Notes Music Quotes

1. "I believe the term modulation denotes in music the uninterrupted shift from one key to another: I do not know the term for change of rhythm without change of measure."
Author: Allen Tate

2. "Two or three notes of music can instantly make you feel sad or tense or afraid or angry. To do that in words is much more difficult."
Author: Anthony Daniels

3. "The genius of a composer is found in the notes of his music; but analyzing the notes will not reveal his genius. The poet's greatness is contained in his words; yet the study of his words will not disclose his inspiration. God reveals himself in creation; but scrutinize creation as minutely as you wish, you will not find God, any more than you will find the soul through careful examination of your body."
Author: Anthony De Mello

4. "Little notes of music trembled in hesitation, and burst, and rolled in quick, fine waves, like the thin, clear ringing of glass. Little notes leaped and exploded and laughed, laughed with a full, unconditional, consummate joy.She did not know whether she was singing. Perhaps she was only hearing the music somewhere. But the music had been a promise; a promise at the dawn of her life. That which had been promised then, could not be denied to her now."
Author: Ayn Rand

5. "She sat listening to the music. It was a symphony of triumph. The notes flowed up, they spoke of rising and they were the rising itself, they were the essence and the form of upward motion, they seemed to embody every human act and thought that had ascent as its motive. It was a sunburst of sound, breaking out of hiding and spreading open. It had the freedom of release and the tension of purpose. It swept space clean, and left nothing but the joy of an unobstructed effort. Only a faint echo within the sounds spoke of that from which the music had escaped, but spoke in laughing astonishment at the discovery that there was no ugliness or pain, and there never had to be. It was the song of an immense deliverance."
Author: Ayn Rand

6. "She sat at the window of the train....The window frame trembled with the speed of the motion, the pane hung over empty darkness, and dots of light slashed across the glass as luminous streaks, once in a while…She sat listening to the music. It was a symphony of triumph. The notes flowed up…It was a sunburst of sound, breaking out of hiding and spreading open. It had the freedom of release and the tension of purpose. It swept space clean, and left nothing but the joy of an unobstructed effort. Only a faint echo within the sounds spoke of that from which the music had escaped, but spoke in laughing astonishment at the discovery that there was no ugliness or pain, and there never had had to be. It was the song of an immense deliverance. She thought: For just a few moments -- while this lasts -- it is all right to surrender completely -- to forget everything and just permit yourself to feel. She thought: Let go -- drop the controls -- this is it."
Author: Ayn Rand

7. "One note is not music. It is what lies between the notes that makes the music. And what is between them is: their relationship. Relationships are the music life makes. Context creates meaning. Asking, "What is the meaning of life?" is the wrong question; it makes you look in the wrong places. The question is, "Where is the meaning in life?" The place to look is: between."
Author: Carl Safina

8. "[Author's Notes] As I write this, September 2002, much about the humpback song is still unknown. (Although scientists do know that it tends to be found in the New Age music section, as well as in tropical waters...)"
Author: Christopher Moore

9. "Then one night Blake had saved them all.Blake made the old organ into a tool. You could see right into his soul through the notes he played. Beckett knew why Blake had Jesus' eyes. Kindness, hope, and light filled the music he played."
Author: Debra Anastasia

10. "You can play. You can play. You can play! Livia leaned against the wall, her aches and pains and shivering chill melting away now that Blake's playing had become something beautiful. She tilted her head back and opened her mouth, as if to drink the music. She couldn't imagine how he created it—it sounded as if three people must be playing. She heard bells, then the notes sounded like voices. So clearly the music sang to her: Blake loves Livia. Blake loves Livia. She stretched her arms out and dug her fingers into the rough, scratchy brick, trying to hug him from the outside of the church. She wiped tears from her cheeks. She wanted to run inside and see him creating. She wanted to see his strong arms and intuitive fingers crafting the notes. Blake's sounds enchanted her."
Author: Debra Anastasia

