Choir Quotes

I have built a city from the books I've read. A good book sings a a timeless music that is heard in the choir lofts, and balconies, and theaters that thrived within that secret city inside me. ~ Pat Conroy

The choir and congregation are singing I Vow to Thee My Country. Never has he heard the hymn sung with such heartfelt pathos. It is as if everyone is trying to sing themselves into being. It is the war that makes everyone sing out their hearts like this. The hymn expresses some imperative deep down in the blood. Like running fingers over the edge of things in pitch darkness. ~ Glenn Haybittle

Method acting has had a major influence both in writing through the eyes of other people, and seeing through the eyes of other people, trying to address different ideas in a way that would go beyond preaching to the choir. ~ Jello Biafra

Ah, Lovely October, as you usher in the season that awakens my soul, your awesome beauty compels my spirit to soar like an leaf caught in an autumn breeze and my heart to sing like a heavenly choir. ~ Peggy Toney Horton

Part calico choir girl...........and part satin dance hall doll, with amber eyes and a dash of hellcat red in her hair --- the kind of woman that a man wants in his bedroom when he's sick.............and in his bed when he's not. ~ Linda Bloodworth-Thomason

I've lived in New York all my life, and we went to the Mormon Pageant each year in upstate New York. It still is a wonderful production. I remember going and seeing the performance and listening to the music. My father had Mormon Tabernacle Choir music, and we would listen to it and sing with it. ~ Renee Fleming

We could never predict what moment in the service would trigger a full-blown crisis of faith. Once, it was the kids' choir singing "Nothing but the Blood" during special music.
"Surely I'm not the only one who thinks it's creepy to hear all those little voices singing about getting washed in the flow of someone's blood," I muttered as Dan and I escaped out the double doors.
Another time it was a prayer about God granting our troops victory over their enemies as they served him in Iraq.
"Don't you think the Iraqis are just as convinced God is on their side?" I whispered.
Sometimes it was just the way people chatted in the fellowship hall about "those liberals," as if feminists or Democrats or Methodists couldn't possibly be in their midst.
Often it was the assumption that women were unfit to speak from the pulpit or pass the collection plate on Sunday mornings, but were welcome to serve the men their key lime pie at the church picnic. ~ Rachel Held Evans

I was definitely a choir and theater geek. ~ Michelle Branch

Nick laughed. "We'll have a celebration, all right. It's called Christmas."
"She's a Christmas baby? On the actual day?"
"Came a month earlier than we expected. Elizabeth had organized the children into a Christmas choir and planned a big party after the service on Christmas Eve." Nick chuckled. "She was not pleased when her pains started beforehand. ~ Debra Holland

I think they'd barely recognize us as brothers and sisters. If we told them, church is on Sundays, and we have an awesome band...if the found out 1/6th of the earth's population claimed to be Christians, I'm not sure they could reconcile the suffering happening on our watch while we're living in excess...

But listen, early church, we have a monthly event called 'Mocha chicks', we have choir practice every Wednesday, we organize retreats with door prizes, we're raising $3 million for an outdoor amphitheater, we have catchy t-shirts, we don't smoke or say the f-word, we go to bible study every semester...

the local church would be the heartbeat of the city. ~ Jen Hatmaker

He'd been drinking in a bar downtown, when he thought he heard a choir of angels singing in the Tiki Lounge. And that's when he got religion. ~ Elton John

As a Welshman that can't sing, I never feel more proud to be Welsh than when I hear the Treorchy Male Choir - the Master Choir of them all. If I could sing I would apply for membership myself. ~ Anthony Hopkins

I have lived in many places over the years - sung in many languages too but hearing the Treorchy Male Choir made me realise how deep my feelings are, and always will be, for our beloved Land of Song. Glorious years of hard work and glorious music! Well done! I am only half Welsh - but these sincere good wishes and congratulations come from all of me! ~ Petula Clark

Psalm 67 For the choir director: A song. A psalm, to be accompanied by stringed instruments. 1 May God be merciful and bless us. May his face smile with favor on us. Interlude 2 May your ways be known throughout the earth, your saving power among people everywhere. 3 May the nations praise you, O God. Yes, may all the nations praise you. 4 Let the whole world sing for joy, because you govern the nations with justice and guide the people of the whole world. Interlude 5 May the nations praise you, O God. Yes, may all the nations praise you. 6 Then the earth will yield its harvests, and God, our God, will richly bless us. 7 Yes, God will bless us, and people all over the world will fear him. ~ Anonymous

So let me be thy choir, and make a moan Upon the midnight hours. ~ John Keats

Here I am looking at my lovely ten-year-old daughter, Maggie, in her white dress, singing Protestant hymns with the choir at the Plymouth Church of the Brethren when I should be at Mass praying for the repose of the soul of my mother, Angela McCourt, mother of seven, believer, sinner, though when I contemplate her seventy-three years on this earth I can't believe the Lord God Almighty on His throne would even dream of consigning her to the flames. A God like that wouldn't deserve the time of day. ~ Frank McCourt

