c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected. The commonplace person begins to play, and shoots into the empyrean without effort, whilst we look up, marvelling how he has escaped us, and thinking how we could worship him and love him, would he but translate his visions into human words, and his experiences into human actions. Perhaps he cannot; certainly he does not, or does so very seldom.
— E.M. Forster, A Room with a View
Well you found us strength and solutions but I liked the tensionAnd not always knowing the answers when you're gonna lose it, you're gonna lose it.
— Hayley Williams
If you talk bad about country music, it's like saying bad things about my momma. Them's fightin' words
— Dolly Parton
Amy turned to Nellie. "Can you create a diversion to draw the clerk outside?"The au pair was wary. "What kind of diversion?""You could pretend to be lost," Dan proposed. "The guy comes out to give you directions, and we slip inside.""That's the most sexist idea I've ever heard," Nellie said harshly. "I'm female, so I have to be clueless. He's male, so he's got a great sense of direc
— Gordon Korman, One False Note
I'm not the one who's so far awayWhen I feel the snake bite enter my veins.Never did I wanna be here again,And I don't remember why I came.
— Sully Erna
Songwriting is a bitch. And then it has puppies
— Steven Tyler
tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play— I tell you, Dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Music is feelings in search of words.
— Shannon L. Alder
I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn't resolve. But I was outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes.
— Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.
— George Eliot
When you sleepI will creepInto your thoughtsLike a bad debtThat you can't payTake the easy wayand give in!
— Morrissey
All of my most significant moments somehow involved music. It's like my life was a John Hughes film and somebody had to put together the perfect soundtrack.
— Caprice Crane, Stupid and Contagious
I was about 12 years old and I was sitting watching the television and it was some kind of talent show, you know, and on marches this monkey, this ape, in a pair of red-checked trousers with a little matching jacket holding a ukelele and it started jigging around playing it, and it was looking straight into the camera, straight at me, and I remember thinking, that's it, that'll be me, you know, that'll be me.
— Nick Cave
The good times are killing me
— Modest Mouse
There's that thing that can happen to you when you meet somebody and you don't consider them extraordinary at all and then they do something like play the cello or write amazing poetry or sing and suddenly you look at them completely differently.
— Yvonne Prinz, The Vinyl Princess
The music never leaves. Once you have it, you can't lose it.
— Luanne Rice, Summer of Roses
I'm looking at you through the glassDon't know how much time has pastOh God it feels like foreverBut no one tells that forever feels like homeSitting all alone in your head
— Stone Sour
Sometimes I am two people. Johnny is the nice one. Cash causes all the trouble. They fight.
— Johnny Cash
The finest fury is the most controlled.
— Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays
These songs tell me I'm not alone. If you look at it that way, music...music can see you through anything.
— Hannah Harrington, Saving June
Easy come, easy go,That's just how you live, oh,Take, take, take it all,But you never give.Should've known you was troubleFrom the first kiss,Had your eyes wide open.Why were they open?Gave you all I had and you tossed it in the trash,You tossed it in the trash, you did.To give me all your love is all I ever asked, 'causeWhat you don't understand isI'd catch a grenade for yaThrow my hand on a blade for yaI'd jump in front of a train for ya You know I'd do anything for yaOh, oh, I would go through all of this pain,Take a bullet straight through my brain!Yes, I would die for ya, baby,But you won't do the same.
— Bruno Mars
I love music. For me, music is morning coffee. It's mood medicine. It's pure magic. A good song is like a good meal-I just want to inhale it and then share a bite with someone else.
— Hoda Kotb, Hoda: How I Survived War Zones, Bad Hair, Cancer, and Kathie Lee
Words cannot always do the work we need them to. Music is there for when words fail us.
— Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear
They said they respect me, which means, their judgment is crazy.
— Morrissey
It was a kind of sado-masochism. I would take the things that were painful to me and elevate them and, through the mantra of music, make them into a release.
— Michael Gira
Searching for nothingWondering if I’ll changeI’m trying everythingBut everything still stays the sameI thought if I showed you I could flyWouldn’t need anyone by my sideI'm running backwardsWith broken wings I know I’ll die
— Sully Erna
Music is the art of thinking with sounds.
— Jules Combarieu
The world is teeming
—  anything can happen.
On that same tour we ran into a band at Aylesbury Friars, a biggish venue in Oxfordshire, England. They were a four-piece from Ireland called U2. They seemed like nice fellows and they sounded pretty good, but we didn’t keep in touch. They’re probably taxi drivers and accountants by now.
— Craig Ferguson, American on Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot
Hold on to your friends.Resist - or move onBe mad, be rashSmoke and explodeSell all of your clothesJust bear in mind:There just might come a timeWhen you need some friends 
— Morrissey
Nothing fortified me, and simple loneliness all but destroyed me, yet I felt swamped by the belief that life must mean something- otherwise why was it there? Why was anything anything?
— Morrissey, Autobiography
...."the sound of a barrel organ rising from the deepest golden vein of the day; two or three bars of a chorus, played on a distant piano over and over again, melting in the sun on the white pavement, lost in the fire of high noon.
— Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles
Music and silence combine strongly because music is done with silence, and silence is full of music. 
