c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Take the time to make some sense for what you wanna say,And cast your words away upon the waves.Sail them home with acquiesce on a ship of hope today,And as they land upon the shore,Tell them not to fear no more.I'm not saying right is wrong,It's up to us to make the best of all the things that come our way.Cos' everything that's been has past,The answers in the looking glass.There's four and twenty million doorsOn life's endless corridor,So say it loud and sing it proud today.
— Noel Gallagher
The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world
—  it will acceptthose whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected.
Butterflies, butterfliesThey were meant to flyYou and i, you and iWe were colours in the sky
— The Wanted
Sometimes I think life is just a rodeo, the trick is to ride and make it to the bell.
— John Fogerty
A piece of music is an experience to be taken by itself.
— B.F. Skinner, Walden Two
Hardcore without punk isn't music, it's a genre of porn. And punk isn't a genre of music, it’s a thought process.
— Dominic Owen Mallary
I won't look back to regret yesterday, we're not handed tomorrow so I'll live for today
— 3 Doors Down
Music is what I have to do, I only answer the questions so that I can do it.
— Jack White
Music took her somewhere, and I used to wonder where. I thought it was dumb, the way she lived for a collection of sounds, for someone else's words and notes.
— Megan Lindholm, The Inheritance
The Little Drummer Boy" was playing in the background for what seemed like the third time in a row. I fought off an urge to beat that Little Drummer Boy seneless with his own drumsticks.
— Dana Reinhardt, How to Build a House
My life is music, and in some vague, mysterious and subconscious way, I have always been driven by a taut inner spring which has propelled me to almost compulsively reach for perfection in music, often - in fact, mostly - at the expense of everything else in my life.
— Stan Getz
Music is love.
— Yvonne Prinz, The Vinyl Princess
Music without the ebb and flow would be like "watching a film with only good guys in it." -attrib Frank Zappa
— John Powell, How Music Works: The Science and Psychology of Beautiful Sounds, from Beethoven to the Beatles and Beyond
How can you understand the language of music, if you will not be an instrument?”—Zarost
— Greg Hamerton, Second Sight
When people would ask me what I’m addicted to, I always said ‘music.’ And while they’d laugh it off like it’s a cliché, I’m actually a complete shopaholic when it comes to records. I’d literally buy 10 albums a week for years, so when I went to that Virgin Records and it said ‘going out of business,’ my heart stopped.
— Blake Lewis
The connection being that in my head all language began in song and that the best stories inevitably reutrn to song, to a state of rapture. For years, I had assumed that throwing beautiful words at the page would make my prose feel true. But I had the process exactly backward. It was truth that lifted the language into beauty and toward song. It was a matter of doing what Joe Henry did, of pursuing characters into moments of emotional truth and slowing down. The result was a compression of sensual and psychological detail that released the rhythm and melody in language itself, what Longfellow called "the happy accidents of language.
— Steve Almond, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life: A Book by and for the Fanatics Among Us
Jazz will endure as long as people hear it through their feet instead of their brains 
— John Philip Sousa
want people to rock out in the car and not care that people are watching, I love that feeling when the sequences are all perfect and you can just press play. I want the music to take you on a journey.
— Blake Lewis
Society, you're a crazy breed.
— Eddie Vedder
Virgin suicideWhat was that she cried?No use in stayin'On this holocaust rideShe gave me her cherryShe's my virgin suicide
— Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides
But had I accepted the pickle juice, I would be drinking pickle juice right now.
— Nicki Minaj
I grew up in a utopia, I did. California when I was a child was a child's paradise, I was healthy, well fed, well clothed, well housed. I went to school and there were libraries with all the world in them and after school I played in orange groves and in Little League and in the band and down at the beach and every day was an adventure. . . . I grew up in utopia.
— Kim Stanley Robinson, Pacific Edge
A kiss is a course of procedure cunningly devised, for the mutual stopage of speech at a moment when words are superfluous.
— Oliver Herford
It's not enough just to do those things anymore; what you must do instead if you want success on any large scale is either figure out a way of getting yourself associated in the audience's mind with their pieties and their sense of 'community,' i.e. ram it home that you're one of THEM; or, alternately, deck and bake yourself into an image configuration so blatant or outrageous that you become a culture myth.
— Lester Bangs
People usually complain that music is so ambiguous, and what they are supposed to think when they hear it is so unclear, while words are understood by everyone. But for me it is exactly the opposite...what the music I love expresses to me are thoughts not to indefinite for words, but rather too definite.
— Felix Mendelssohn
The chef who cooks without a song on his lips cannot hope to infuse the right carefree improvisatory note into his art.
— James Hamilton-Paterson, Cooking with Fernet Branca
I just got into the Beatles a couple of years ago, you know, I like it.
— Ziggy Marley
It's in my genes. My mother was an opera singer. I'm clearly dramatic.
— Mariah Carey
The Peruvian flute music is . . . cool. In this music, they have not yet invented the industrial revolution that leads to excessive punctuality or the failed experiment they call the nuclear family. This is the music of elements, untarnished, unrehearsed.