There are names like Savoy Hotel, Caruso, Shangri-La, Pavlove, Mount Everest and the Treorchy Male Choir that just hang up there as peaks of excellence - perfect things that we simply take for granted as symbols of greatness. So imagine how delighted and honoured I am to join with all the other small peaks in congratulating the Choir of Choirs on its anniversary. In admiration, since I was a boy! ~ Ron Moody

O may I join the choir invisible of those immortal dead who live again in minds made better by their presence; live in pulses stirred to generosity, in deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn for miserable aims that end with self, in thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, and with their mild persistence urge men's search to vaster issues. ~ George Eliot

I see, and sing by my own eyes inspired.
O let me be thy Choir and make a moan
Upon the midnight hours;
Thy voice, thy lute, thy pipe, thy incense sweet
From swinged Censer teeming;
Thy Shrine, thy Grove, thy Oracle, thy heat
Of pale-mouthe'd Prophet dreaming!
Yes, I will be thy Priest and build a fane
In some untrodden region of my Mind,
Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain
Instead of pies shall murmer in the wind ~ John Keats

Setting aside the puppet shows, the only thing that matters is who will be ruling, who will have the keys to the cash register, and how they're going to split up other people's money among themselves. On their way to the booty they'll spruce everything up, which is badly needed. New Scoundrels will appear, new leaders, and a whole choir of jnnocents with no memory will come out into the streets, ready to believe whatever they want or need to believe. They'll follow whichever Pied Piper flatters them most and promises them some shotty paradise... This is what it is... with its highs and lows, and it's only as good as it gets, which is better than nothing. There are those who see it coming and go far away... And there are those of us who stay with our feet stuck in the mud, because anyhow we don't have anywhere better to go. But don't worry about the circus. We've now come to the clown acts, and the trapeze artists will take a while to arrive. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon

She felt safe for a while and derived solace from the reflection that there would always be church. If she were a governess all her life there would be church. There was a little sting of guilt in the thought. It would be practising deception.... To despise it all, to hate the minister and the choir and the congregation and yet to come - running - she could imagine herself all her life running, at least in her mind, weekly to some church - working her fingers into their gloves and pretending to take everything for granted and to be just like everybody else and really thinking only of getting into a quiet pew and ceasing to pretend. It was wrong to use church like that. She was wrong - all wrong. It couldn't be helped. Who was there who could help her? She imagined herself going to a clergyman and saying she was bad and wanted to be good - even crying. He would be kind and would pray and smile - and she would be told to listen to sermons in the right spirit. She could never do that.... There she felt she was on solid ground. Listening to sermons was wrong... people ought to refuse to be preached at by these men. Trying to listen to them made her more furious than anything she could think of, more base in submitting... those men's sermons were worse than women's smiles... just as insincere at any rate... and you could get away from the smiles, make it plain you did not agree and that things were not simple and settled... but you could not stop a sermon. It was so unfair. The se ~ Dorothy M. Richardson

I've been playing music all my life, from being a choir soloist at Symphony Hall as a youngster to playing in bands through high school and college at Kent State. Went in the service at 17, out before I was 21. ~ Arthur Godfrey

There's always the cliche of the choir shouting and clapping. OK, you have to do that, but there's also introspective parts, parts where you just follow someone that's preaching. There's lots of different emotions and moods that a service requires. ~ Wynton Marsalis

I've done choir since I was tiny, and I've always tried to get into plays. They all just meshed together. Now with my career, especially with music, people are like, "Which one do you pick?" I don't pick either. They're just different expressions of who I am. ~ Tinsel Korey

Every time, it's the same thing, I feel like crying, my throat goes all tight and I do the best I can to control myself but sometimes it gets close: I can hardly keep myself from sobbing. So when they sing a canon I look down at the ground because it's just too much emotion at once: it's too beautiful, and everyone singing together, this marvelous sharing. I'm no longer myself. I am just one part of a sublime whole, to which the others also belong, and I always wonder at such moments why this cannot be the rule of everyday life, instead of being an exceptional moment, during a choir. ~ Muriel Barbery

I once saw my mother playing Mary Magdalene in a parish event. But she had to put the role aside in order to go and front the choir who were singing at the same occasion. She left the stage halfway through the Crucifixion. ~ Fiona Shaw

I think [the virtual choir] speaks well to a benevolent future for the Internet. ~ Eric Whitacre

People used to think of vocal music as boring choir stuff, once you figured out that you can do crazy beat-boxing, awesome bass lines (and) throw everything together, you just have really cool music. ~ Isaac Hecker

