c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
I was once asked to pick a couple of records for an interview I was doing on Radio 2. I picked one by Will Oldham and one by Joanna Newsome. Someone on the production phoned me to say that I couldn't have either record because they were 'too alternative' and I could just pick two from their playlist. Now, personally, I think that Radio 2's listeners would dig both Joanna Newsome and Will Oldham if they heard their records, and that the fact they don't get to hear them contributes to the cultural wasteland we live in. I told them that I'd been to see Joanna Newsome in the Albert Hall a couple of weeks before and it had been sold out. How could she be 'too alternative'? 'Alternative' and 'mainstream' aren't strictly to do with whether things are popular or minority interest. They are ideological labels. Someone like Joe Pasquale would be called 'mainstream' and regularly pops up on TV, but would play the smaller end of the touring-theatre circuit. If Joanna Newsome can sell out Albert Hall, why can't she get played on Radio 2? I would agree that it's because her work is too layered, challenging and interesting. Think about that. What you get to hear about is filtered, and not filtered to get rid of useless cunts like Joe Pasquale, but of things that might enrich your life.
— Frankie Boyle, Work! Consume! Die!: You Are Bored. This is the Antidote
What we seem to perceive influences what we feel, and what we feel influences what we say we perceive
— Jenefer Robinson, Music & Meaning
After talking to people and meeting them every day, I realize that a song can be written from one perspective with an objective in mind. What is crazy about it is that many different people can take one song a totally different way. That is so cool, since music is a universal thing and a very personal thing.
— Josh Dun
He has only heard what I felt.
— Zora Neale Hurston, How It Feels To Be Colored Me
Rock 'n' roll music, in the end, is a source of religious and mystical power. Your playing can suck, your singing can be barely viable, but if when you get together with your pals in front of your audience and make the noise, the one that is drawn from the center of your being, from your godhead, from your gutter, from the universe's infinitesimal genesis point... you're rockin' and you're a rock 'n' roll star in every sense of the word. The punks instinctively knew this and created a third revolution out of it, but it is an essential element in the equation of every great musical unit and rock 'n' roll band, no matter how down-to-earth their presentation.
— Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run
I skipped between the dancers, twirling my skirts. The seated, masked musicians didn’t look up at me as I leaped before them, dancing in place. No chains, no boundaries—just me and the music, dancing and dancing. I wasn’t faerie, but I was a part of this earth, and the earth was a part of me, and I would be content to dance upon it for the rest of my life.One of the musicians looked up from his fiddling, and I halted.Sweat gleamed on the strong column of his neck as he rested his chin upon the dark wood of the fiddle. He’d rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, revealing the cords of muscle along his forearms. He had once mentioned that he would have liked to be a traveling minstrel if not a warrior or a High Lord—now, hearing him play, I knew he could have made a fortune from it.“I’m sorry, Tam,” Lucien panted, appearing from nowhere. “I left her alone for a little at one of the food tables, and when I caught up to her, she was drinking the wine, and—”Tamlin didn’t pause in his playing. His golden hair damp with sweat, he looked marvelously handsome—even though I couldn’t see most of his face. He gave me a feral smile as I began to dance in place before him. “I’ll look after her,” Tamlin murmured above the music, and I glowed, my dancing becoming faster. “Go enjoy yourself.” Lucien fled.I shouted over the music, “I don’t need a keeper!” I wanted to spin and spin and spin.“No, you don’t,” Tamlin said, never once stumbling over his playing. How his bow did dance upon the strings, his fingers sturdy and strong, no signs of those claws that I had come to stop fearing … “Dance, Feyre,” he whispered.So I did.I was loosened, a top whirling around and around, and I didn’t know who I danced with or what they looked like, only that I had become the music and the fire and the night, and there was nothing that could slow me down.Through it all, Tamlin and his musicians played such joyous music that I didn’t think the world could contain it all. I sashayed over to him, my faerie lord, my protector and warrior, my friend, and danced before him. He grinned at me, and I didn’t break my dancing as he rose from his seat and knelt before me in the grass, offering up a solo on his fiddle to me.
— Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Thorns and Roses
That was how we wanted to play, majestic and chaotic.
— Anthony Kiedis, Scar Tissue
Music was like food, like water, like air - that necessary, that essential - and here she was in a break-on-through mood and nothing for it but her own stumbling version caught like lint on her tongue.
— T.C. Boyle, Drop City
Music embodies feeling without forcing it to contend and combine with thought, as it is forced in most arts and especially in the art of words.
— Franz Liszt
Will you still be there,,,,,,,, a gorgeous… touching emotional soundtrack that I started working on …..I love this great atmosphere in my studio …..my piano is crying from the sweetness of the chords I’m playing …..Great to be doing what I’m doing in life … Will you still be there. Coming soon.
— Sami Abouzid
Mother Maybelle, have mercy, we've just been discovered.
— Alecia Whitaker, Wildflower
Listening to music, reading literature, writing, and extended periods of personal introspection provide four prongs of the incitements available to form a conscious and subconscious designation of self. Other potential incentives that contribute to self-identity include religion and cultural events as well as painting, sculpture, dance, films, newspapers, television, Internet surfing, web sites, and online message boards.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Without Puccini, there is no opera; without opera, the world is an even drearier place than the evening news would have us think.