— Kate Braverman, Small Craft Warnings: Stories
Our musicians in residence carry this belief into the classroom. They don't think of children's self-esteem as so fragile that it will be shattered by the suggestion that the child guessed wrong or jumped to an invalid conclusion. They make corrections matter-of-factly, with no feeling that a chid is a failure because she has made an error, but with ocnfidence that the feedback will help the child learn and be accurate the next time.
— Peter Perret, A Well-Tempered Mind: Using Music to Help Children Listen and Learn
She wasn't actually speaking to me, she was singing a kind of lullaby of talk. But, eventually, the music stopped. 
— Alice Sebold
The musician has the most brothers, and the dancer the most sisters.
— Alexandra Chauran, HerStory: Fiction Honoring Women's History Month
Look, dude, you've sampled your life, mixed those sounds with a funk precedent, and established a sixteen-bar system of government for the entire rhythm nation. Set the Dj up as the executive, the legislative, and judicial branches. I mean, after listening to your beat, anything I've heard on the pop radio in the last five years feels like a violation of my civil rights.
— Paul Beatty, Slumberland
And I knowThe scariest part is letting goCause love is a ghost you can’t control
— Christina Perri
To grow a melody?" "You can't grow a melody on purpose,” she said, and slyly added, “you have to plant an accidental.
— Gregory Maguire, Son of a Witch
We stood there for a minute or two, with John swaying gently against my arm. 'I'm feeling better,' he announced. Then he looked up at the stars. 'Wow..' he intoned. 'Look at that! Isn't that amazing?".I followed his gaze. The stars did look good but they didn't look that good. It was very unlike John to be over the top in that way. I stared at him. He was wired-pin-sharp and quivering, resonating away like a human tuning fork.No sooner had John uttered his immortal words about the stars than George and Paul came bursting out on the roof. They had come tearing up from the studio as soon as they found out where we were. They knew why John was feeling unwell. Maybe everyone else did, too - everyone except for father-figure George Martin here!It was very simple. John was tripping on LSD. He had taken it by mistake, they said - he had meant to take an amphetamine tablet. That hardly made any difference, frankly; the fact was that John was only too likely to imagine he could fly, and launch himself off the low parapet that ran around the roof. They had been absolutely terrified that he might do so. I spoke to Paul about this night many years later, and he confirmed that he and George had been shaken rigid when they found out we were up on the roof. They knew John was having a what you might call a bad trip. John didn't go back to Weybridge that night; Paul took him home to his place, in nearby Cavendish Road. They were intensely close, remember, and Paul would do almost anything for John. So, once they were safe inside, Paul took a tablet of LSD for the first time, 'So I could get with John' as he put it- be with him in his misery and fear.What about that for friendship?
— George Martin, With a Little Help from My Friends: The Making of Sgt. Pepper
For someone so conflicted, who am I to give advice to anybody? It’s such a funny, grandiose idea
— Florence Welch
Pianos, unlike people, sing when you give them your every growl. They know how to dive into the pit of your stomach and harmonize with your roars when you’ve split yourself open. And when they see you, guts shining, brain pulsing, heart right there exposed in a rhythm that beats need need, need need, need need, pianos do not run. And so she plays.
— Francesca Lia Block, Love Magick
The power of music, whether joyous or cathartic must steal on one unawares, come spontaneously as a blessing or a grace--
— Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
So imagine that the lovely moon is playing just for you - everything makes music if you really want it to.
— Giles Andreae
In this Music [the singing of the angels in harmony] the World was begun; for Iluvatar made visible the song of the Ainur,and they beheld it as a light in the darkness.
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion
The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, 'Is there a meaning to music?' My answer would be, 'Yes.' And 'Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?' My answer to that would be, 'No'.
— Aaron Copland, What to Listen for in Music
What can a man do with music who is not benevolent?
— Confucius, The Analects
Music’s the soundtrack of my life and has been since I was a teenager. There’s always music. If I’m not playing it, I’m listening to it. With my writing…sometimes it inspires a story, sometimes it highlights something I’m working on, sometimes it simply helps me stay in the narrative mood.
— Charles de Lint
There is simply no limit to the tyrannical snobbery that otherwise decent people can descend into when it comes to music.
— Stephen Fry, Moab Is My Washpot
It's asking for trouble to listen to music alone.
— Janice Galloway, The Trick Is to Keep Breathing
As Steve draws me closer to the band, all I can see is a frenzied mass of seething, writhing people, like a many-headed sea snake, grinding, waving their arms, stamping their feet, jumping. No rules, just energy - so much energy, you could harness it; I bet you could power Portland for a decade. It is more than a wave. It's a tide, an ocean of bodies.