— Marcel Marceau
You make me sick. Because I adore you so..."~Space Dementia
— Matthew J. Bellamy
The Show Must Go On!
— Queen
Love is friendship set to music
— Erich W. Pollak
Who can fail to mist at Fergie's anthem, 'My humps, my humps, my lovely lady lumps.' Hmmm. 'My lunch, my lunch, I swear it's coming up.
— Celia Rivenbark, Belle Weather: Mostly Sunny with a Chance of Scattered Hissy Fits
I would teach children music, physics, and philosophy; but most importantly music, for the patterns in music and all the arts are the keys to learning
— Plato
A choir is made up of many voices, including yours and mine. If one by one all go silent then all that will be left are the soloists.Don’t let a loud few determine the nature of the sound. It makes for poor harmony and diminishes the song.
— Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
I am kind of majoring in bull shitting.
— Kate Voegele
Has the industry done to music what McDonald’s has done to eating?
— Tiffanie DeBartolo, How to Kill a Rock Star
Strange how potent cheap music is.
— Noël Coward, Private Lives
If he can't sleep, how will he ever dream?
— Eddie Vedder
You can try and read my lyrics off of this paper before I lay 'emBut you won't take the sting out these words before I say 'em
— Eminem
I liked AC/DC," Lee said. "If you were going to shoot someone, you'd really want to do it while you were listening to them.""What about the Beatles? Did you feel like shooting anyone listening to them?"Lee considered seriously for a moment, then said, "Myself."At the same time he was laughing, Ig was distressed. Not liking the Beatles was almost as bad as not knowing about them at all.
— Joe Hill, Horns
Anyone who tells a lie has not a pure heart, and cannot make a good soup. 
— Ludwig van Beethoven
The most exciting rhythms seem unexpected and complex, the most beautiful melodies simple and inevitable.
— W.H. Auden, The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Prose, Volume III: 1949-1955
Jazz is not just 'Well, man, this is what I feel like playing.' It's a very structured thing that comes down from a tradition and requires a lot of thought and study.
— Wynton Marsalis
How far is too far? When you love a band so much that its songs fill the empty spaces inside your head and heart, is that too far?
— Bert Murray, Colin Preston Rocked And Rolled
...And you're the only one who knows.
— Billy Joel
Does anybody know how I feel?Sometimes I'm numb...Sometimes I'm overcome...Does anybody care what's going on?Do I have to wear my scarsLike a badge on my arm?For you to see meI need to release
— ZOEgirl
Life is a pigsty.
— Morrissey
I was totally clueless about social interaction, and completely scared of girls. All I knew was that music was going to make girls fall in love with me.
— Rob Sheffield, Love Is a Mix Tape
[The Head of Radio Three] had been ensnared by the Music Director of the college and a Professor of Philosophy. These two were busy explaining to the harassed man that the phrase "too much Mozart" was, given any reasonable definition of those three words, an inherently self-contradictory expression, and that any sentence which contained such a phrase would be thereby rendered meaningless and could not, consequently, be advanced as part of an argument in favour of any given programme-scheduling strategy.
— Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
Because I hate the ocean, theme parks and airplanes, talking with strangers, waiting in line. I'm through with these pills that make me sit still, are you feeling fine? Yes, I feel just fine.
— Aurelien Budynek, Best of Motion City Soundtrack
You can love a song, but you can form a bond with an album, a relationship that evolves as organically and beautifully as a marriage.
— Jacob Hoye, 100 Greatest Albums
If you wanna make friends at the ATM, do the creep.
— Lonely Island
Should I have taken him by the hand and led him over to the Zappa? No. I won't spoon-feed the customers. If you don't know your alphabet, you have no business leaving your house, let alone shopping for premium music.
— Yvonne Prinz, The Vinyl Princess
Your voice has haunted every inch of my soul since the last time I heard it…my world had been so dark, void of sound and then I heard you sing again—and it exploded. Everything came crashing down on me that I’d been holding in, and then I was just a mess. But I wasn’t suffering in silence anymore. I was suffering from the impenetrable sound of your voice on repeat in my head.
— Cassandra Giovanni, Finding Perfection
We were both young when I first saw you. I close my eyes and the flashback starts. I'm standin' there on a balcony in summer air.
— Taylor Swift, Taylor Swift - Fearless: Easy Guitar with Notes & Tab
HEREIt’s-Can I say?It’s like the song of a family where everything’s always all right, it’s a song of belonging that makes you belong just by hearing it, it’s a song that’ll always take care of you and never leave you. If you have a heart, it breaks, if you have a heart that’s broken, it fixes.
— Patrick Ness, The Knife of Never Letting Go
I don't feel any shame I won't apologize if there ain't nowhere you can go running away from pain when you've been victimized tales from another broken home.
— Green Day
I would love to be erased from our association with Pearl Jam or the Nymphs and other first time offenders.
— Kurt Cobain, Journals
You take a deep breath and you walk through the doors. It's the morning of your very first day. You say hi to your friends you ain't seen in a while, try and stay out of everybody's way. It's your freshman year and your gonna be here for the next four years in this town. Hopin' one of those senior boys will wink at you and say, "You know I haven't seen you around before." 'Cause when you're fifteen and somebody tells you they love you, you're gonna believe them. And when you're fifteen, feelin' like there's nothin' to figure out, but, count to ten, take it in. This is life before you know who you're gonna be. Fifteen.