11. "This is what nibbling your ear sounds like." Blake created a soundtrack for his teeth."This is what looking into your eyes sounds like." The notes were deep and beckoning."This is what my mind hears when my tongue is in your mouth." The kiss sounded steamy and delicate. The rhythm was her heartbeat as he sampled her mouth."But when you smile. When you smile it's…" Blake scooted the keyboard around behind her. He needed both hands.She put her hands on his face and smiled in amazement as the music exploded. She couldn't imagine how her simple facial gesture could inspire such a majestic sound.He smiled back. "One thousand nine hundred and ten.""So many? Really?""Yes, really. And it's not nearly enough. I want to lose count, Livia. Make me lose count." His hands left the beautiful music and grabbed handfuls of her hair."
Author: Debra Anastasia

12. "This is a uni-verse ("one song'). There's one song playing everywhere and we are all notes in it. There are no "special" or "better" notes.Every note is necessary and contains the whole essence of the music. All the power and substance of the universe is seeking to sing its song through you as magnificently as it has ever been sung before."
Author: Derek Rydall

13. "Music has no subject beyond the combinations of notes we hear, for music speaks not only by means of sounds, it speaks nothing but sound."
Author: Eduard Hanslick

14. "Silence is the worst. Whenever a thick cloud of silence descends, the yapping voices inside me become all the more audible, rising to the surface one by one. I like to believe I know all the women in this inner harm of mine but perhaps there are those I have never met. Together they make a choir that does not know how to tone down. I call them the Choir of Discordant Voices. It is a bizarre choir, now that I think about it. Not only are they all off-key, none of them can read notes. In fact, there is no music at all in what they do. They all talk at the same time, each in a voice louder than the other, never listening to what is being said. They make me afraid of my own diversity, the fragmentation inside of me. That is why I do not like the quiet. I even find it unpleasant, unsettling."
Author: Elif Shafak

15. "Right there in that room, listening to the tape Laura gave me, I decided that I wanted something more than what I'd allowed myself to become. Listening to the voices and piano notes fade in and out, I decided that I wanted to be happy. If I had to fight for things in life, I wanted to fight for something bigger than the right to eat with a fork. I wanted to love and be loved and feel alive. I had no idea how to find my way, but listening to that music wash over me, I felt, for the first time, that the struggle I faced would be worth it."
Author: Eric Nuzum

16. "It never was about the musician or the instrument - it was about the laser notes in a hall of mirrors, the music itself. It was going to change the world for the better and it has. Maybe not as fast or as much as we wanted, but it has and it still will. Whether your name is Mozart, or Django Reinhardt, or Robert Johnson, or Jimi Hendrix, or whoever is next; who you are doesn't matter so long as you can open that conduit and let the music come through. It is the burning edge, whatever it sounds like and whoever is playing it. It is the noisy, messy, silly, invincible voice of life that comes through the LP on the turn-table, the transistor radio, or the Bose in your new Lexus that makes you want to get up out of whatever you are stuck in and dance. It is Dionysus and the Maenads all over again. No one can control it and I pity whoever tries. I am old now and only a house cat sunning herself in the window - but I was a tigress once, and I remember. I still remember."
Author: G.J. Paterson

17. "Got to go sing in a few minutes... no, that's GOT to go sing in a few minutes, as in... GOT TO GO SING in a few minutes... hahaha It's an all consuming compassion/obsession... a drawing... a wonderful bliss... a union of soul and spirit, of notes and voice, of all of life's vibrating essence. String theory... all of life is vibrating, is alive, and the life of that essence is music itself!!"
Author: Gloria Smith

18. "Of all the conceptions of pure bliss that people and poets have dreamed of, listening to the harmony of the spheres always seemed to me the highest and most intense. That is where my dearest and brightest dreams have ranged - to hear for the duration of a heartbeat the universe and the totality of life in its mysterious innate harmony. Alas, how is it that life can be so confusing and out of tune and false, how can there be lies, evil, envy and hate among people, when the shortest song and most simple piece of music preach that heaven is revealed in the purity, harmony and interplay of clearly sounded notes. And how can I upbraid people and grow angry when I myself, with all the good will in the world have been unable to make song and sweet music out of my life?"
Author: Hermann Hesse

19. "I've found in composing that being simple and profound—having in-depthness in your music—is the most difficult thing to do. Anybody can write a whole lot of notes, which may or may not say something . . . But why make it complicated for the musicians to play? Why make it difficult for the listeners to hear?"
Author: Horace Silver