— Lauren Oliver, Hana
This ain't the heartbreak hotel even though I know it well.Those no shows should you tell in the way you hold yourself.Don't you fret should you get another cancellation, give me a chance and I'll make a permanent reservation.In your heart in your, I can tell you fit one more
— The Wanted
The houses have been condemned on Memory LaneI’m tired of this struggle that leaves everything the sameI’ve tried so hard to make it workthat I’m dying insideWell, you can take my pastBut you can’t have my tomorrowPromises that remain promises are useless and they’re cheapI wish I could put a price on words so I could make them keepI put so much faith in youI lost all my faith in meWell, you can take my pastBut you can’t have my tomorrowI’m giving up on giving upI can’t leave it all to prayer‘Cause the first step in getting betteris knowing what’s not thereYou said you’d make it betterand that just makes it worseWell, you can take my pastBut you can’t have my tomorrowYes, I want my life to lastSo you can’t have my tomorrowNo, you can’t have my tomorrow
— David Levithan, Wide Awake
My first kiss. A new kind of kiss, like the new kind of music still playing, softly, in the distance - wild and arrhythmic, desperate. Passionate.
— Lauren Oliver
A good song should life your heart, warm the soul and make you feel good.
— Colbie Caillat
Do you realize why is it I'm so driven to operate within the Establishment? It's vengeance. 'Hope I die before I get old' is something I still have to live with, but not for the reason many people think. I have to be very, very vigilant not to become one of those people I despised.
— Pete Townshend
There was the noise itself, which he thought of vaguely as the noise of classical music, sameish and rhetorical, full of feelings people surely never had
— Alan Hollinghurst, The Stranger's Child
Cayse you left a jagged hole.And I can' stand it any more.
— The Wanted
It's not easy in this phosphorescent gloom telling waking dreams apart anyhow.
— Aimee Mann
One Life, with each other, Sisters, Brothers...
— Bono
I am in the world only for the purpose of composing.
— Franz Schubert
I will fucking kill you and anyone else who gets in the way of me and my tunes.
— Bradley Sands, Rico Slade Will Fucking Kill You
...music is the key to life
— D.M.X.
If, while at the piano, you attempt to form little melodies, that is very well; but if they come into your mind of themselves, when you are not practising, you may be still more pleased; for the internal organ of music is then roused in you. The fingers must do what the head desires; not the contrary.
— Robert Schumann
...I have sometimes thought that the mere hearing of those songs would do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject could do.I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning of those rude and apparently incoherent songs. I was myself within the circle; so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear. They told a tale of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension; they were tones loud, long, and deep; they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with bitterest anguish. Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains. The hearing of those wild notes always depressed my spirit, and filled me with ineffable sadness. I have frequently found myself in tears while hearing them. The mere recurrence to those songs, even now, afflicts me; and while I am writing these lines, an expression of feeling has already found its way down my cheek. To those songs I trace my first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery. I can never get rid of that conception. Those songs still follow me, to deepen my hatred of slavery, and quicken my sympathies for my brethren in bonds. If any one wishes to be impressed with the soul-killing effects of slavery, let him go to Colonel Lloyd's plantation, and, on allowance-day, place himself in the deep pine woods, and there let him, in silence, analyze the sounds that shall pass through the chambers of his soul, - and if he is not thus impressed, it will only be because "there is no flesh in his obdurate heart."I have often been utterly astonished, since I came to the north, to find persons who could speak of the singing, among slaves, as evidence of their contentment and happiness. It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake. Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears. At least, such is my experience. I have often sung to drown my sorrow, but seldom to express my happiness. Crying for joy, and singing for joy, were alike uncommon to me while in the jaws of slavery. The singing of a man cast away upon a desolate island might be as appropriately considered as evidence of contentment and happiness, as the singing of a slave; the songs of the one and of the other are prompted by the same emotion.
— Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
You could name practically any problem in the hood and there'd be a rap song for you.
— Jay-Z, Decoded
Rap has been a path between cultures in the best tradition of popular music.
— Jay-Z, Decoded
I was captured by music at a really early age. I was really captured by it. Everything about it. It was my mother… It was my father… It was my play thing. It was my toy. It was the best thing in my life.
— Jeff Buckley
There is no pattern the human mind can devise that does not exist already within the bounds of nature...Everything we do, see, write, notate, all are an echo of the deep seams of the universe. Music is the invisible world made visible through sound.
— Kate Mosse, Sepulchre
if the main reason we listen to music in the first place is to hear passion expressed- as i've believed all my life-then what good is this music going to prove to be? what does that say about us? what are we confirming in ourselves by doting on art that is emotionally neutral? and, simultaneously, what in ourselves might we be destroying or at least keeping down?
— Lester Bangs, Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader
Yeah – Sure I rememberMatter of fact it was just last SeptemberShe still calls it the fall to rememberLittle Heather when it all came togetherYou remember the first time you met her?She cried when it rained and blamed the weatherBut inside she strained with suicide lettersThe kind of cold you couldn’t warm with a sweater Hardly lasted past December She said she was headed down to defeat That’s the last you’d seen and never had dreamed That the same little Heather – It’s who you saw last weekIn an instant you couldn’t have missed her gleamAs she listened she looked like a distant queen With a difference, there for all to seeShe found a different – A different kind of free
— ZOEgirl, Zoegirl - Different Kind of Free
It was like being at an Arabian hoedown with a band of psychedelic hillbillies (p. 171).