— William Berger, Puccini Without Excuses
In its own unique and indefinable manner, music indirectly communicates the joys of life along with the pains and terrors overwhelming humanity. The universal language of music quantities the human experience, its range of variation encapsulates the scale of humankind’s exuberance for living as well as expresses our apprehension of suffering and death. Because music articulates the quintessence of life and yokes a myriad of human events into an expressible format, music is a critical act.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
No; look out for the part where you think you have done with the goblins and they come back,' breathed Helen, as the music started with a goblin walking quietly over the universe, from end to end.
— E.M. Forster
Will You Still Be There (I’ll Keep On Loving You)…a Beautiful musical gem for an awesome story line ….I’m having fun creating this musical dream …..Enjoy
— Sami Abouzid
I’m so happy that I’m having the chance to create amazing music that bringing happiness and joy to me and to others in this world, it’s a dream came true
— Sami Abouzid
323 - Last Gate To Your Heart (Déjà Vu)I’m real happy to spend the last days of 2016 creating this amazing Soundtrack ….. real romantic and emotional ,,,, I hope 2017 will be a better year for all of US , I wish you all love , Joy and Happiness …..Creating Music is the best thing I’m doing in my life and now it’s so great to share this gift with you all …..hope you know how to do the Cha Cha,,,,,,Enjoy……………..Sami
— Sami Abouzid
In the darkest and strangest of places with the most macabre of company, this music moves her and her life pulses hard... And even for Julie's safety, I can't bring myself to smother it.
— Isaac Marion, Warm Bodies
It's all so sexy and cute and romantic...until the music changes to "In Da Club" by 50 Cent.
— C.M. Stunich, Bad Nanny
Life is like a long note; it persists without variance, without wavering. There is no cessation in sound or pause in tempo. It continues on, and we must master it or it will master us.
— Amy Harmon, From Sand and Ash
I want to go and write music that announces to you that you can feel something. I don’t want to tell you what to feel, but I just want you to have the possibility of feeling something.
— Hans Zimmer
An illusionist can make himself disappear; a musician can do the same thing: When he plays a piano, after a while we start seeing only the music, not the man!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
The secret is not to make your music louder. But to make the world quieter.
— Mitch Albom, The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto
Although a little noisy at first, in a bizarre twist of fate, electronic music became popular in France in the 1890’s before fizzling out in favor of Swing music – which somehow made an early appearance in the 1900’s. In another alternative timeline, the Beatles never existed and England invented popcorn and hamburgers in the 1840’s. Damn, that’s what almost happened last time again, thought Scrooby tensely, while maneuvering himself onto a stronger looking branch. Details, everything was about the details. Sometimes there was almost too much detail to keep up with.
— Christina Engela, The Time Saving Agency
If you are going to hear the work of the world’s greatest composers, you will have to allow for a little murder here and there. […] Those who want justice can go to the police, but those who want something a little more interesting should go to the orchestra!
— Lemony Snicket, The Composer Is Dead
MUSIC. It’s in my heart! It’s in my mind! It’s in my soul! Music has a way of taking control of my entire being, and I’m perfectly okay with that! Music is Life! Music is LOVE. Music makes life extra special! Music is a GIFT to the world!
— Stephanie Lahart
Songwriting was their way to converse with the universe.
— Megan Rivers, A Fateful Melody: A Fictional Memoir
What's the Symmetry???John Doe...Jane Doe... wtf... wtf...
— Deyth Banger, Symmetrical
When we cannot see, we don't judge. Small wonder when we kiss, cry, laugh, make love, are in pain, pray and listen to music, we close our eyes.
— Sabine Shah
Music (Definition
—  Noun): The artistic organization of sound for the joy and experience of listening.
Do you remember when we learned how to fly? We'd play make-believe, we were young and had time on our side
— Paradise Fears
There is a crack, a crack, in everything. That's how the light gets in.
— Leonard Cohen, The Future
I think music has the ability to inspire people and to change hearts, and the heart has the power to change the mind, and the mind has the power to change the world.
— Serj Tankian
it's real great to be back in my studio to create amazing music , after I took a break it was awesome to go back once again and create this awesome soundtrack ,,,,,how can I forget you .... I love all chords I’ve created and nothing in this world compares the beauty and the greatness of being in my studio and creating this adorable music ...endless greatness
— Sami Abouzid
Dancing salsa, what an amazing workout, Healthy and amazing …..Incredible Fun
— Sami Abouzid
How can the feeling man resist feeling, the loving one love? Who has not experienced the overwhelming power of melody? And what else is melody but the power of feeling? Music is the language of feeling; … feeling communicates itself. … Is it man that possesses love, or is it not … love that possesses man? When love impels a man to suffer death even joyfully for the beloved one, is this death-conquering power his own individual power, or is it not rather the power of love?
— Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity
Who was it had said when you fall in love all the popular songs suddenly seemed to mean something.
— Dolores Hitchens, The Watcher
Music is the perfect reminder of our essence
—  the vibration of strings
He sat in the chapel for hours picking his way through fugues. A dozen notes, hardly music. But then those few notes spoke to each other, subject and answer, by repetition, by diminution, by augmentation, even looping backwards on themselves in a course like the retrograde motion of Mars. He listened as if he had as many ears as fingertips, and, like a blind man, could feel textures that were barely there. At the end of two or three pages of music he would hear all the voices twining together in a construction of such dizzying power that the walls of the chapel could barely contain it.