20. "In two weeks, despite these notes, I shall no longer believe in what I am experiencing now. One must leave behind a trace of this journey which memory forgets. One must, when this is impossible, write or draw without responding to the romantic solicitations of pain, without enjoying suffering like music, tieing a pen to one's foot if need be, helping the doctors who can learn nothing from laziness."
Author: Jean Cocteau

21. "I play until my fingers are blue and stiff from the cold, and then I keep on playing. Until I'm lost in the music. Until I am the music--notes and chords, the melody and harmony. It hurts, but it's okay because when I'm the music, I'm not me. Not sad. Not afraid. Not desperate. Not guilty."
Author: Jennifer Donnelly

22. "Cooking is like playing a violin. The bow is a tool used to play, as is the knives and other tools you use to prepare. (a chef's knife is even held in the same manner) Spices are the notes used in the score. The way the food is cooked and prepared is the rhythm and tempo. The ingredients are the violin themselves, ready to be played upon. The finished dish is the music played to its best melody. All of these things must be applied together at the right pace, manner, and time in order to create a flavourful rush of artwork and beauty."
Author: Jennifer Megan Varnadore

23. "I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music."
Author: Joan Miro

24. "There was no telling if I'd be reborn when I died, but the waltz began and ended with my four notes. He'd built the music around things that reminded him of me. And now this name. My name."
Author: Jodi Meadows

25. "I play the notes as they are written, but it is God who makes the music."
Author: Johann Sebastian Bach

26. "Stories come alive in the telling. Without a human voice to read them aloud, or a pair of wide eyes following them by flashlight beneath a blanket, they had no existence in our world. They were like seeds in the beak of a bird, waiting to fall to earth. Or the notes of a song laid out on a sheet, yearning for an instrument to bring their music into being. They lay dormant, hoping for the chance to emerge. Once someone started to read them, they could begin to change. They could take root in the imagination and transform the reader. Stories wanted to be read. They needed it. It was the reason they forced themselves from their world into ours. They wanted us to give them life."
Author: John Connolly

27. "While human nature largely determines how we hear the notes, it is nurture that lets us hear the music."
Author: Jonah Lehrer

28. "I could see us sitting at the old piano, while he tried to explain how music worked. I could see the Iron glamour in the notes, the strict lines and rigid rules that made up the score, but the music itself was a vortex of song and pure, swirling emotion. They weren't separate entities, creative magic and Iron glamour. They were one; cold logic and wild emotion, merged together to create something truly beautiful."
Author: Julie Kagawa

29. "Johnny made me feel like I was clever without trying to be. And pretty. And valued. He made everything about me seem more special.Like, say I was a song. Well, Johnny made me feel as though I'd been remixed. The melody didn't change, but it wasn't just the same one-dimensional sequence of notes anymore. Instead, he brought out all these harmonies — these low and high notes — that made the music fuller. No more discord or dissonance. Around Johnny, I was the best possible rendition of myself."
Author: Kristin Walker

30. "Trout sat back and thought about the conversation. He shaped it into a story, which he never got around to writing until he was an old, old man. It was about a planet where the language kept turning into pure music, because the creatures there were so enchanted by sounds. Words became musical notes. Sentences became melodies. They were useless as conveyors of information, because nobody knew or cares what the meanings of words were anymore. So leaders in government and commerce, in order to function, had to invent new and much uglier vocabularies and sentence structures all the time, which would resist being transmuted to music."
Author: Kurt Vonnegut

31. "(We loved Mother too, completely, but we were finding out, as Father was too, that it is good for parents and for children to be alone now and then with one another...the man alone or the woman, to sound new notes in the mysterious music of parenthood and childhood.)That night I not only saw my Father for the first time as a person. I saw the golden hills and the live oaks as clearly as I have ever seen them since; and I saw the dimples in my little sister's fat hands in a way that still moves me because of that first time; and I saw food as something beautiful to be shared with people instead of as a thrice-daily necessity."
Author: M.F.K. Fisher

32. "To him the stars seemed like so many musical notes affixed to the sky, just waiting for somebody to unfasten them. Someday the sky would be emptied, but by then the earth would be a constellation of musical scores"
Author: Machado De Assis

33. "In the main café area next door, Delilah is coming to the end of Moonlight Sonata. The final notes are deep, sad — placed in a way only Beethoven knows how to place notes. They drill a hole in my stomach and place a lead weight there. If death has ever been portrayed in music, it's in those final bars. And yet, at the same time, they're so beautiful."
Author: Mark Capell

