Sound And Music Quotes

1. "When somebody plays music, you listen. you just follow those sounds, and eventually you understand the music. the point can't be explained in words because music is not words, but after listening for a while, you understand the point of it, and that point is the music itself. in exactly the same way, you can listen to all experiences."
Author: Alan Wilson Watts

2. "When the OutKast sound changed and I started producing my own records, I would mirror what I thought that character doing that music would look like. As the sound got a little wilder, freakier and funkier, so did the clothes. Then when the sound got more sophisticated, the clothes changed again."
Author: Andre Benjamin

3. "There are beautiful sounds in rock. Very lazy, dreamlike noises. You can forget about the lyrics in most songs. Just dig the noise, and you've got your sound...We're musical primitives."
Author: Andy Warhol

4. "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

5. "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

6. "I don't know if it's my music, my lyrics, my sound, and knowing the music business the way I do-all I can say is, my career has lasted way longer than I expected."
Author: Barry White

7. "I'm aware now over the last 5 or 10 years that when you do an accent, you really have to kind of get down to the nitty gritty and go into the phonetics of it, if necessary. Find out not just the sounds but the rhythms and the music - or lack thereof - in a particular accent."
Author: Brendan Gleeson

8. "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."
Author: Charles De Lint

9. "I live in Topanga Canyon, which is like a faux-rustic enclave in Los Angeles. I love the sounds of all the critters outside - the frogs, owls, crickets, and birds. Some of the birds around here are pretty accomplished musicians. You can learn a lot from them."
Author: Cliff Martinez

10. "I'm tired of the music industry these days! They polish everything until it no longer sounds real. The raw uncut sound is something I think no genre but alternative and Aerow music retain."
Author: Clive Langer

11. "Music isn't much different now from what it was when we hit the dance floor. This means something. We found something universal. We bottled that desire, then released it into the airwaves. The sounds hit your body, and you move.We are in those particles that send you. We are in that music.Dance for us, Tariq.Feel us there in your freedom."
Author: David Levithan

12. "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

13. "How may one describe enchantment? As he sang, his countenance softened, and without benefit of costume or any other artifice of the stage, the Gaspari I knew faded and was transfored into something eerily beautiful. A delicate hand, rising and turning like a vine, seemed to unfurl this otherworldy sound into the air. Though I could not translate the words, there was no need, for the sound went straight to my soul, transcending the poor and broken language we mortals must use. I slipped gratefully out of my body and floated on the current of music, feeling that all of us round the table were a single spirit, a single being. I was filled with such love. The voice soared, wave upon wave, until the last note, quivering with tenderness, put us ashore again too soon."
Author: Debra Dean

14. "Now the voices and the sound of movement were gone, and the stream could be heard running quietly under its banks. The air was full of the scent of water and of flowers.She walked, quiet, while the house began to reverberate: a band had started up. She walked beside the river while the music thudded, feeling herself as a heavy, impervious, insensitive lump that, like a planet doomed always to be dark on one side, had vision in front only, a myopic searchlight blind except for the tiny three-dimensional path open immediately before her eyes in which the outline of a tree, a rose, emerged then submerged in dark. She thought, with the dove's voices of her solitude. Where? But where. How? Who? No, but where, where … Then silence and the birth of a repetition. Where? Here. Here?Here, where else, you fool, you poor fool, where else has it been, ever…?"
Author: Doris Lessing

15. "It was in this apartment, also, that there stood against the western wall, a gigantic clock of ebony. It's pendulum swung to and fro with a dull, heavy, monotonous clang; and when the minute-hand made the circuit of the face, and the hour was to be stricken, there came from the brazen lungs of the clock a sound which was clear and loud and deep and exceedingly musical, but of so peculiar a note and emphasis that, at each lapse of an hour, the musicians of the note orchestra were constrained to pause, momentarily, in their performance, to harken to the sound and thus the waltzers perforce ceased their evolutions; and there was a brief disconcert of the whole gay company; and, while the chimes of the clock yet rang, it was observes that the giddiest grew pale, and the more aged and sedate passed their hands over their brows as in confessed revery or meditation"
Author: Edgar Allan Poe