— Kate Grenville, The Lieutenant
Others, tiring of the sound of Buxtehude and Bach for hours on end, would complain there was no tune. That was exactly the thing he liked best about a fugue, the fact that it could not be sung. A fugue was not singular, as a melody was, but plural. It was a conversation.
— Kate Grenville, The Lieutenant
Silence enhances music. What you do not play can sweeten what you do. But it is not the same with words. What you do not say can haunt you.
— Mitch Albom, The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto
That small exposure to a few measures of song threw my world of its axis. It punctured a tiny window that gave me a peek at feelings, emotions, and thoughts I never knew existed. Knowing there was more to my life I wasn't getting at this moment made me feel like a drug addict forced into rehab.
— Megan Rivers, A Fateful Melody: A Fictional Memoir
My inspiration for writing music is like Don McLean did when he did "American Pie" or "Vincent". Lorraine Hansberry with "A Raisin in the Sun". Like Shakespeare when he does his thing, like deep stories, raw human needs.I'm trying to think of a good analogy. It's like, you've got the Vietnam War, and because you had reporters showing us pictures of the war at home, that's what made the war end, or that shit would have lasted longer. If no one knew what was going on we would have thought they were just dying valiantly in some beautiful way. But because we saw the horror, that's what made us stop the war.So I thought, that's what I'm going to do as an artist, as a rapper. I'm gonna show the most graphic details of what I see in my community and hopefully they'll stop it quick.I've seen all of that-- the crack babies, what we had to go through, losing everything, being poor, and getting beat down. All of that. Being the person I am, I said no no no no. I'm changing this.
— Tupac Shakur, Tupac: Resurrection 1971-1996
I’ve always thought the best songs come though us not from us…. They gave me life, they gave me an identity and I gave them my tears, my heart, and my truth.
— Carole Bayer Sager, They're Playing Our Song
I don't want to wake up and find out it was all a dream.
— Megan Rivers, A Fateful Melody: A Fictional Memoir
It will be a lesson in hope.
— Megan Rivers, A Fateful Melody: A Fictional Memoir
You have to take what you can get out of the music. It's different for everyone, but you have to pay attention and appreciate each piece in order for it to speak to you.
— Megan Rivers, A Fateful Melody: A Fictional Memoir
To me, guitar notes are the most beautiful sounds in the world.
— Megan Rivers, A Fateful Melody: A Fictional Memoir
Life is either the same song you sing day in and day out, or you go out into the world and devise your own soundtrack.
— Megan Rivers, A Fateful Melody: A Fictional Memoir
I radiated with all the stars in the night sky and the courage of a thousand men ran through my veins.
— Megan Rivers, A Fateful Melody: A Fictional Memoir
Soon it will all be a memory and memories decay and deform over time.
— Megan Rivers, A Fateful Melody: A Fictional Memoir
I had no idea what the lyrics were in the song, but his voice wrapped around my head, weaving through my hair, and whispered into my ears that made me drunk with a feeling I never felt before.
— Megan Rivers, A Fateful Melody: A Fictional Memoir
There's a jangle to the music of the dead. I mean that certain something that's so happy and so sad at the same time. The notes almost make a perfect harmony, but don't. Then they do but quickly crash into dissonance. They simmer in that sweet in-between rhythm section rattling along all the while. Chords collapse chaotically into one another and just when you think it's gonna spill into total nonsense, it stands back up and comes through sweet as a lullaby on your mami's lips. Songs that'll make people tap their feet and drink melancholically but not realize the twisting genius lurking within until generations later.
— Daniel José Older, Salsa Nocturna: Stories
Yeah, you and me, we can ride on a starIf you stay with me, girlWe can rule the worldYeah, you and me, we can light up the skyIf you stay by my sideWe can rule the world
— Neil Gaiman, Stardust
We didn’t have words. We didn’t have writing or maps or language, but we had music and in that music, we spoke victory and loss, sadness and rage. We sang fire and water, earth and sky. We wrote the history of the Battle of Lamos and told the story of Selisanae of the Sun and wove the tragedy of the lives and deaths of dragons in every land. It was marvellous.
— H. Leighton Dickson, Dragon of Ash & Stars: The Autobiography of a Night Dragon
I hated goodbyes. It felt like I had to give so many of them away lately.
— Megan Rivers, A Fateful Melody: A Fictional Memoir
Maybe one day we'd become fiction.
— Megan Rivers, A Fateful Melody: A Fictional Memoir
Maybe the definition of a real father is someone who accepts their child for who they are, despite their faults or how far they've strayed from the path of the person you hoped they'd become.
— Megan Rivers, A Fateful Melody: A Fictional Memoir
We were both filled with the enthusiasm that comes from being with someone you automatically click with.
— Megan Rivers, A Fateful Melody: A Fictional Memoir
There are some things that are never meant to be said aloud.
— Megan Rivers, A Fateful Melody: A Fictional Memoir
It's funny how reflections, even on the window of a store when walking down some busy street, momentarily erects a wall against all those thoughts flittering around. Some people may automatically switch their thoughts to how wide their hips have become, how quickly their hair is thinning or how funny their walk is, but it's always a reality check: this is you, right here, right now.