34. "Now, when he sat at the piano, he did not play music for the company the notes provided him. He played the music so she might hear it, and come a little closer to him as she listened."
Author: Meredith Duran

35. "The ballet embodies the notes of music. And sometimes you almost feel like you can see the notes dance up there on the stage."
Author: Robert Caro

36. "Many today insist that music is amoral, that there is nothing innately good or bad about music itself. They say it is neutral, and only its use determines whether it is good or evil. To a degree this is true, but in a very real way music ceases to be neutral the moment those little black-and-white notes begin to be woven together to produce a certain combinations of sounds that result in the message or world-view that the composer of the music wants to get across. The music itself becomes a statement, even when words are not attached to its message."
Author: Ron Owens

37. "Diatonic, he heard the word in his head. Chromatic, pentatonic, hexatonic, heptatonic, octatonic, each iteration of the scale opening innumerable possibilities for harmony. He thought about the Pythagorean major third, the Didymus comma, the way the intervals sound out of tune rather than as though they were different notes. This, he thought, was where his brilliance at mathematics bled into his love of music; music was the realm in which his mathematical brain danced."
Author: Ru Freeman

38. "One series of notes, high and delicate, sang of a sweet moonlight kiss gone sour; another line of music rippled with regret over opportunities forever lost."
Author: Sharon M. Draper

39. "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."
Author: Steve Almond

40. "Arrow let the slow pulse of the vibrating strings flood into her. She felt the lament raise a lump in her throat, fought back tears. She inhaled sharp and fast. Her eyes watered, and the notes ascended the scale. The men on the hills, the men in the city, herself, none of them had the right to do the things they'd done. It had never happened. It could not have happened. But she knew these notes. They had become a part of her. They told her that everything had happened exactly as she knew it had, and that nothing could be done about it. No grief or rage or noble act could undo it. But it could all have been stopped. It was possible. The men on the hills didn't have to be murderers. Then men in the city didn't have to lower themselves to fight their attackers. She didn't have to be filled with hatred. The music demanded that she remember this, that she know to a certainity that the world still held the capacity for goodness. The notes were proof of that."
Author: Steven Galloway

41. "I close my eyes and try and shut him out. My fingers don't want to stay in time. They want to race ahead in fury, plunging into the dense fog of black notes, pulling the music out by its roots, hurling it up out of the piano and into the air."
Author: Tabitha Suzuma

42. "You can't speak Music with notes alone, but you can speak Music without notes at all!"
Author: Victor L. Wooten

43. "Come, Spirits" she murmured; and was instantly fortified by a sense of the presence of the things that aren't there. There were the beautiful drowned statues, there were the glens and hills of an undiscovered country; there were divine musical notes, which, struck high up in the air, made one's heart beat with delight at the assurance that the world of things that aren't there was splendidly vigorous and far more real than the other. She felt that one never spoke of the things that mattered, but carried them about, until a note of music, or a sentence or a sight, joined hands with them."
Author: Virginia Woolf

44. "I had once been splintered into a million beings and objects. Today I am one, tomorrow I shall splinter again. And thus everything in the world decants and modulates. That day I was on the crest of a wave. I knew that all my surroundings were notes of one and the same harmony, knew - secretly - the source and the inevitable resolution of the sounds assembled for an instant, and the new chord that would be engendered by each of the dispersing notes. My soul's musical ear knew and comprehended everything."
Author: Vladimir Nabokov

45. "Finally Bill Mixter would lower his head, lay his bow upon the strings, and draw out the first notes of a tune, and the others would come in behind him. The music, while it lasted, brought a new world into being. They would play some tunes they had learned on the radio, but their knowledge was far older than that and they played too the music that was native to the place, or that the people of the place were native to. Just the names of the tunes were a kind of music; they cal l back the music to my mind still, after so many years: "Sand Riffle," "Last Gold Dollar," "Billy in the Low Ground," "Gate to Go Through," and a lot of others. "A fiddle, now, is an atmospheric thing," said Burley Coulter. The music was another element filling the room and pouring out through the cracks. When at last they'd had their fill and had gone away, the shop felt empty, the silence larger than before."
Author: Wendell Berry

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