— Patti Smith, Just Kids
The music brought us what it seemed / We had long desired, but in a form / so rarefied there was no emptiness of sensation
— John Ashbery, Some Trees
Two people, two hands, and two songs, in this case "Big Shot" and "Bette Davis Eyes." The lyrics of the two songs provided no commentary, honest or ironic, on the proceedings. They were merely there and always underfoot, the insistent gray muck that was pop culture. It stuck to our shoes and we tracked it through our lives.
— Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor
He had a clear, lyrical voice and his songs remained in her ears long after the music had ended.
— Hiroko Sherwin, Eight Million Gods and Demons
Opera lovers may be the narrowest people in the world.
— Haruki Murakami, After the Quake
Don't worry about the future, sooner or later it's the past. If they say the feeling's gone then it's time to take it back.
— Meat Loaf
I just want to hear something I haven't heard before
— John Peel
If we could only turn back time
— Kate Winslet
You have to feel the mix and you have to feel the work and the sweet somehow which somebody is investing in that moment in the way that you can really feel the passion.
— Tobias Thomas
Listen to this, Nimit. Follow Coleman Hawkins' improvised lines very carefully. He is using them to tell us something. Pay very close attention. He is telling us the story of the free spirit that is doing everything it can to escape from within him. That same kind of spirit is inside me, inside you. There--you can hear it, I'm sure: the hot breath, the shivering heart. (Thailand)
— Haruki Murakami, After the Quake
The “music of decline” had sounded, as in that wonderful Chinese fable; like a thrumming bass on the organ its reverberations faded slowly out over decades; its throbbing could be heard in the corruption of the schools, periodicals, and universities, in melancholia and insanity among those artists and critics who could still be taken seriously; it raged as untrammeled and amateurish overproduction in all the arts.
— Hermann Hesse
I have my own particular sorrows, loves, delights; and you have yours. But sorrow, gladness, yearning, hope, love, belong to all of us, in all times and in all places. Music is the only means whereby we feel these emotions in their universality.
— Overstreet
I like the smell of my Grandma's soap - I used to sit in the bath and eat it.
— Carl Barât
A good country song takes a page out of someone's life, and puts it into music.
— Conway Twitty
What is the purpose of writing music? One is, of course, not dealing with purposes but dealing with sounds. Or the answer must take the form of a paradox: a purposeful purposeless or a purposeless play. This play, however, is an affirmation of life--not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.
— John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings
Now that rock is turning 50, it's become classical itself. It's interesting to see that development.
— Björk
Then the bow orchestra began to play an apocalyptically beautiful canon, one of those pieces in which, surely, the composer simply transcribed what was given, and trembled in awe of the hand that was guiding him.
— Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale
Only time will set you free, just like me
— George Michael
The sound of the king's music made Despereaux's soul grow large and light inside of him.
— Kate DiCamillo, The Tale of Despereaux
Its language is a language which the soul alone understands, but which the soul can never translate. 
— Arnold Bennett
Years and years ago, I read a great interview with Jam and Lewis, the R&B producers, in which they described what it was like to be members of Prince's band. They'd sit down, and Prince would tell them what he wanted them to play, and they'd explain that they couldn't--they weren't quick enough, or good enough. And Prince would push them and push them until they mastered it, and then just when they were feeling pleased with themselves for accomplishing something they didn't know they had the capacity for, he'd tell them the dance steps he needed to accompany the music.This story has stuck with me, I think, because it seems like an encapsulation of the very best and most exciting kind of creative process.
— Nick Hornby, The Polysyllabic Spree
This mournful and restless sound was a fit accompaniment to my meditations.
— Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim
Cops and Robbers in 1965 England was still a kind of Ealing comedy: crimes rarely involved firearms. The denizens of F-wing were losers in a game they had been playing against the cops. In queues for exercise, the constant questions were 'What you in for, mate?', followed by 'What you reckon you'll get?' When Freddie and I responded with 'Suspicion of drug possession' and 'We're innocent, we'll get off' they would burst into laughter, offering: 'Listen, mate, they wouldn't have you in here if they had any intention of letting you off. You're living in dreamland, you are.
— Joe Boyd, White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s
He was waiting for me at the best table in the room, toying with a glass of white wine and listening to the pianist who was playing a piece by Granados with velvet fingers.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game
I've never feared the unexpected.
— Kate Voegele
It is as though they simply cannot contemplate the notion of a short, slight man who dresses and moves like a popular (mis)conception of a homosexual being attractive to millions of women.
— Dave   Hill, Prince: A Pop Life
Led Zep played with light and shade, ear-splitting noise and echoing quiet. They could do it all.
— Quinton Skinner
Fans are what make a performer and I've always taken them seriously.