— Megan Rivers, A Fateful Melody: A Fictional Memoir
That mountain of courage I had been building inside me for the past several months began crumbling, tumbling down, and gaining speed like an avalanche.
— Megan Rivers, A Fateful Melody: A Fictional Memoir
My life was a rollercoaster except sometimes I'd have to get out and push the car and be sure I made it back in before it gained too much momentum and I'd be left vulnerable on the tracks, in the destructive path of another oncoming car.
— Megan Rivers, A Fateful Melody: A Fictional Memoir
Maybe she knew some day it would become my job. My job to complete the melody she had begun.
— Tessa Emily Hall, Unwritten Melody
We don't have a song, we have a whole album.
— Megan Rivers, A Fateful Melody: A Fictional Memoir
I have letters from you all over my room as if they were your fingerprints.
— Megan Rivers, A Fateful Melody: A Fictional Memoir
Beethoven introduced us to anger. Haydn taught us capriciousness, Rachmaninoff melancholy. Wagner was demonic. Bach was pious. Schumann was mad, and because his genius was able to record his fight for sanity, we heard what isolation and the edge of lunacy sounded like. Liszt was lusty and vigorous and insisted that we confront his overwhelming sexuality as well as our own. Chopin was a poet, and without him we never would have understood what night was, what perfume was, what romance was.
— Doris Mortman, The Wild Rose
Music was more than subjective; it was erratic. It was the ship on the horizon that one sailor saw, the other sailor didn’t.
— David  Arnold, Kids of Appetite
There are eighty-eight keys on a piano and within that, an entire universe.
— James Rhodes
In your most desperate moments where you crawl on the ground like worms, sometimes you suddenly hear the voice of a savior, the voice of the Music which immediately carries you away to the stars!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
When you play a piece of music there are so many different ways you could play it. You keep asking yourself what if. You try this and you say what if and you try that. When you buy a CD you get one answer to the question. You never get the what if.
— Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai
As there is no joy for the broken heart, there is not also an harmony to a guitar with broken strings!
— Bruce Mbanzabugabo
The love song I wrote that day... I got embarrassed and never sang it for her.Oh yeah... I'll sing it to her when I go home.I'll go home.I'll hurry home.
— Inio Asano, Solanin
A singer whose ear is singly directed to the melodic aspects of a Brahms lied or a Verdi aria lacks perception of the musical web from which the melodic line emerges; the composer's intent may remain unrealized. to sing Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Wolf, or Strauss lieder without an understanding of underlying harmonic structures is to vocalize on them, not to conceive of them musically and emotionally.
— Richard Miller, Solutions for Singers: Tools for Performers and Teachers
When I write I like to give equal justice to lyrics, too. I want the song to have meaning for me so I can make it have meaning for the audience.
— Oliver
I try to make the music give people a chance to become engrossed with what they hear enough to possibly experience things they've probably experienced on their own but don't normally let themselves go so as to feel them fully.
— Oliver
Sometimes your music sounds like there’s too much inside you. Maybe even you couldn’t get it all out. Maybe that’s why you died. Like you exploded from the inside.
— Ava Dellaira, Love Letters to the Dead
A song should stand on its own and on what a singer does with it. It shouldn't need a lot of extra help to be good.
— Oliver
Take just one well-known event: The Beatles' 1964 appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. This has been depicted with astonishing regularity as a pivotal cultural moment; in fact an entire movie -- I Wanna Hold Your Hand -- was built around it. And that Sullivan episode was indeed a major event in popular culture. But did you know that in 1961, 26 million people watched a CBS live broadcast of the first performance of a new symphony by classical composer Aaron Copland? Moreover, with all the attention that sixties rock groups receive, it may come as a surprise to learn that My Fair Lady was Columbia Records' biggest-selling album before the 1970s, beating out those of sixties icons Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin and The Byrds.
— Jonathan Leaf, The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Sixties
My feet were keeping in time with the music, but my heart was pounding out a different rhythm altogether.
— Renee Conoulty, Don't Mean a Thing
My job is to entertain people by playing my music well. You shouldn't really be upset because people like you, should you?
— Oliver
The more you create great music, the more it makes eager to create more and more
— Sami Abouzid
So how did you think about him?” Rachel asks.Hallelujah shrugs. “We were friends. Good friends. He knew—knows—a lot about me. I guess I know a lot about him. Stuff he likes and doesn’t like.”Rachel looks skeptical. “And yet you never knew he liked you.”“No! I mean—when Jonah and I were friends, I liked Luke. So maybe I missed some signs.”“So you just . . . hung out? Platonically?”“Yeah. I guess.” Hallelujah thinks about how to explain it. How to distill a friendship down to its most basic components. “We had choir together last year. We talked. For kind of the first time, even though we’d been in church and school together since fourth grade.”“And, what, you found out you had so much in common?”“Actually, no. But we started comparing music we liked, and a month into ninth grade, Jonah made me this mix of songs. Based on what we’d talked about. So then I made him a mix. And it grew from there. We’d go to each other’s houses, watch movies, listen to music, that kind of thing. Hanging out.”“So tell me about Jonah. Something only you know.”“Um. He’d probably deny it, but he got really into the Harry Potter books. Like, really into them. I loaned him my box set last spring. He got so mad at me for not warning him how Book Six ends.”Rachel laughs. “He didn’t see the movies?”“No. But I told him we couldn’t watch them until he’d finished the books.