16. "With stammering lips and insufficient sound I strive and struggle to deliver right the music of my nature."
Author: Elizabeth Barrett Browning

17. "The sound and music are 50% of the entertainment in a movie."
Author: George Lucas

18. "This is... an attempt to find some of the important fault lines in the narrative of "recorded history"--the points where people with access to the technology decided that *this* was how recordings should sound, and *this* is what it means to make a record. Ultimately, this is the story of what it means to make a recording of music--a *representation* of music--and declare it to be music itself."
Author: Greg Milner

19. "We grown-up people think that we appreciate music, but if we realized the sense that an infant has brought with it of appreciating sound and rhythm, we would never boast of knowing music. The infant is music itself."
Author: Hazrat Inayat Khan

20. "As the sun went down, I saw a solitary boatman disporting on the smooth lake. The falling dews seemed to strain and purify the air, and I was soothed with an infinite stillness. I got the world, as it were, by the nape of the neck, and held it under in the tide of its own events, till it was drowned, and then I let it go down stream like a dead dog. Vast hollow chambers of silence stretched away on every side, and my being expanded in proportion, and filled them. Then first could I appreciate sound, and find it musical."
Author: Henry David Thoreau

21. "I recall this passage as the hour of its first fully coming over me that she was a beautiful liberal creature. I had seen her personality in glimpses and gleams, like a song sung in snatches, but now it was before me in a large rosy glow, as if it had been a full volume of sound. I heard the whole of the air, and it was sweet fresh music, which I was often to hum over.("Sir Edmund Orme")"
Author: Henry James

22. "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

23. "I think 'Two Towers' is a completely distinct film from 'Fellowship of the Ring' or 'Return of the King.' I think that you can watch them as a group and watch how the story evolves, but I think each one was made in its own entirety, and each one has its own palate of sound and music and color and characterization."
Author: Howard Shore

24. "Every life has a soundtrack.There is a tune that makes me think of the summer I spent rubbing baby oil on my stomach in pursuit of the perfect tan. There's another that reminds me of tagging along with my father on Sunday morning to pick up the New York Times. There's the song that reminds me of using fake ID to get into a nightclub; and the one that brings back my cousin Isobel's sweet sixteen, where I played Seven Minutes in Heaven with a boy whose breath smelled like tomato soup. If you ask me, music is the language of memory."
Author: Jodi Picoult

25. "Kids use words in ways that release hidden meanings, revel the history buried in sounds. They haven't forgotten that words can be more than signs, that words have magic, the power to be things, to point to themselves and materialize. With their back-formations, archaisms, their tendency to play the music in words--rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, repetition--children peel the skin from language. Words become incantatory. Open Sesame. Abracadabra. Perhaps a child will remember the word and will bring the walls tumbling down."
Author: John Edgar Wideman

26. "Last night as your breathingsettled into sleepwhat I heard was the half-forgotten sound,the velvet rush and hiss,the automatic clickas the record player's arm runs out,is brushed awayat the record's centre,the pulse of its subsidingoddly comforting.33 1/3 rpm.The knowledge that when the music ends,there will not be silence."
Author: John Knowles

27. "The unchanging Man of history is wonderfully adaptable cloth by his power of endurance and in his capacity for detachment. The fact seems to be that the play of his destiny is too great for his fears and too mysterious for his understanding. Were the trump of the Last Judgement to sound suddenly on a working day the musician at his piano would go on with his performance of Beethoven's Sonata and the cobbler at his stall stick to his last in undisturbed confidence in the virtues of the leather. And with perfect propriety. For what are we to let ourselves be disturbed by an angel's vengeful music too mighty for our ears and too awful for our terrors ? Thus it happens to us to be struck suddenly by the lightning of wrath. The reader will go on reading if the book pleases him and the critic will go on criticizing with that faculty of detachment born perhaps from a sense of infinite littleness and wich is yet the only faculty that seems to assimilate man to the immortal gods."
Author: Joseph Conrad