— Charley Pride, Pride: The Charley Pride Story
I've been working on my craft for a long time. People never want to let go of the whole 'Glitter,'... I'm like, 'It's eight years later, people. Let's move on.
— Mariah Carey
Music That Brings, The Meaning Of our Life.Music That Shows, The Light From Our Soul.When This Music Touch Our Hear, We call it TRANCE.When This Music Control Our Emotion We call it "THE SENSATION OF TRANCE
— Saumya Mohanty
he was home on his own and listening to the sort of music he needed to listen to when he felt like this, music that seemed to find the sore spot in him and press up hard against it...
— Nick Hornby, About a Boy
You see, there's some blues for folks ain't never had a thing, and that's a sad blues ... but the saddest kind of blues is for them that's had everything they ever wanted and has lost it, and knows it won't come back no more. Ain't no sufferin' in this world worse than that; and that's the blue we call 'I Had It But It's All Gone Now.
— Ken Grimwood, Replay
Songs are dangerous, songs are subversive and can change your life.
— Ronnie Gilbert
Her silent singing wrapped around the story she was telling herself, which she extended further every night on the deck. (Averill often told herself stories-- the activity seemed to her as unavoidable as dreaming.) Her singing was a barrier set between the world in her head and the world outside, between her body and the onslaught of the stars.
— Alice Munro, Friend of My Youth
You can't live life being second best.
— Alex Trimble performed by Two Door Cinema Club
When she listened to songs that she loved on the radio, something stirred inside her. A liquid ache spread under her skin, and she walked out of the world like a witch.
— Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
Music evokes emotion and emotion can bring it's memory.
— Oliver Sacks
You can kill people with sound. And if you can kill, then maybe there is also the sound that is opposite of killing. And the distance between these two points is very big. And you are free--you can choose. In art everything is possible, but everything is not necessary.
— Arvo Pärt
Don't give up. It's just the weight of the world.
— Josh Groban
Life…was much like a song. In the beginning there is mystery, in the end there is confirmation, but it’s in the middle where all the emotion resides to make the whole thing worthwhile.
— Nicholas Sparks, The Last Song
So cry if you need to, but I can't stay to watch you. That's the wrong thing to do. Touch if you need to, but I can't stay to hold you. That's the wrong thing to do.Talk if you need to, but I can't stay to hear you. That's the wrong thing to do. Cause you say you love me, and I'll end up lying and say I love you too.
— Drake
I love people who play guitars on roofs!" said Rose, hopping along the pavement in one of her sudden happy moods. "Don't you?""Never knew anyone else who did it!""Don't you like Tom?""Of course I do. But I don't know about all the other guitar-on-roof players! They might be really awful people, with just that one good thing about them. Playing guitars on roofs... or bagpipes... Or drums... Sarah would like that, and Saffy could have the bagpipes! Caddy could have a harp.... What about Mum?""One of those gourds filled with beans!" said Rose at once. "And Daddy could have a grand piano. On a flat roof. With a balcony and pink flowers in pots around the edge! And I'll have a very loud trumpet! What about you?""I'll just listen," said Indigo.
— Hilary McKay, Indigo's Star
We're deaf men working as musicians
—  we play the music but we can't hear it.
I am tough for a reason and it is to fucking destroy the music. I dance hard.
— Hannah Moskowitz, Gone, Gone, Gone
When it happens that I am more moved by the song than the thing which is sung, I confess that I sin in a manner deserving punishment
— Augustine of Hippo
I don’t care if he hangs out with Skream/Benga or whoever,” he spat, “it’s just pure nonsense to ruin a hardcore genre with gay synths, chopped chipmunk vocals and cheesy poppy shit just so you can make a shitload of money and be an icon to a fanbase that consists of 13 year old wannabe dubheads and doesn’t know shit about music.
— Skrillex
Music is a holy place, a cathedral so majestic that we can sense the magnificence of the universe.
— Don Campbell
I believe that music is connected by human passions and curiosities rather than by marketing strategies.
— Elvis Costello
We're not into music. We're into chaos.
— Steve Jones
Tragically we’ve forgotten the reason we’re even here at all.Worst still, we remember it’s just that we feel so comfortable.Do we notice, do we even careAll the people that are lost out there?Don’t you remember how it felt ‘til someone showed you the way?
— Anthem Lights
All these years the people said 'He’s acting like a kid.' He did not know he could not fly, so he did. Well he’s one of those that knows that life is just a leap of faith. So spread your arms, hold your breath and always trust your cape.
— Guy Clark
There were no ideas in music, only touch and instinct and sometimes grace—the mechanical tools—and that among those who were given the tools, only a few, a scant few, would be able to tell you something true.
— Will Boast, Power Ballads
The radio is in the hands of such a lot of fools tryin' to anesthetize the way that you feel.
— Elvis Costello
I'm in love with a girl who knows me better.Fell for the woman just when I met her.Took my sweet time when I was bitter.Someone understands,She knows how treat a fella right.Give me that feeling every night,She wants show love when I wanna fight,Now someone understand me.