— Kathryn Holmes
[L]anguage cannot match music's subtlety and preciseness of expression.
— Jenefer Robinson, Music & Meaning
But who cares? Memory isn't about reality, and neither is music. It's about the comforting reflections we want to hold on to, even if they're mostly bullshit.
— Spitznagel, Eric
The only life that matters is in your mind. The only truth is the one that lives invisibly, that waits even after you close the book. Silence, too, is a kind of music. Silence will last.
— Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing
Music, I'd heard him say, was like dessert. He could live without it, but life just wasn't as good.
— Sara Nović, Girl at War
Lord but I dislike poetry. How can anyone remember words that aren't put to music?
— Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind
For each of us is  A separate miracleIn a collective miracleBrought together For a momentBy a group of notesAnd a scan of wordsFrom the heart Of one Who dares To thinkThat othersMight feel As he feels
— Leonard Nimoy, Will I Think of You?
If you could see my thoughts, you could see our faces.
— Frank Ocean
Even though we've devoted our lives to music, we both know that the most important things happen without a soundtrack.
— Ibi Kaslik, The Angel Riots
If we respected only what is inevitable and has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the streets. When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality. This is always exhilarating and sublime.
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
None of it mattered, because there was music.
— Erin Entrada Kelly, Blackbird Fly
...seeing ghosts and demons just lends itself to listening to White Zombie and Slayer and Fantomas on repeat. One Direction and Selena Gomez are for the girls who don’t see dead people every fucking day.
— Karina Halle, Veiled
Music is like a psychiatrist. You can tell your guitar things that you can't tell people. And it will answer you with things people can't tell you.
— Paul McCartney
Rachmaninoff. The 18th Variation of a Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.
— Claudia Gray, A Thousand Pieces of You
If it sounds good, it is good.
— Louis Armstrong
I can see clouds a thousand miles away, hear ancient music in the pines.
— Ikkyu
reality has too many heads
— Bob Dylan, Lyrics: 1962-2001
And the waitress is practicing politicsAs the businessmen slowly get stonedYes, they're sharing a drink they call lonelinessBut its better than drinkin' alone
— Billy Joel
Bowie talks in great, voluble torrents, darting from one topic to the next, parenthesizing and then parenthesizing the parentheses, as if he has too many ideas for one conversation.
— Sean Egan, Bowie on Bowie: Interviews and Encounters with David Bowie
You don’t want a cheap Strat. Everybody has it. What you want is a rare model. The one that’s very hard to get. And only a guitar you’ve put a lot of effort into buying would end up being the most important in your collection. Do you get it?
— Polina Traore, Never a Dream
It does not need to be perfect - or technically correct - to be magic
— Rasheed Ogunlaru
Music rots when it gets too far from the dance. Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music.
— Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading
You won't enjoy it," sighed Crowley. "It's been in the car for more than a fortnight." A heavy bass beat began to thump through the Bentley as they sped past Heathrow. Aziraphale's brow furrowed. "I don't recognize this," he said. "What is it?" "It's Tchaikovsky's 'Another One Bites the Dust'," said Crowley, closing his eyes as they went through Slough. To while away the time as they crossed the sleeping Chilterns, they also listened to William Byrd's "We Are the Champions" and Beethoven's "I Want To Break Free." Neither were as good as Vaughan Williams's "Fat-Bottomed Girls.
— Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch
What music do you like?” he asked between calls.“Cheery, chirpy pop.”Wincing, he pulled up a station that delivered exactly that. “You owe me.”“Come on”—she turned in her seat to face him once more—“it’s not that bad.”“I’m sorry? I can’t hear you past the sugar blocking my eardrums.
— Nalini Singh, Secrets at Midnight
Everyone plays guitar alone, but we can play side by side.
— Jennifer Lane, Spiked
I do not have to hear your most favourite music.I hear your sweet silent music all the time.Petra Cecilia Maria HermansSeptember 10, 2016Amen
— Petra Hermans
If words are not music, they have failed your song.
— Aditya Bhaskara
It was not the sorrowful, lovely piece she had once played for Dorian, and it was not the light, dancing melodies she'd played for sport; it was not the complex and clever pieces she had played for Nehemia and Chaol. This piece was a celebration—a reaffirmation of life, of glory, of the pain and beauty in breathing.Perhaps that was why she'd gone to hear it performed every year, after so much killing and torture and punishment: as a reminder of that she was, of what she struggled to
— Sarah J. Maas, Queen of Shadows
Make sure you date someone who always makes you want to dance, with or without music.
— Christina Engela, Bugspray
Don't regret anything you do, because in the end it makes you who you are.
— Jared Leto
It’s not the note you play that’s the wrong note – it’s the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.
— Miles Davis
Anna's voice wasn't a beautiful voice - rough edged and sorrowful, a bit used, somehow male and female at once. Yet it had more vibrancy to it than most Danish voices, which were often thin and white and too pretty to trigger a shiver. Anna's voice had the heat of the south; it warmed Einar, as if her throat were red with coals.
— David Ebershoff, The Danish Girl
Tonight I heard Louis's horn. My father heard it, too. The wind was right, and I could hear the notes of taps, just as darkness fell. There is nothing in all the world I like better than the trumpet of the swan.