— Taylor Swift, Taylor Swift - Fearless: Easy Guitar with Notes & Tab
We live in a generation of not being in love, and not being together. But we sure make it feel like we're together, because we're scared of seeing each other with somebody else.
— Drake
We have a lot of questions, and we want to understand.Music helps with that .Music helps with everything.
— Lisa Schroeder, The Day Before
If I could be who you wanted, all the time
— Radiohead
He could tell by the way animals walked that they were keeping time to some kind of music. Maybe it was the song in their own hearts that they walked to.
— Laura Adams Armer, Waterless Mountain
We imagined ourselves as the Sons of Liberty with a mission to preserve, protect, and project the revolutionary spirit of rock and roll. We feared that the music which had given us sustenance was in danger of spiritual starvation. We feared it losing its sense of purpose, we feared it falling into fattened hands, we feared it floundering in a mire of spectacle, finance, and vapid technical complexity.
— Patti Smith, Just Kids
I discovered the miracle that all things that sound are music, including the dishes and silverware in the dishwasher, as long as they fulfill the illusion of showing us where life is heading.
— Gabriel García Márquez, Living to Tell the Tale
Sweet Grace amazes meThe way that she can seeBeyond the man I amTo the man that I could beShe's bringing out my bestWhile she covers all the restSome say her love is blindBut I say her love forgetsShe don't like it when I try so hard to impress her‘Cause when I do that, it's a lie that makes her love look the lesserThe truth is I knowI'll never be, I'll never be good enoughI'll never deserve her loveI'll never be, I'll never be good enough for GraceBut she takes me anywayI am the cheatin' kind But she's changing my mindThe way she takes me backThough I fail her every timeShe's got friends who tell her that sheIs much too good for meWell, I've told her that myselfBut she refuses to leaveI'd like to think my strength won her affectionBut the truth is it was my weakness that caught her attentionI'm grateful to knowWhen my tears fall down like rainShe wipes them from my faceShe tells me that I'm lovelyAnd if I am, it's all because of GraceThis love turns my inside outAnd my world upside downGrace is changing me
— Jason Gray
One of the great things about songwrighting
—  it's not an intellectual experience
I've never known a musician who regretted being one. Whatever deceptions life may have in store for you, music itself is not going to let you down.
— Virgil Thomson
The Devil has all the best tunes? My arse! Metalville just got a new sheriff.
— Mark  Rice, Metallic Dreams
It might sound chauvinistic, but there is a sad reality in rock music: Bands who depend on support from females inevitably crash and burn.
— Chuck Klosterman, Fargo Rock City: A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural North Dakota
The kind of person who listens to our music doesn't want to live a bit and die a little and find a friend. The kind of person who listens to our music wants to live forever and die a lot and fall in love.
— Ray Robertson, Moody Food
We can be heroes just for one day
— David Bowie Heroes
Grace abounds in contemporary movies, books, novels, films and music. If God is not in the whirlwind, He may be in a Woody Allen film, or a Bruce Springsteen concert. Most people understand imagery and symbol better than doctrine and dogma. Images touch hearts and awaken imaginations. One theologian suggested that Springsteen's 'Tunnel of Love' album, in which he symbolically sings of sin, death, despair and redemption, is more important for Catholics than the Pope's last visit when he spoke of morality only in doctrinal propositions.
— Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel: Good News for the Bedraggled, Beat-Up, and Burnt Out
When she started to play, Steinway came down personally and rubbed his name off the piano. 
— Bob Hope
The music defied classification. If I had been writing areview of the show, I would have labeled it progressive,guitar-driven rock ’n’ roll. But the guitars made sounds guitarsdidn’t always make. Symphonic sounds. Sacred sounds.The music dug in so deep you didn’t hear it so much as feelit, reminding me of a dream I used to have when I was a kid,where I would be standing on a street corner, I would jumpinto the air, flap my arms, and soar up into the sky.That’s the only way I could describe the music.It was the sonic equivalent of flight.
— Tiffanie DeBartolo, How to Kill a Rock Star
Everybody told me this 'girl on the piano' thing was never going to work.
— Tori Amos
Saying you liked all music meant that you didn't love any.
— Lindsey Kelk, I Heart New York
One person's data is another person's noise.
— K.C. Cole
Father Break my heart for what breaks yoursGive me open hands and open doorsPut your light in my eyes and let me seeThat my own little world is not about me
— Matthew West
It's like this when you fall hard for a musician. It's a crush with religious overtones. You listen to the songs and you memorize the words and the notes and this is a form of prayer. You attend the shows and this is the liturgy. You're interested in relics -- guitar picks, set lists, the sweaty napkin applied to His brow. You set up shrines in your room. It's not just about the music. It's about who you are when you listen to the music and who you wish to be and the way a particular song can bridge that gap, can make you feel the abrupt thrill of absolute faith.