— Juxtaposition
Many people don’t realize the connection between music and literature and I’m here to tell them that it does exist!
— Veronika Carnaby
The music of the future will not entertainIt's only meant to repress and neutralize your brain
— Porcupine Tree
I play chicken with the train
— Cowboy Troy
There is certainly a universal and unconscious propensity to impose a rhythm even when one hears a series of identical sounds at constant intervals... We tend to hear the sound of a digital clock, for example, as "tick-tock, tick-tock" - even though it is actually "tick tick, tick tick.
— Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
There is no good singing, there is only present and absent.
— Jeff Buckley
In the three minutes it takes the song to play I'm caught in a magic world of harmony and joy, a truly ecstatic joy, where the aching longing to be somewhere else, out of this city, out of this country, out of this body and out of this life, is kept at bay.
— Christos Tsiolkas, Loaded
Bring wings to the weak and bring grace to the strongMay all evil stumble as it flies in the worldAll the tribes comes and the mighty will crumbleWe must brave this night and have faith in love
— Janelle Monáe
By the sweet power of music: therefore the poet did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones and floods; since nought so stockish, hard and full of rage, but music for the time doth change his nature. The man that hath no music in himself, nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils; The motions of his spirit are dull as night and his affections dark as Erebus: Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.
— William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
Here are all these people, full of heartache or hatred or desire, and we all have our troubles and the school year is filled with vulgarity and triviality and consequence, and there are all these teachers and kids of every shape and size, and there's this life we're struggling through full of shouting and tears and fights and break-ups and dashed hopes and unexpected luck -- it all disappears, just like that, when the choir begins to sing. Everyday life vanishes into song, you are suddenly overcome with a feeling of brotherhood, of deep solidarity, even love, and it diffuses the ugliness of everyday life into a spirit of perfect communion.
— Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog
The air was warm and heavy as sprinkles began to fall from the clouds high above. The Triton glided through the waters and the whoosh of the ship combined with the steady beat of the rain to make a concerto, like a pianist fluttering his fingers on the keys at one end and running his fingers up and down the scales at the other. Expectancy hung in the air as the tune moved to a crescendo.
— Victoria Kahler, Capturing the Sunset
The avant-garde is now an arrière-garde.
— Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past
Disco's are tricky. You look a total wally if you dance too early but after one crucial song tips the disco over, you look a sad saddo if you don't.
— David Mitchell, Black Swan Green
I guess in this culture of ever-shortening attention spans, it's good if a song can lift us out of the madness, even if only for a few minutes.
— Peter Bradley Adams
We all fall sometime, you're not the first. I know it hurts. In the end, you'll find what you deserve.
— Alter Bridge
You're maybe eighteen. Your mother didn't love you enough so you decided to pierce your lip and brand your body to piss her off. You hang around this band because they make you feel like you belong. And most days you wish you were in a band of your own, but you know that probably will never happen." I met his eyes waiting.I'm twenty. my mother has an assload of tattoos herself, she thinks its art. I have a lip ring because it turns girls on when I do this." He licked his lip, lingering on the metal for a couple intense seconds. My eyes fluttered with nervousness.
— Holly Hood, Ink
Music was a balm for any weary soul. It could either lift a person out of the doldrums or comfort him if there was no other solace to be had.
— Lisa S. Lewis, Love's Road Home
Why would you want to stand there waving a stick when you could be playing an instrument?
— Nigel Kennedy
I wanted to smell the guitars. It's hard to explain but they have a smell. And the best way I could ever describe it would be to say they smell like potential. Ambition and desire. If such things had a smell.
— Barbara Hall, Tempo Change
Music is our bidet, man.
— Tim Hensley, Wally Gropius
four geological eras had to pass so that human beings would be able to outsing the birds and die for love.
— Gabriel García Márquez
How does one say in the jargon of musicology that my sould was pulled out of me and thrown up in the air, to be tossed about by the music. How does one say that I breathed, that I existed, in harmony with the ups and downs of those notes. What kind of notes both elevate and cast down, exalt and crush?
— Yann Martel, The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios
Music
— Music
I've never heard of anybody getting rid of their prized Exile postcards, much less actually writing on them and sending them through the mail to a girl. I watched these two, laughing over this story at the same kitchen table they've shared for thirty years. I realize that I will never fully understand the millions of bizarre ways that music brings people together.
— Rob Sheffield, Love Is a Mix Tape
100% Reason to remember the name.