— E.B. White, The Trumpet of the Swan
Music repairs us when it breaks the silence.
— Gwen Calvo
Music is the shorthand of emotion.
— Leo Tolstoy
Maybe I'm overcast. And maybe all my lucks washed down the drain.
— Switchfoot, Switchfoot - Nothing Is Sound
And another thing about German symphonic development: [it's] just like German philosophy, all worked out and systematized. When a German thinks, he reasons his way to a conclusion. Our Russian brother, on the other hand, starts with a conclusion and then might amuse himself with reasoning. Just keep one thing in mind. The creative act carries within itself its own aesthetic laws. When an artist revises, it means he is dissatisfied. When he revises what is already satisfying, he is Germanizing, chewing over what has [already] been said. We Russians are not cud chewers; we are omnivores!
— Modest Mussorgsky
If you are trully in a place that is way from the noise of civilization,you can actually experience what real slience is about.It is filled with sounds of nature.There is a musicality,a harmony to it...
— K.J. Kilton, Trophy Life
punk is about being an individual and going against the grain and standing up and saying 'This is who I am
— Joey Ramone
Punk is about being an individual and going against the grain and standing up and saying 'This is who I am.
— Joey Ramone
Reese sucked in a breath and played faster, hurling the anger through his fingers until it spun all hisfear, all his rage, into the gentle voice of music.
— Willowy Whisper, This Hostile Land
Do you know what happens when you play a country song backwards? You get your wife back, your dog back and your job back.
— Richard Belzer
Life is like a piano. White keys are happy moments and the black ones are sad moments. Both keys are played together to give us the sweet music called Life.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
... and it occured to me then and forever afterwards, that films, theatre books and poems were just a fraud. It's only music that doesn't deceive, it doesn't pretend to be anything else except what it is. Music.
— Lars Saabye Christensen, Beatles
Tristan was the soundtrack of my summer. The beat I walked to. The melody I breathed in and out. The lyrics I lived by.
— Jessica Brody, A Week of Mondays
If I am horror writer, I should listen to metal???- Why not to dubstep??? Or Deathstep???
— Deyth Banger
Suddenly high song awakens me, and I leave all this tedious routine far, far distant; I listen, till all the world is changed, and the beautiful earth becomes more beautiful.
— Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Valperga: Or, the Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca
[T]he piano was to Harlem what brass bands had been to New Orleans. The instrument represented conflicting possibilities -- a pathway for assimilating traditional highbrow culture, a calling card of lowbrow nightlife, a symbol of middle-class prosperity, or, quite simply, a means of making a living.
— Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz
It's all about Perfection or the tolerance of Imperfection
— Stijn Moreels
We feel that we fit into this fandom even if we're an outcast or misfits in this world." -Mary, 16, Philippines
— Jazmin Williams, 5SOS: The Fans' Story
I know what I want to hear. I want to hear the "Believe it or Not" song. I want to play that shit loud. Really belt out the "Should have been somebody eeeeeelse" part, with a little bit of Zack de la Rocha venom. That would be pretty awesome right about now.But the other part of me, the part that wanted to be cool, knew that it was a much better idea to say, "Let's play the fucking Misfits." Because that's what you say to the cool guy in the combat boots who wants to smoke in your house. Because he's going to snarl-smile at you and say, "Fuck yeah!" And you're feel cool by association."Let's play the fucking Misfits," I said.John snarl-smiled and saluted me with rock horns. "Fuck yeah."Told you.
— Eric Spitznagel, Old Records Never Die: One Man's Quest for His Vinyl and His Past
After we hung up, I took the joint. If I was going to die here, in the creepy basement out of a horror movie, in an epic snowstorm that was like an icy prison, with a wife unwilling to pretend-like Bananarama to maybe save her husband's life, I should at least go out with a smile on my face.
— Eric Spitznagel, Old Records Never Die: One Man's Quest for His Vinyl and His Past
Got it!" Mike announced. The GE record player slowly whirred to life, creaky as an old carousel."Nice," John said, raising a beer in salute. "What'd you do?""It wasn't on," Mike said.
— Eric Spitznagel, Old Records Never Die: One Man's Quest for His Vinyl and His Past
I may some day get a boyfriend and eventually a husband, but you will always be my first loves." -Sheetal, 14, Qatar
— Jazmin Williams, 5SOS: The Fans' Story
Ah! keep my songs within your heart (The heart that holds the singer too), And never to the world impart The music only meant for you. Nor breathe one word, one tender word aloud, Lest it be heard by the cold-hearted crowd. To sing what only you can hear Will keep my heart in perfect tune; As sings the nightingale, when clear Above her shines the summer moon, And every tone of truthful love that flows Is heard alone by the enraptured rose.
— L. G. McVean
Music is a medicine that is self prescribed.
— Jazmin Williams, 5SOS: The Fans' Story
Music has the ability to express in the upbeat every brilliant aspect of existence, while on the downbeat convey the anguish that a human being experiences when apprehending the fleeting nature of time, and the mysterious torture of living and dying. Music stands alone in its ability to communicate the symbols and phases of life, both being and nonbeing.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
This story is dedicated to all those who help, and all those who care.