— Steve Almond, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life: A Book by and for the Fanatics Among Us
If heartache was a physical pain I could face, I could faceBut your hurting me from inside of my headAnd I can't take it, I can't take itI'm going to lose my mind
— The Wanted
From the first note I knew it was different from anything I had ever heard.... It began simply, but with an arresting phrase, so simple, but eloquent as a human voice. It spoke, beckoning gently as it unwound, rising and tensing. It spiraled upward, the tension growing with each repeat of the phrasing, and yet somehow it grew more abandoned, wilder with each note. His eyes remained closed as his fingers flew over the strings, spilling forth surely more notes than were possible from a single violin. For one mad moment I actually thought there were more of them, an entire orchestra of violins spilling out of this one instrument. I had never heard anything like it--it was poetry and seduction and light and shadow and every other contradiction I could think of. It seemed impossible to breathe while listening to that music, and yet all I was doing was breathing, quite heavily. The music itself had become as palpable a presence in that room as another person would have been--and its presence was something out of myth.
— Deanna Raybourn, Silent in the Grave
Speaking unspoken words,music is a good way to say.
— Toba Beta, Betelgeuse Incident: Insiden Bait Al-Jauza
To do what you love and are passionate about is a dream come true, My life is consumed by music and entertainment— and it’s the best life I could ever hope for.
— Blake Lewis
We hate it when our friends become successful.
— Morrissey
What we believe as human nature in actuality is human habit.
— Jewel
I tried to look at writing a song almost like solving a mystery. The song was there, buried somewhere in my brain. All I had to do was follow the clues until I figured it out.
— Jon Skovron, Struts & Frets
Stupid cupid keeps on calling me, but I see nothing in his eyes. I miss my babe
— George Michael
When you move like a jellyfish rhyth don't mean nothing. You go with the flow, you don't stop. Move like a jellyfish, rhythm means nothing.You go with the flow you don't stop.
— Jack Johnson
all bags are pack ready to go i am standing here outside your door i hate to wake you up to say goodbyedawn is braking its early mornthe taxi waiting he blowing his hornalready i am so lonesome i could dieso kiss me and smile for me tell me that you'll wait for me and hold me like you never let me gocause leaving on a jet plane don't know when ill be back again oh babe i hate to go there so many let you down so many time i played around i tell you know that don't mean a thing every plase i go i'll think of you every song i sing i'll sing for you.
— John Denver
If you have to ask what jazz is you will never know." Louis Armstrong
— Louis Armstrong
Music is spiritual. The music business is not.
— Van Morrison
Bruce has always been so nice to me, which is crazy, because he's one of my heroes. I'll never forget being at a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony the year Bruce and Paul McCartney were inducted. We were at the bar, and Bruce was talking to Paul, and he turned to me and said, 'I can't believe I'm talking to Paul McCartney!' I thought, 'I can't believe I'm talking to Bruce Springsteen, who's talking to Paul McCartney!
— Melissa Etheridge
This is a book for every fiddler who has realized halfway through playing an ancient Scottish air that the Ramones "I Wanna Be Sedated" is what folk music is really all about, and gone straight into it.
— Neil Gaiman, The Good Fairies of New York
Because ENOUGH is TOO MUCH!And look around ...can you blame us?!
— Morrissey
Where were you? When everything was falling apart. All my days staying by the telephone. You never rang and all I needed was a call.
— The Fray
It's time, my childrenWhen the waves rise high When the waters run deepWhen the clock strikes midnightYou'll feel the mark of Zero HourAnd you'll never be the same again
— Lisa Mangum, The Hourglass Door
Many roads to take some to joy some to heart ache
— Kate Winslet
Down in Louisiana we call that Boogie Woogie!
— Jerry Lee Lewis
Music originated from God and was created solely for his worship, his glory, and his pleasure.
— Pedro Okoro, Crushing the Devil: Your Guide to Spiritual Warfare and Victory in Christ
Often the right path is the one that may be hardest for you to follow. But the hard path is also the one that will make you grow as a human being.
— Karen Mueller Coombs, Bully at Ambush Corner
All the world is made of music. We are all strings on a lyre. We resonate. We sing together.
— Joe Hill, Heart-Shaped Box
For you can't hear Irish tunes without knowing you're Irish, and wanting to pound that fact into the floor.
— Jennifer Armstrong, Becoming Mary Mehan
Music fathoms the sky.
— Charles Baudelaire
Music and comedy are so linked. The rhythm of comedy is con­nected to the rhythm of music. They’re both about creating tension and knowing when to let it go. I’m always surprised when somebody funny is not musical.
— Conan O'Brien
Ambition is a dream with a V8 engine. Ain't nowhere else in the world where you can go from driving a truck to cadillac overnight
— Elvis Presley
Always wear cute pyjamas to bed, you'll never know who u will meet in your dreams.
— Joel Madden
Music that gentlier on the spirit lies,Than tired eyelids upon tired eyes.
— Alfred Tennyson
You can put off your dreams, your desires, your careers, your farms. You can avoid your responsibilities, obligations, promises, and sovereign rights. But any person who wants to make music, and doesn't, is a goddamned fool.
— Jenna Woginrich
Goth was sort of the melancholy cousin of punk that says: there's a lot of evil in this world, there's a lot of very mean spirited people and that makes me sad.