A choir of angels glorified the hour, the vault of heaven was dissolved in fire. Father, why hast Thou forsaken me? Mother, I beg you, do not weep for me ... ~ Anna Akhmatova

Bjork, I'd love to do something with her. I'd love to do some sort of crazy orchestral choir thing with her. ~ Ellie Goulding

My interest in women's voices started when I was in the boys' choir and we were singing in opera choruses. That was my first close-up experience with the female soprano voice. I was amazed at how it could be within the same scale but so different in quality. ~ Alexander Chee

That is what is marvelous about school, she realized: when you are in school, your talents are without number, and your promise is boundless. You ace a math test: you will one day work for NASA. The choir director asks you to sing a solo at the holiday concert: you are the next Mariah Carey. You score a goal, you win a poetry contest, you act in a play. And you are everything at once: actor, astronomer, gymnast, star. But at a certain point, you begin to feel your talents dropping away, like feathers from a molting bird. Cello lessons conflict with soccer practice. There aren't enough spots on the debating team. Calculus remains elusive. Until the day you realize that you cannot think of a single thing you are wonderful at. ~ Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

When he was creating this picture, Leonardo da Vinci encountered a serious problem: he had to depict Good - in the person of Jesus - and Evil - in the figure of Judas, the friend who resolves to betray him during the meal. He stopped work on the painting until he could find his ideal models.

One day, when he was listening to a choir, he saw in one of the boys the perfect image of Christ. He invited him to his studio and made sketches and studies of his face.

Three years went by. The Last Supper was almost complete, but Leonardo had still not found the perfect model for Judas. The cardinal responsible for the church started to put pressure on him to finish the mural.

After many days spent vainly searching, the artist came across a prematurely aged youth, in rags and lying drunk in the gutter. With some difficulty, he persuaded his assistants to bring the fellow directly to the church, since there was no time left to make preliminary sketches.

The beggar was taken there, not quite understanding what was going on. He was propped up by Leonardo's assistants, while Leonardo copied the lines of impiety, sin and egotism so clearly etched on his features.

When he had finished, the beggar, who had sobered up slightly, opened his eyes and saw the picture before him. With a mixture of horror and sadness he said:

'I've seen that picture before!'


'When?' asked an astonished Leonardo.

'Three year ~ Paulo Coelho

Ode to Psyche - Excerpt

I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspir'd.
So let me be thy choir, and make a moan
Upon the midnight hours;
Thy voice, thy lute, thy pipe, thy incense sweet
From swinged censer teeming;
Thy shrine, thy grove, thy oracle, thy heat
Of pale-mouth'd prophet dreaming.

Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane
In some untrodden region of my mind,
Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain,
Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind: ~ John Keats

I like the idea of politically charged music a lot, but it usually seems to be preaching to the choir and ineffective. ~ Phil Elvrum

I was fired ignominiously from the Junior School Choir for being so off tune that the choir mistress declared she couldn't even bear to have me mime. ~ Sara Sheridan

Your kisses lift me higher ... like the sweet song of a choir. You light my morning sky, with burning love. ~ Elvis Presley

The youth choir is up onstage now, in flowing white gowns, and they're singing something in the key of goose-bumps. ~ A.S. King

I started writing songs when I was 10. It was a natural way to express myself as a kid. It wasn't until I started listening to jazz, joined the choir and picked up a guitar that my little hobby became something far more serious. ~ Kimbra

The virtual choir would never replace live music or a real choir, but the same sort of focus and intent and esprit de corps is evident in both, and at the end of the day it seems to me a genuine artistic expression. ~ Eric Whitacre

Yet, I also began to have the sense, fostered in part by the cross-contamination of research, that around the world enclaves that never knew one another - writers who could not have read each other - still had communicated across decades and across vast distances, had stared up at the same shared unfamiliar constellations in the night sky, heard the same unearthly music: a gorgeous choir of unique yet interlocking imaginations and visions and phantoms. At such times, you wonder as both a writer and an editor if you are creating narrative or merely serving as a conduit for what was already there. ~ Jeff VanderMeer

Oaths were important to word correctly, but Gregory could be forgiven for his lapse. It wasn't every day that his demon lover took a member of his choir hostage, beat the shit out of the guy and kept him a starving captive in her basement. ~ Debra Dunbar

When I had no gym,
The Divine One gave me rocks.
When I had no health,
The Divine One gave me herbs.
When I had no perfume,
The Divine One gave me flowers.
When I had no bathtub,
The Divine One gave me rivers.

When I had no tap water,
The Divine One gave me springs.
When I had no diamonds,
The Divine One gave me stars.
When I had no umbrella,
The Divine One gave me trees.
When I had no companions,
The Divine One gave me animals.

When I had no pool,
The Divine One gave me lakes.
When I had no bed,
The Divine One gave me fields.
When I had no pillow,
The Divine One gave me hay.
When I had no shelter,
The Divine One gave me a forest.