— Fort Minor
Well, normally I’m against big things. I think the world is going to be saved by millions of small things. Too many things can go wrong when they get big.” — Pete Seeger (on how he felt about attending his big 90th birthday bash last year)
— Pete Seeger
As early as 1930 Schoenberg wrote: "Radio is an enemy, a ruthless enemy marching irresistibly forward, and any resistance is hopeless"; it "force-feeds us music . . . regardless of whether we want to hear it, or whether we can grasp it," with the result that music becomes just noise, a noise among other noises. Radio was the tiny stream it all began with. Then came other technical means for reproducing, proliferating, amplifying sound, and the stream became an enormous river. If in the past people would listen to music out of love for music, nowadays it roars everywhere and all the time, "regardless whether we want to hear it," it roars from loudspeakers, in cars, in restaurants, in elevators, in the streets, in waiting rooms, in gyms, in the earpieces of Walkmans, music rewritten, reorchestrated, abridged, and stretched out, fragments of rock, of jazz, of opera, a flood of everything jumbled together so that we don't know who composed it (music become noise is anonymous), so that we can't tell beginning from end (music become noise has no form): sewage-water music in which music is dying.
— Milan Kundera, Ignorance
London, London, London town,You can toughen up or get thrown around.
— Kano
Had Kurt Cobain not committed suicide in 1994, would his genius have survived the continuous incisions of a media that was only too proud of its ability to chisel away at his fragile psyche in the years before he decided that he'd had enough off their invasions? And, had Jimi Hendrix not passed way in 1970, would he, too have eventually fallen into decline, first equalled, then eclipsed by the brilliant wave of new guitarists: Robin Trower, Ritchie Blackmore, Mick Ronson, who emerged during the early 1970s? In death, Hendrix led by example: in life he could have been left for the dead.
— Dave Thompson
Or maybe memories are like karaoke - where you realize up on the stage, with all those lyrics scrawling across the screen's bottom, and with everybody clapping at you, that you didn't even know the lyrics to your all-time favourite song. Only afterwards, when someone else is up on stage humiliating themselves amid the clapping and laughing, do you realize that what you liked most about your favourite song was precisely your ignorance of its full meaning - and you read more into it than maybe existed in the first place. I think it's better not to know the lyrics to your life.
— Douglas Coupland, The Gum Thief
You haven’t prepared yourself for worship if you just practice musical art
— LaMar Boschman, A Passion for His Presence
It’s not the art, it’s the heart. What [God] reads during our worship is the inner attitude. Worship is spiritual; it’s organic; it’s relational.
— LaMar Boschman
Music has become more pervasive and portable than ever. But it feels less previous in the bargain. I don't want to confuse artistic and commercial value, but it's just a fact that some kid who rips an album for free isn't going to give it the same attention he would if it cost him ten bucks. At what point does convenience become spiritual indolence? I realize this makes me sound like an old fart, but sometimes I get nostalgic for the days when the universe of recorded sound wasn't at our fingertips, when we had to hunt and wait and - horror of horrors - do without, when our longing for a particular record or song made it feel sacred.
— Steve Almond, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life: A Book by and for the Fanatics Among Us
All we shared was a mattress, and a lie, and an addressBaby I don't need you, well baby I don't need youOnce occupied by a goddess, now it's a room full of boxesShe said, "it's time to leave you" but baby I don't need you! In a perfect world... her face would not existIn a perfect world... a broken heart is fixed
— Billy Talent, Billy Talent II
She's thinking that what she's been doing all these years isn't what she wants to do anymore. Sometimes music flows to her and from her, but sometimes it doesn't. Lately that happens more and more, and she can't seem to find what she had and what made her special. But she can't tell her father because he'd be so disappointed in her, so disappointed to find out she's not extraordinary after all.
— Leila Cobo, Tell Me Something True
They're events you remember all your life, like your first real orgasm. And the whole purpose of the absurd, mechanically persistent involvement with recorded music is the pursuit of that priceless moment. So it's not exactly that records might unhinge the mind, but rather that if anything is going to drive you up the wall it might as well be a record.
— Lester Bangs, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung
Notes and chords have become my second language and, more often than not, that vocabulary expresses what I feel when language fails me. The guitar is my conscience, too - whenever I've lost my way, it's brought me back to center; whenever I forget, it reminds me why I'm here.
— Slash, Anthony Bozza, Slash
It was more like an abortion than music, but he got a wildly enthusiastic response from the crowd. Well, we're all pro-choice out here in Hillmont, after all.
— Frank Portman, King Dork
We have all lived through that shriveling moment when a parent walks into a room and repeats, with sardonic disbelief, a couplet picked up from the stereo or the TV. 'What does that mean, then?' my mother asked me during Top of the Pops. "Get it on / Bang a gong"? How long did it take him to think of that, do you reckon?' And the correct answer - 'Two seconds, and it doesn't matter' - is always beyond you, so you just tell her to shut up, while inside you're hating Marc Bolan for making you like him even though he sings about getting it on and banging gongs.
— Nick Hornby, Songbook
We couldn't believe how exciting it was to be together, a pair of young Americruisers on a roll. We'd lived for just twenty-five years; we weren't planning to die for fifty more. We danced and drank and went to rock shows. Our lives were just beginning, our favorite moment was right now, our favorite songs were unwritten.