— Aurelio Voltaire Hernández
Because there's beauty in the breakdown.
— Imogen Heap
Your youth is the most important thing you will ever have. It's when you will connect to music like a primal urge, and the memories attached to the songs will never leave you. Please hold on to everything. Keep every note, mix tape, concert ticket stub, and memory you have of music from your youth. It'll be the one thing that might keep you young, even if you aren't anymore.
— Butch Walker, Drinking with Strangers: Music Lessons from a Teenage Bullet Belt
Which is more musical, a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?Are the people inside the school musical and the ones outside unmusical?What if the ones inside can't hear very well, would that change my question?
— John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings
I set out on a narrow way many years ago, hoping I would find true love along the broken road
— Rascal Flatts
Music is the soul of language.
— Max Heindel
People spend thousands of dollars on stereos. Sometimes tens of thousands. There is a specialist industry right here in the States which builds stereo gear to a standard you wouldn't believe. Tubed amplifiers which cost more than a house. Speakers taller than me. Cables thicker than a garden hose. Some army guys had that stuff. I'd heard it on bases around the world. Wonderful. But they were wasting their money. Because the best stereo in the world is free. Inside your head. It sounds as good as you want it to. As loud as you want it to be.
— Lee Child, Killing Floor
A musician's or artist's responsibility is a simple one, and that is, through your music to tell the truth,
— Tom Morello
He felt as if he were paying for the privilege of music with portions of his life and body. But it was well worth it.
— Mark Helprin
The tune was wailing and mournful, almost flagrantly so, and the total effect was of a heartbroken piccolo being parted forever from its bagpipe lover.
— Peter S. Beagle, A Fine and Private Place
We take gingko to sharpen our memories. We could be memorizing song lyrics instead.
— Joan Oliver Goldsmith, How Can We Keep from Singing: Music and the Passionate Life
Kids on the Youtube, learning how to be cool.
— Toby Keith
Some need diamonds some need loveSome need cards some need luckSome need dollar bills lining their clothesall I need is, all I need is two white horses in a line
— Beck
Fate, up against your
— Echo and the Bunnymen, Echo And The Bunnymen
The piano ain't got no wrong notes.
— Thelonious Monk
Next to the Word of God, music deserves the highest praise. The gift of language combined with the gift of song was given to man that he should proclaim the Word of God through Music.
— Martin Luther
I was always fishing for something on the radio. Just like trains and bells, it was part of the soundtrack of my life. I moved the dial up and down and Roy Orbison's voice came blasting out of the small speakers. His new song, "Running Scared," exploded into the room.Orbison, though, transcended all the genres - folk, country, rock and roll or just about anything. His stuff mixed all the styles and some that hadn't even been invented yet. He could sound mean and nasty on one line and then sing in a falsetto voice like Frankie Valli in the next. With Roy, you didn't know if you were listening to mariachi or opera. He kept you on your toes. With him, it was all about fat and blood. He sounded like he was singing from an Olympian mountaintop and he meant business. One of his previous songs, "Ooby Dooby" was deceptively simple, but Roy had progressed. He was now singing his compositions in three or four octaves that made you want to drive your car over a cliff. He sang like a professional criminal. Typically, he'd start out in some low, barely audible range, stay there a while and then astonishingly slip into histrionics. His voice could jar a corpse, always leave you muttring to yourself something like, "Man, I don't believe it." His songs had songs within songs. They shifted from major to minor key without any logic. Orbison was deadly serious - no pollywog and no fledgling juvenile. There wasn't anything else on the radio like him.
— Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Vol. 1
There is music you never hear unless you play it yourself.
— Marty Rubin
Rock'n'roll is a teenage sport, meant to be played by teenagers of all ages--they could be 15, 25 or 35. It all boils down to whether they've got the love in their hearts, that beautiful teenage spirit... -Calvin Johnson
— Michael Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991
Now I think I understand how this world can overcome a man.
— James Sullivan
I'm a bluesman moving through a blues-soaked America, a blues-soaked world, a planet where catastrophe and celebration- joy and pain sit side by side. The blues started off in some field, some plantation, in some mind, in some imagination, in some heart. The blues blew over to the next plantation, and then the next state. The blues went south to north, got electrified and even sanctified. The blues got mixed up with jazz and gospel and rock and roll.
— Cornel West, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud, A Memoir
Ruby said there were many songs that you could not say anybody in particular had made by himself. A song went around from fiddler to fiddler and each one added something and took something away so that in time the song became a different thing from what it had been, barely recognizable in either tune or lyric. But you could not say the song had been improved, for as was true of all human effort, there was never advancement. Everything added meant something lost, and about as often as not the thing lost was preferable to the thing gained, so that over time we'd be lucky if we just broke even. Any thought otherwise was empty pride.
— Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain
I will protect you," she promised the Bosendorfer inside. "I won't let you down."Sophie gave her a quizzical look."Bastards better not hurt my piano," Miranda replied."That's what you're worried about right now? What about your boyfriend?
— Dianne Sylvan, Queen of Shadows
I just happen to comprehend the low standards of the majority of the music-buying public, and I don’t care how condescending that sounds, it’s true. They always go for the shiny gimmicks. Always.