28. "Depression is awful beyond words or sounds or images...it bleeds relationships through suspicion, lack of confidence and self-respect, the inability to enjoy life, to walk or talk or think normally, the exhaustion, the night terrors, the day terrors. There is nothing good to be said for it except that it gives you the experience of how it must be to be old, to be old and sick, to be dying; to be slow of mind; to be lacking in grace, polish and coordination; to be ugly; to have no belief in the possibilities of life, the pleasures of sex, the exquisiteness of music or the ability to make yourself and others laugh."
Author: Kay Redfield Jamison

29. "I conceived of an instrument that would create sound without using any mechanical energy, like the conductor of an orchestra. The orchestra plays mechanically, using mechanical energy; the conductor just moves his hands, and his movements have an effect on the music artistry."
Author: Leon Theremin

30. "The smell of good bread baking, like the sound of lightly flowing water, is indescribable in its evocation of innocence and delight...[Breadmaking is] one of those almost hypnotic businesses, like a dance from some ancient ceremony. It leaves you filled with one of the world's sweetest smells... there is no chiropractic treatment, no Yoga exercise, no hour ofmeditation in a music-throbbing chapel. that will leave you emptier of bad thoughts than this homely ceremony of making bread."
Author: M.F.K. Fisher

31. "Some people look like they sound better than they actually sound, because they look confident and have good posture," once musician, a veteran of many auditions, says. "Other people look awful when they play but sound great. Other people have that belabored look when they play, but you can't hear it in the sound. There is always this dissonance between what you see and hear" (p.251)."
Author: Malcolm Gladwell

32. "Her words were so indistinct to me, and the sound of them, which was all I heard, lasted so long and was so musical, that it was as though a nightingale among the close, leafy twilight had burst into song."
Author: Marcel Proust

33. "I grew up in a kibbutz in the Galilee, but we were surrounded by Arabic villages, so I heard all these sounds and all this music. My father was very close friends with one of the Bedouin tribes, so I would always go there, to weddings, and I was always very fascinated by that music."
Author: Maya Beiser

34. "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-powering, 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!"
Author: Milan Kundera

35. "I dislike what has happened to the quality of the sound of music; there is little depth or feeling left, and people can't get what they need from listening to music anymore, so it is dying."
Author: Neil Young

36. "Sometimes I sensed that the books I read in rapid succession had set up some sort of murmur among themselves, transforming my head into an orchestra pit where different musical instruments sounded out, and I would realize that I could endure this life because of these musicales going on in my head."
Author: Orhan Pamuk

37. "You see my five fingers, but somebody can see the five gaps between my fingers. Ordinarily you will not see the gaps, you will see five fingers. But the gaps are more real: fingers may come and go, gaps will remain. Between sounds of music there are gaps of silence. The authentic music consists not of sounds,but of the gaps. Sounds come and go; those gaps remain. And music can make you aware of those gaps more beautifully than anything else; hence I have to say that music comes next to silence."
Author: Osho

38. "How can I keep my soul in me, so thatit doesn't touch your soul? How can I raiseit high enough, past you, to other things?I would like to shelter it, among remotelost objects, in some dark and silent placethat doesn't resonate when your depths resound.Yet everything that touches us, me and you,takes us together like a violin's bow,which draws one voice out of two separate strings.Upon what instrument are we two spanned?And what musician holds us in his hand?Oh sweetest song."
Author: Rainer Maria Rilke

39. "And in her ears the little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind. The room was indeed empty. Every night the waves came in and bore her off on their great tides of sound, floating her, wide-eyed, toward morning. There had been no night in the last two years that Mildred had not swum that sea, had not gladly gone down in it for the third time."
Author: Ray Bradbury

40. "Then all the winds of Heaven ran to join hands and bend a shoulder, to bring down to me the sound of a noble hymn that was heavy with the perfume of Time That Has Gone.The glittering multitudes were singing most mightily, and my heart was in blood to hear a Voice that I knew.The Men of the Valley were marching again.My Fathers were singing up there.Loud, triumphant, the anthem rose, and I knew, in some deep place within, that in the royal music was a prayer to lift up my spirit, to be of good cheer, to keep the faith, that Death was only an end to the things that are made of clay, and to fight, without heed of wounds, all that brings death to the Spirit, with Glory to the Eternal Father, forever, Amen."
Author: Richard Llewellyn