— James D. Scanlon, The Musical Adventure of 'One-Shot' Billy
The best music is that which subtly connects with your reality but mischievously transcends you into an enticing imagination.
— Hrishikesh Agnihotri
Keith Richards is a man without regret. When I ask him if—given the chance to do it all over again—he’d start taking heroin, he doesn’t pause. “Oh yes. Yes. There was a lot of experience in there—you meet a lot of weird people, different takes on life that you’re not going to find if you don’t go there. I loved a good high. And if you stay up, you get the songs that everyone else misses, because they’re asleep. There’s songs zooming around everywhere. There’s songs zooming through here right now, in the air.
— Caitlin Moran, Moranthology
You don’t go to a show because you think someone in the band is hot. You don’t go because they always wear this cool, awesome outfit, or have the right hair. Those things are part of what makes up the whole picture of the music… but those things wouldn’t compel you to spend your hard earned money on a ticket to spend a night watching those clothes or that hair move around for a little while. Music resonates with everyone, which is why we call it the “universal language.
— Hayley Williams
There is no dark side of the moon really. As a matter of fact it's all dark.
— Pink Floyd, Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon
James, you’d like Lou Reed,” Michael insisted. “He was bisexual.”Their laughter turned to coughs. They were all staring at me when I turned around. I told myself to relax.“Oh, yeah?” I said. “He doesn’t sound bisexual.”Michael just shook his head, but Ronan and Glenn smiled.“They did electroshock therapy on him when he was a teenager,” Michael said.“Electro-what?” said Glenn. “They electrocuted people?”“Kind of. They zapped their brains to alter their personalities. That’s how they tried to make gay people straight back then.”They all looked at me for a response.I shrugged. “So, he was bisexual? It worked halfway?
— Kenneth Logan, True Letters from a Fictional Life
Would you care to dance?” he blurted. “Now?” She smiled adorably. “Is there music?” There wasn’t. It was some testament to how foolish in love he’d become that he did not even feel embarrassed.
— Julia Quinn, Because of Miss Bridgerton
Ah, music, a magic beyond all we do here.
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
We are taught to think ourselves ugly. Eyes are an assaulted sense. We are taught to behave by spankings and whippings. Touch is an assaulted sense. We are taught we should not smell, or we smell wrong. Smell is an assaulted sense. We listen to songs that call us 'hos and tell us how to give blow jobs. Hearing is an assaulted sense. Taste, not so much.
— Alice Randall, Ada's Rules: A Sexy Skinny Novel
Music is powerful. It sets the mind and body and soul free in a way that I've need fully been able to understand. Maybe because it's not meant to be understood. It's simply meant to be experienced.
— Jacqueline E. Smith, Worldwide
The Beatles were bubblegum cards and Help at the Saturday morning cinema and toy plastic guitars and singing 'Yellow Submarine' at the top of my voice in the back row of the coach on school trips. They belong to me, not to me and Laura, or me and Charlie, or me and Alison Ashworth, and though they'll make me feel something, they won't make me feel anything bad.
— Nick Hornby, High Fidelity
I waited for something,something died.So I waited for nothing,Nothing arrived.
— Villagers
Hip hop in my veins, if you cut cut me I will bleed.
— Nathan Feuerstein (NF)
A world without music is only filled with sounds in the air
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
The songs were all either fast or sad. Because all songs should be either fast or sad.
— Rob Sheffield, Love Is a Mix Tape
People should train their brain by watching films, by listening music, by playing games, by reading quotes. If people do this, I can said from this a big percent from here you can become clever.
— Deyth Banger
Us girls deserve more than one song. We deserve more than one pledge of solidarity. We deserve better songs than any boy will ever write about us.
— Jessica Hopper
Music gives pleasure because your mind keeps predicting what comes next. Each correct prediction triggers dopamine. You can't make good predictions for unfamiliar music, so you don't get the dopamine. But when music is too familiar, something strange happens. You don't get the dopamine either because your brain predicts it effortlessly. To make you happy, music must be at the sweet spot of novelty and familiarity.
— Loretta Graziano Breuning, Habits of a Happy Brain: Retrain Your Brain to Boost Your Serotonin, Dopamine, Oxytocin,  Endorphin Levels
Music is powerful. It sets the mind and body and soul free in a way that I've never fully been able to understand. Maybe because it's not meant to be understood. It's simply meant to be experienced.
— Jacqueline E. Smith
i was musicbut you had your ears cut off
— Rupi Kaur, Milk and Honey
Never look down unless you're helping them up.
— Calum Hood
The power of sacred music increases the honor given to God by the Church in union with Christ, its Head. Sacred music likewise helps to increase the fruits which the faithful, moved by the sacred harmonies, derive from the holy liturgy. These fruits, as daily experience and many ancient and modern literary sources show, manifest themselves in a life and conduct worthy of a Christian.