— Tiffanie DeBartolo, How to Kill a Rock Star
Mac Rebennack, better known as Dr. John, once told me that when a brass band plays at a small club back up in one of the neighborhoods, it's as if the audience--dancing, singing to the refrains, laughing--is part of the band. They are two parts of the same thing. The dancers interpret, or it might be better to say literally embody, the sounds of the band, answering the instruments. Since everyone is listening to different parts of the music--she to the trumpet melody, he to the bass drum, she to the trombone--the audience is a working model in three dimensions of the music, a synesthesic transformation of materials. And of course the band is also watching the dancers, and getting ideas from the dancers' gestures. The relationship between band and audience is in that sense like the relationship between two lovers making love, where cause and effect becomes very hard to see, even impossible to call by its right name; one is literally getting down, as in particle physics, to some root stratum where one is freed from the lockstop of time itself, where time might even run backward, or sideways, and something eternal and transcendent is accessed.
— Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters
But there was a discipline, it was just that we didn't understand. We thought he was formless, but I think now he was tormented by order, what was outside it. He tore apart the plot - see his music was immediately on top of his own life. Echoing. As if, when he was playing he was lost and hunting for the right accidental notes. Listening to him was like talking to Coleman. You were both changing direction with every sentence, sometimes in the middle, using each other as a springboard through the dark. You were moving so fast it was unimportant to finish and clear everything. He would be describing something in 27 ways. There was pain and gentleness everything jammed into each number.
— Michael Ondaatje, Coming Through Slaughter
Music expresses feeling, that is to say, gives shape and habitation to feeling, not in space but in time. To the extent that music has a history that is more than a history of its formal evolution, our feelings must have a history too. Perhaps certain qualities of feeling that found expression in music can be recorded by being notated on paper, have become so remote that we can no longer inhabit them as feelings, can get a grasp of them only after long training in the history and philosophy of music, the philosophical history of music, the history of music as a history of the feeling soul.
— J.M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year
Yet, for my part, I was never usually squeamish; I could sometimes eat a fried rat with a good relish, if it were necessary. I am glad to have drunk water so long, for the same reason that I prefer the natural sky to an opium-eater’s heaven. I would fain keep sober always; and there are infinite degrees of drunkenness. I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man; wine is not so noble a liquor; and think of dashing the hopes of a morning with a cup of warm coffee, or of an evening with a dish of tea! Ah, how low I fail when I am tempted by them! Even music may be intoxicating. Such apparently slight causes destroyed Greece and Rome, and will destroy England and America. Of all ebriosity, who does not prefer to be intoxicated by the air he breathes?
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
The sheer force of the music calls for a wild audience reaction.
— Emanuel Ax
Rush to danger
—  wind up nowhere.
A long apprenticeship is the most logical way to success. The only alternative is overnight stardom, but I can't give you a formula for that. 
— Chet Atkins
Diazapam (that's valium), temazepam, lithium, ECT, HRT - how long must I stay on this stuff? Don't give me anymore!
— Morrissey
(regarding the prelude from suite two)... The key is minor, the three notes a tragic triad. The tones move closer and closer to a harrowing vision, weaving spiter-like, relentlessly gathering sound into thighter concentric circle that come to an abrupt stop. Nothing fills the empty space. A tiny prayer is uttered.
— Eric Siblin, The Cello Suites
Music is the weapon in the war against unhappiness.
— Jason Mraz
Some days there won't be a song in your heart. Sing anyway.
— Emory Austin
There is a music for lonely hearts nearly always. If the music dies down there is a silence. Almost the same as the movement of music. To know silence perfectly is to know music.
— Carl Sandburg, Good Morning, America
Life is not breaths you take, but the moments that take your breath away.
— George Strait
Music is a world within itself, with a language we all understand.
— Stevie Wonder
My mother says we’re supposed to make mistakes. That’s the way we learn.” Rocky Ryan in Bully At Ambush Corner.
— Karen Mueller Coombs
There are millions of chords. There are millions of numbers. And everyone forgets the one that is a zero. But without the zero, numbers are just arithmetic. Without the empty chord, music is just noise.
— Terry Pratchett, Soul Music
I'm an artist. I'm an artist and I'm going to make art! Art arty art art.
— Andy Beirsack
I do not like the raw sound of the human voice in unison unless it is under the discipline of music.
— Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor
Jesus take the wheel
— Carrie Underwood
I started out with nothing and I've still got most of it left.
— Seasick Steve
They say that time Heals everythingBut they dob't know youAnd the scars you bring
— The Wanted
In the world of Big Macks Starbucks coffee and oversized SUVS it was business as usual snort and go
— Saira Viola, Crack Apple And Pop!
After dinner Natasha went to the clavichord, at Prince Andrey's request, and began singing. Prince Andrey stood at the window, talking to the ladies, and listened to her. In the middle of a phrase, Prince Andrey ceased speaking, and felt suddenly a lump in his throat from tears, the possibility of which he had never dreamed of in himself. He looked at Natasha singing, and something new and blissful stirred in his soul. He was happy, and at the same time he was sad. He certainly had nothing to weep about, but he was ready to weep. For what? For his past love? For the little princess? For his lost illusions? For his hopes for the future? Yes, and no. The chief thing which made him ready to weep was a sudden, vivid sense of the fearful contrast between something infinitely great and illimitable existing in him, and something limited and material, which he himself was, and even she was. This contrast made his heart ache, and rejoiced him while she was singing.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
No second chances in the land of a thousand dances, the valley of ten million insanities.