41. "The coffee shops were doing a brisk business, and street musicians filled the air with the sounds of guitar, lyre, panpipes, and armpit noises. (Percy didn't get that last one. Maybe it was an old Roman musical tradition.)"
Author: Rick Riordan

42. "One always has to remember these days where the garbage pail is, because it's so easy to make sounds, and to put sounds together into something that appears to be music, but it's just as hard as it always was to make good music."
Author: Robert Moog

43. "Pop music provides not just the soundtrack to our lives, as the cliche goes; it releases our emotions and helps us to articulate them. This is why music is so important to adolescents, who are struggling with questions of identity and self-expression."
Author: Sarah Churchwell

44. "I just enjoy the sound as I hear it in everything around me. The high and low frequencies of sound bewitch me. Whether I am in a shop, in the bathroom or listening to noise that my fans make... everything is music to my ears and drives me. I just put all these things in rhythm when I'm playing."
Author: Sivamani

45. "You know, sound was still a fairly new thing when I came into movies. And the reason musicals happened is because of sound. They could put music in the picture! That's how it all began."
Author: Stanley Donen

46. "Nice piano," I said. "Do you play?" "oh no, but Edwart does!" Eva Mullen said."A little," Edwart said sheepishly."Go ahead, play!" Eva said. She picked up the triangle that was lying on the piano and handed it to Edwart. He started banging on it. It sounded like construction work very early in the morning. "Whoops. I messed up. Let me start over," he said.He started banging again."Wait. Uh. I haven't practiced in a while. Let me start over."Edwart continued to bang the triangle. Eva closed her eyes and raised her arms, swaying rhythmically to Edwart's music. Edwart held the triangle up high, in what appeared to be a grand finish, but then he brought it down hard, hitting the top of the piano. He continued to bang the piano, putting the entire force of his slim body into each smash. The piano shook. The room vibrated. When he finished I subtly removed my hands from my ears. "I wrote that for you," Edwart murmured, drawing me close. "It's called Belle's Lullaby."
Author: The Harvard Lampoon

47. "Both my grandmothers had upright pianos, and I just knew how to play since I was a child. Nobody taught me. I sounded like a grown-up, and then I learned how to read music. I played so well by ear I could fool the teacher to believe I could play the notes. She'd make the mistake of playing the song once, and I could play it."
Author: Valerie Simpson

48. "And in front of it all are the pearly gates: the proverbial entrance to Heaven that she, in earthly life, thought might not exist. But they are real, not myth or fantasy.As she passes through them, several people greet her. In foreign tongues even, but she understands. Language no longer matter. There are no barriers between herself and others, just love.The gorgeous views seem to go on forever. Ornate structures, mansions, banquet halls, and natural beauty, orchards, gardens. People congregate around huge marble fountains. In the distance are snow-capped mountains of the purist white. She can hear the sounds of rushing rivers and the surf of the ocean at once.Everyone around her is happy, loving, thankful. A choir sings songs of joy and peace while others play musical instruments of every kind in perfect harmony. Children laugh and play in the streets as well as in the clouds above her head."
Author: Victoria Kahler

49. "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."
Author: William Shakespeare

50. "HAMLET: I do not well understand that. Will you play upon this pipe?GUILDENSTERN: My lord, I cannot.HAMLET: I pray you.GUILDENSTERN: Believe me, I cannot.HAMLET: I do beseech you.GUILDENSTERN: I know no touch of it, my lord.HAMLET: It is as easy as lying. Govern these ventages with our fingers and thumb, give it breath with your mouth, and it will discourse most eloquent music. Look you, these are the stops.GUILDENSTERN: But these cannot I command to any utterance of harmony. I have not the skill.HAMLET: Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery, you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass, and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. 'Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me."
Author: William Shakespeare

Sound And Music Quotes Pictures