— Pope Pius XII
I am not an angry girlBut it seems like I’ve got everyone fooledEvery time I say something they find hard to hearThey chalk it up to my anger, and never to their own fear
— Ani DiFranco
Yes beyonce, thank you very very much!!!Growing up wasn’t easy for me, even as a boy, then as a black boy, then it was even harder as a black boy who lives in Africa. You might think that white privilege is more prevalent in America but no, it is worse here in Africa were white people are literally worshiped as gods.While growing up as a boy in my teens, i had serious self esteem issues, i didn’t like the color of my skin, i didn’t like my hair, i didn’t like my butt, and i was a boy!!! can you believe it? in 2007 i even tried bleaching my skin, lucky for me i bought a fake bleaching cream, translation, it didn’t work. I dyed my hair blonde several times.But after a while i started to get my self esteem in place, the fact that i had so many white folks as friends at that time didn’t help, truth is most white people living here in Africa claim not to be racist but when you catch that stare, hear that comment, see the way they react, you can smell racism all over them. I can give you a simple example, I had a white friend years ago who was an exec at a big oil company here in Nigeria, I had just graduated and needed a job, I spoke to him about it and y’all wont believe what he suggested, well, he suggested I work as his steward.You see, a lot of Nigerians will jump at it, but i smelt racism all over that offer and i wasn’t gonna be a slave to a white man who still had slave-owner tendencies, he totally undermined my degree and felt i was better off as his “slave”.When Beyonce dropped ‘formation’ i was blown away, never before have i felt more proud to be black!!! and now her ‘lemonade’ album is here and it is everything the black community needs. Beyonce has ‘black’ going mainstream, her lemonade album has white girls wishing they were black, getting tans, dying their hair black, talking gangster etc. black is the new black.I really do appreciate what bey has done for the black race, now black men and women will walk the streets, heads held high in all their blackness and be proud!!! THANKS BEY!!!
— joseph ejiro
Just keeping being you. Don't worry what people think. Being you is cool, okay?
— Ashton Irwin
Normal is gross
— Jack Barakat
Who am I when I don't know myself?
— 5 Seconds of Summer
I'm stuck in between a nightmare and lost dreams
— 5 Seconds of Summer
I've only got forever and forever is fine
— Ashton Irwin
Music begins where the possibilities of language end
— Jean Sibelius
You might say that the universe plays the blues.
— David Byrne, How Music Works
I got one foot in the golden life, one foot in the gutter. So close to the other side, so far from the wonder. I got one foot in the golden life, one foot in the gutter. So sick of the tug of war, that keeps pulling me under
— 5 Seconds of Summer
What you don’t have you don’t need it now.  What you don’t know you can feel it somehow . What you don’t have you don’t need it now , don’t need it now It was a beautiful day
— U2
Presuming that there is such a thing as "progress" when it comes to music, and that music is "better" now than it used to be, is typical of the high self-regard of those who live in the present. It is a myth. Creativity doesn't "improve.
— David Byrne, How Music Works
In the early days, I might have gotten on stage and begun to sing as a desperate attempt to communicate, but now I found that singing was both a physical and emotional joy. It was sensuous, a pure pleasure, which didn't take away from the emotions being expressed—even if they were melancholic. Music can do that; you can enjoy singing about something sad.
— David Byrne, How Music Works
aloneness is a bad fiddle I play against my own / burning
— Colleen J. McElroy, What Madness Brought Me Here: New And Selected Poems, 1968 1988
Recordings aren't time sensitive. You can hear the music you want whether it's morning, noon, or the middle of the night. You can "get into" clubs virtually, "sit" in concert halls you can't afford to visit, go to places that are too far away, or hear people sing about things you don't understand, about lives that are alien, sad, or wonderful. Recorded music can be ripped free from its context, for better and worse. It becomes its own context.
— David Byrne, How Music Works
The mixtapes we made for ourselves were musical mirrors. The sadness, anger, or frustration you might be feeling at a given time could be encapsulated in the song selection. You made mixtapes that corresponded to emotional states, and they'd be avaliable to pop into the deck when each feeling needed reinforcing or soothing. The mixtape was your friend, your psychiatrist, and your solace.
— David Byrne, How Music Works
The online music magazine Pitchfork once wrote that I would collaborate with anyone for a bag of Doritos.
— David Byrne, How Music Works
Music written by teams makes the authorship of a piece indistinct. Could it be that when hearing a song written by a team, a listener can sense that they aren't hearing an expression of a solitary individual's pain or joy, but that of a virtual conjoined person? Can we tell that an individual singer might actually represent a collective, that he might have multiple identities? Does that make the sentiments expressed more poetically universal? Dan eliminating some portion of the authorial voice make a piece of music more accessible and the singer more empathetic?
— David Byrne, How Music Works
Any kid will tell you that, yes, their music is both an escape and a survival mechanism, and that sometimes the music givesbthem hope and inspiration. It doesn't just placate and pacify.
— David Byrne, How Music Works
Don't give up when you still have something to give. Because nothing is really over until the moment you stop trying,
— Austin Mahone
Music, that is the science or the sense of proper modulation, is likewise given by God's generosity to mortals having rational souls in order to lead them to higher things.
— Augustine of Hippo
Music — good music, great music — had a hard, irreducible purity to it. It might be bitter and despairing and pessimistic, but it could never be cynical. If music is tragic, those with asses’ ears accuse it of being cynical. But when a composer is bitter, or in despair, or pessimistic, that still means he believes in something.
— Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time
You can’t really think hard about what you’re doing and listen to the radio at the same time. Maybe they didn’t see their job as having anything to do with hard thought, just wrench twiddling.
— Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
Music is made for relax, let's don't move it... let's be clever and left it like this, shall we?
— Deyth Banger