made its debut at the Her Majesty's Theatre featuring Michael Crawford and Sarah Brightman. Sarah was then wife of composer Andrew Lloyd Webber. The popular London musical, The Phantom of the Opera went on becoming a popular show and still London's hottest ticket. The award winning show is a brilliant amalgamation of outstanding design, special effects and memorable score. The show has earned critical acclamation from both the critics and audiences. The show has been transferred to Broadway and is currently the longest running musical. The show is running at the Majestic Theatre and enjoyed brilliant performance across the globe. For Instance, the Las Vegas production was designed specifically with a real lake. In order to celebrate its silver jubilee, there was a glorious concert production at the Royal Albert Hall. The phenomenal production featured Ramin Karimloo and Sierra Boggess as Phantom and Christine. If you are looking for some heart touching love musical the Phantom of the Opera is a must watch. With its wonderfully designed sets, costumes and special effects, the show is a must watch for theatre lovers. The show is recommended for 10+ kids and run for two hours and thirty minutes.
— Alina Popescu
It had started with the moon, inaccessible poem that it was.
— Patti Smith, Just Kids