— Ry Cooder, Los Angeles Stories
I didn't just hear music. It seemed as if I were part of the music.
— Don Piper, 90 Minutes in Heaven: A True Story of Death and Life
My mind begs for you in the soft, secret, silent places of the night... I thirst for you and without you my soul is a desert. I thought when I first met you, first saw you, that I loved you more than any woman had ever loved a man, but now I know the feeling only grows within me. You are the song I sing each day, each moment, each second. You are the melody of my life...
— Gloria   Smith, Love Tears
Big fat hairy monkey, hands a couple of octaves wide?
— Terry Pratchett, Soul Music
We act out our lives to a soundtrack, thought Isabel, the music that becomes, for a spell, out favourite and is listened to again and again until it stands for the time itself. But that was about all the scripting that we achieved; the rest, for most of us, was extemporising.
— Alexander McCall Smith, The Right Attitude to Rain
His touch was like a bard's on his instrument, and it awakened a deep and mysterious music in my body.
— Juliet Marillier, Heir to Sevenwaters
A bit of the vagueness of music stops you going completely mad, I imagine.
— Sebastian Faulks, Engleby
Every hidden cell is throbbing with music and life, every fiber thrilling like harp strings.
— John Muir, The Wilderness World of John Muir
There's something beautifully friendly and elevating about a bunch of guys playing music together. This wonderful little world that is unassailable. It's really teamwork, one guy supporting the others, and it's all for one purpose, and there's no flies in the ointment, for a while. And nobody conducting, it's all up to you. It's really jazz__that's the big secret. Rock and roll ain't nothing but jazz with a hard backbeat.
— Keith Richards, Life
The music was more than music- at least what we are used to hearing. The music was feeling itself. The sound connected instantly with something deep and joyous. Those powerful moments of true knowledge that we have to paper over with daily life. The music tapped the back of our terrors, too. Things we'd lived through and didn't want to ever repeat. Shredded imaginings, unadmitted longings, fear and also surprisingly pleasures. No, we can't live at that pitch. But every so often something shatters like ice and we are in the river of our existence. We are aware. And this realization was in the music, somehow, or in the way Shamengwa played it.
— Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves
Endeavour to play easy pieces well and with elegance
—  that is better than to play difficult pieces badly.
I wish the government would put a tax on pianos for the incompetent.
— Edith Sitwell
Fame is not so impossible for people with charisma, passion and talent. Being famous just means you have fans, and even one or two is enough to make you someone special. Ask a music fan who the best guitarist of all time is, and while one group insists that it was Jimmi Hendrix, another group swears that it was Eddie Van Halen instead. There will never be a time when everyone on this planet agrees on something like that, but luckily that's not important. All that matters is that both sides remain loyal, which they will assuming you continue to be who you are and do your thing. This is all that you need to be immortalized.
— Ashly Lorenzana
I'm so cool that the kids come to my bedroom and go, 'Mom! Turn the music down!
— Melissa Etheridge
I listen'd, motionless and still;And, as I mounted up the hill,The music in my heart I bore,Long after it was heard no more.
— William Wordsworth, The Major Works
Owls hoot in B flat, cuckoos in D, but the water ousel sings in the voice of the stream. She builds her nest back of the waterfalls so the water is a lullaby to the little ones. Must be where they learn it.
— Karen Joy Fowler, Sarah Canary
The verse is supposed to get you hard so the chorus can suck you off.
— M. Thomas Gammarino, Big in Japan: A (Hungry) Ghost Story
You all have a gift. It's free. It's the gift of song.
— Christine E. Schulze, The Silver Stag
If I were to begin life again, I would devote it to music. It is the only cheap and unpunished rapture upon earth. 
— Sydney Smith
You know, people can't fall in love with me just because I'm good at what I do.
— Robert Plant
When Johnson started singing, he seemed like a guy who could have sprung from the head of Zeus in full armor.
— Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Vol. 1
For the children around the world without a home, say a prayer tonight.
— Third Day
Why don't you find out for yourself?Then you'll see the glass, hidden in the grass.
— Morrissey
In the hall itself the din of the music - for this is the real way to play a jukebox and what it was originally for - was so tremendous that it shattered Dean and Stan and me for a moment in the realization that we had never dared to play music as we wanted, and this was how loud we wanted.
— Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The Original Scroll
He stilled my room, for sure.
— Suze Rotolo, A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties. Suze Rotolo
There is a folk-tale about a shoemaker and his wife who were so poor that they had to send their many children out into the world to make a living. The lads went through many a perilous adventure but came home in the end, unscathed, to help their mother. They had always remembered their mother's advice and wise words; they often quoted them when they were in trouble, and in fact they recognized one another by them in foreign lands.The countless peoples of the world may be looked upon as so many children sent out into the world. They have gone through many adventures and hardships. They have drifted apart and fallen out with one another, on many occasions. They have failed to realize soon enough that they are brothers.But now it seems that they are beginning to realize this -- at least to the extent that they are able to get acquainted with each other's fundamental natures -- through their stories and songs.