— Rob Sheffield, Love Is a Mix Tape
There is much more to playing the clavier than playing written music. Do you realize with accompanying there is often nothing written out but the bass line--the left hand? There might be a few notations as to a suggested harmony, but it is up to me to fill in the music, at the proper volume, style, and harmony for the soloist--often instantly. I've heard it said that Bach questioned wether the soloist or the accompanist deserves the greatest glory.
— Nancy Moser, Mozart's Sister
For mile after mile the same melodic phrase rose up in my memory. I simply couldn’t get free of it. Each time it had a new fascination for me. Initially imprecise in outline, it seemed to become more and more intricately woven, as if to conceal from the listener how eventually it would end. This weaving and re-weaving became so complicated that one wondered how it could possibly be unravelled; and then suddenly one note would resolve the whole problem, and the solution would seem yet more audacious than the procedures which had preceded, called for, and made possible its arrival; when it was heard, all that had gone before took on a new meaning, and the quest, which had seemed arbitrary, was seen to have prepared the way for this undreamed-of solution.
— Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques
And then I notice the music flooding out of every part of the apartment at once — the couch, the walls, even the floor — and I know Bennies alone in Lou’s studio, pouring music down around us. A minute ago it was “Don’t Let Me Down”. Then it was Blondie’s “Heart of Glass”. Now it’s Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger”. Listening, I think, You will never know how much I understand you.
— Jennifer Egan
From time to time, too, and for the space of two or three paces, an image or an echo would rise up from the recesses of time: in the little streets of the beaters of silver and gold, for instance, there was a clear, unhurried tinkling, as if a djinn with a thousand arms was absent-mindedly practising on a xylophone.
— Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques
The deaf people there with balloons, holding them up and feeling the vibrations of the balloons to the Germs, all these fuckin' great bands, and using these balloons and dancing around. For a tough old punk, it just made your heart -- it gave you that beautiful feeling. They loved the music, and we were making money for them.
— Jack Boulware
It's so funny being a Christian musician. It always scares me when people think so highly of Christian music, Contemporary Christian music especially. Because I kinda go, I know a lot of us, and we don't know jack about anything. Not that I don't want you to buy our records and come to our concerts. I sure do. But you should come for entertainment. If you really want spiritual nourishment, you should go to church...you should read the Scriptures.
— Rich Mullins
Music conveys to us itself!
— Ludwig Wittgenstein
Kalkbrenner has made me an offer; that I should study with him for three years, and he will make something really - really out of me. I answered that I know how much I lack; but that I cannot exploit him, and three years is too much. But he has convinced me that I can play admirably when I am in the mood, and badly when I am not; a thing which never happens to him. After close examination he told me that I have no school; that I am on an excellent road, but can slip off the track. That after his death, or when he finally stops playing, there will be no representative of the great piano-forte school. That even if I wish it, I cannot build up a new school without knowing the old one; in a word : that I am not a perfected machine, and that this hampers the flow of my thoughts. That I have a mark in composition; that it would be a pity not to become what I have the promise of being...
— Frédéric Chopin
nothing is accomplished by writing a piece of musicnothing is accomplished by hearing a piece of musicnothing is accomplished by playing a piece of musicour ears are now in excellent condition.
— John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings
Partying means drinking. It also means playing records by Lou Reed and Chicago, which I thought was a city but is also a band it turns out.
— Ron Currie Jr., Everything Matters!
Even Azathoth is bored of this tune.
— Christy Leigh Stewart
[He] went on to tell her that certain work songs made the work a little easier, but that there were others, depending upon the time of day, that dragged a body down, so 'you just gotta be careful with your songs and your hummin' and whatnot.
— Edward P. Jones, The Known World
On the Rolling Stones - You will walk out of the Amphitheatre after watching the Stones perform and suddenly the Chicago stockyards smell clean and good by comparison.
— Tom Fitzpatrick
Music is a holy place, a cathedral so majestic that we can sense the magnificence of the universe, and also a hovel so simple and private that none of us can plumb its deepest secrets.
— Don Campbell, The Mozart Effect: Tapping the Power of Music to Heal the Body, Strengthen the Mind, and Unlock the Creative Spirit
You can go a hundred miles a second Don't have to drive no lousy cab Got everything you want and more man And the King picks up the tab You walk around on streets of gold all day And you never have to listen To what these customers say and I know...
— Marc Cohn
Will any of those men under you ever really understand all this? They're professional cynics, and it's too late for them. Why do you want to go back with them? So you can keep up with the Joneses? To buy a gyro just like the Smith has? To listen to music with your pocketbook instead of your glands?
— Ray Bradbury
When I'm on stage, I'm trying to do one thing: bring people joy. Just like church does. People don't go to church to find trouble, they go there to lose it.
— James  Brown
Musicians add to songs and they evolve: For as was true of 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. p. 380
— Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain
I cringed as the band oozed into the next chord. If notes were cars, I think there was a D major under the wreckage.
— Mary Hughes, Biting Nixie
The lower the class of the affair, the more likely the band will be invited to eat.
— Don Asher, Notes From A Battered Grand: A Memoir