— Gyula Illyés, Once Upon a Time: Forty Hungarian Folk-Tales
We've both got a million bad habits to kick, not sleeping is one. We're biting our nails, you're biting my lip, I'm biting my tongue.
— Lorde, Lorde - Pure Heroine Songbook
It bewildered Ig, the idea that a person could not be interested in music. It was like not being interested in happiness.
— Joe Hill, Horns
Dancing is creating a sculpture that is visible only for a moment.
— Erol Ozan
I’m proud of you, son,” he said. “I guess it has finally sunk in that it’s important to stand up for yourself in this world.”Rocky shook his head. “It’s more important to stand up for someone who can’t stand up for herself,” he had answered.Rocky Ryan speaking with his father.
— Karen Mueller Coombs, Bully at Ambush Corner
Noise has one advantage. It drowns out words. And suddenly he realized that all his life he had done nothing but talk, write, lecture, concoct sentences, search for formulations and amend them, so in the end no words were precise, their meanings were obliterated, their content lost, they turned into trash, chaff dust, sand; prowling through his brain, tearing at his head. they were his insomnia, his illness. And what he yearned for at that moment, vaguely, but with all his might, was unbounded music, absolute sound, a pleasant and happy all-encompassing, over-poering, window-rattling din to engulf, once and for all, the pain, the futility, the vanity of words. Music was the negation of sentences, music was the anti-word!
— Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Music is everything and nothing. It is useless and no limit can be set on its use. Music takes me to places of illimitable sensual and insensate joy, accessing points of ecstasy that no angelic lover could ever locate, or plunging me into gibbering weeping hells of pain that no torturer could devise. Music makes me write this sort of maundering adolescent nonsense without embarrassment. Music is in fact the dog's bollocks. Nothing else comes close.
— Stephen Fry, Moab Is My Washpot
Hey Jude, don't make it bad, take a sad song and make it better.
— The Beatles
As one old gentleman put it, " Son, I don't care if you're stark nekkid and wear a bone in your nose. If you kin fiddle, you're all right with me. It's the music we make that counts.
— Robert Fulghum, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten
Music helps us understand where we have come from but, more importantly, what has happened to us.
— Simon Van Booy, Love Begins in Winter: Five Stories
Life is a chain of choices. Making the correct one is never easy.”“That’s for sure,” agreed Rocky.“But if we didn’t make difficult choices, right or wrong,” said Mr. Veraldi, “we wouldn’t learn anything worth knowing." Rocky Ryan and his viola teacher, Mr. Veraldi, in Bully at Ambush Corner.
— Karen Mueller Coombs, Bully at Ambush Corner
One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn't, the wolves and blizzards will be at one's throat all the sooner.
— David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
This is one of my favorite things about the Underground: the crashing of the cymbals, the screeching guitar riffs, music that moves into the blood and makes you feel hot and wild and alive.
— Lauren Oliver, Hana
The way I choose to show my feelings is through my songs.
— Marianne Faithfull
Without music life would B flat
— Dulcinea Martinez
My mind is killing me”— The Glass Child, Stuck In My Mind
— Charlotte Eriksson
Music is very personal. It means different things to different people. To you it means belonging. To me it means knowing I exist.
— Simon Cheshire, Plastic Fantastic
The harp sounds at each passing breeze, but that does not mean the tune is masterfully played.
— Jacqueline Carey, Kushiel's Chosen
Music is a language that speaks to people emotions.
— The Unknown
Learning music by reading about it is like making love by mail.
— Luciano Pavarotti
Put some muscle into it! Channel your inner Trent Reznor!
— Robin Benway, Audrey, Wait!
Some girls are bigger than others.
— Morrissey
Play always as if in the presence of a master.
— Robert Schumann
The aim and final end of all music should be none other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul.
— Johann Sebastian Bach
Who are you, Martin Eden? he demanded of himself in the looking- glass, that night when he got back to his room. He gazed at himself long and curiously. Who are you? What are you? Where do you belong? You belong by rights to girls like Lizzie Connolly. You belong with the legions of toil, with all that is low, and vulgar, and unbeautiful. You belong with the oxen and the drudges, in dirty surroundings among smells and stenches. There are the stale vegetables now. Those potatoes are rotting. Smell them, damn you, smell them. And yet you dare to open the books, to listen to beautiful music, to learn to love beautiful paintings, to speak good English, to think thoughts that none of your own kind thinks, to tear yourself away from the oxen and the Lizzie Connollys and to love a pale spirit of a woman who is a million miles beyond you and who lives in the stars! Who are you? and what are you? damn you! And are you going to make good?
— Jack London, Martin Eden
Modern man is full of platitudes about living life to its fullest, with catchy keychain phrases and little plaques for kitchen walls. But if you've never retreated to the solitude of a dark room and listened to Beethoven's Ninth from start to finish, you know nothing. For music is a transcendental exploration of human emotion and experience, the very fabric of life in its purest form. And the Ninth our greatest musical achievement.
— Tiffany Madison