When I had no bodygaurds,
The Divine One gave me angels.
When I had no teacher,
The Divine One gave me nature.
When I had no orchestra,
The Divine One gave me crickets.
When I had no choir,
The Divine One gave me birds.

When I had no lamp,
The Divine One gave me the sun.
When I had no blanket,
The Divine One gave me the sky.
When I had no mansion,
The Divine One gave me the world.
When I had no wealth,
The Divine One gave me the universe. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

This shit is what would happen if the devil fell asleep in Santa's sleigh and had a wet dream while Rudolf licked his ass to the beat of a choir singing Amazing Grace. ~ Ashleyjo

She arched an eyebrow. "You already know?" "I stole his soul, lost his soul, exorcised his soul from another person's body, stuffed him in a bottle, pulled a short con, and now the Choir thinks I'm Gilles de Rais." Pixie just stared at me. She rested her palms on the tabletop. "You have got," she said, "to do a better job of keeping me in the loop." "It's been a really busy couple of days. ~ Craig Schaefer

He's going to audition for the Vienna Boys' Choir! ~ Gorilla Monsoon

My father's a deacon, my mother's a choir director, so I grew up in the church and singing in the choir, begging my mom if I could have a solo. ~ Keke Palmer

Mariah Carey is my favorite singer because her voice sounds utterly groundless. It's not even a human voice; it almost sounds mechanical. ~ Grimes

I had always suspected that trying to play golf in the company of big-time pros and a gallery would be something like walking naked into choir practice. ~ Dan Jenkins

I want to host a religious show. I'm sure nobody will be wanting the 11 o'clock spot on Sunday morning. I think we should really get some of our own preachers and preach that gay is good. And we'd have a great choir. ~ Kate Clinton

Every major city has a section like this one. If a piebald dwarf with advanced leprosy wants to have sex with a kangaroo and a teenage choir, he'll find his way here and get a room. When he's done he might take the whole gang next door for a cup of Cuban coffee and a medianoche sandwich. Nobody would care, as long as he tipped. ~ Jeff Lindsay

Church was the thing for me. The fellowship and the message that was given and singing in the choir and singing the solos and really listening to the words that you were singing and seeing how it affected people was huge for me. ~ DeLisha Milton-Jones

I was more of a dancing kid than a singing kid. I mean, I sang in school choirs and I sang in school musicals, but I was much more interested in dancing than singing. ~ Madonna Ciccone

Writers who used to show off their erudition no longer sing in the bare ruined choir of the media. ~ William Safire

I've had the idea since high school, of writing music just for voices, just a choir. I don't know if I'll ever get around to doing it, but I'd definitely be excited about trying to pull that off at some point. It definitely seems like an older-me kind of project. ~ Panda Bear

As it recurred again and again, it set me thinking of what my architect's books say about the custom in early times to consecrate the choir as soon as it was built, and that the nave, being finished sometimes half a century later, often did not get any blessing at all: I wondered idly if that had been the case at St. Barnabe, and whether something not usually supposed to be at home in a Christian church, might have entered undetected, and taken possession of the west gallery. I had read of such things happening too, but not in works on architecture.
("In The Court Of The Dragon") ~ Robert W. Chambers

I was in a show choir. I can't sing or dance to save my life, but I was very passionate. People said my parents paid the choir director to let me in. It was actually the parents who started that one! ~ Blake Lively

I took piano and drum lessons when I was young, and took a lot of choir classes in high school. Beyond that I just play by ear and learn as I go. ~ Jason Reeves

Hangovers are a vivid form of vengeance. Last night my apartment became the venue for a small, introverted chardonnay festival. A melancholy choir of Bulgarians provided the entertainment, via a set of headphones that ended up irredeemably tangled beneath the bed. Part of me just watched. The other part was in charge. ~ Liz Jensen

I grew up in a Southern Baptist-style church with a choir, a band, and music, but I've been asking myself my whole life, "Why is my own church, my own community, rejecting me because of my sexuality?". ~ Roger Ross Williams

Hey"

hey
been trying to meet you
hey
must be a devil between us
or whores in my head
whores at my door
whores in my bed
but hey
where have you been?
if you go i will surely die
we're chained

uh said the man to the lady
uh said the lady to the man she adored
and the whores like a choir
go uh all night
and Mary ain't you tired of this
uh
is
the
sound
that the mother makes when the baby breaks
we're chained ~ Pixies

To hear the Treorchy Male Choir in full throat is one of the great joys of choral music. ~ Melvyn Bragg

By a curious perversity, the human mind refuses to behave itself on the occasions when it should be intensely dramatic. It was so now; the climber suddenly forgot his fears in a smile. The choir had chosen this precise moment to start the Nunc Dimittis. ~ Whipplesnaith

Bloody hell," Charlie gasped. "That's twenty-five quid each, Isaac."

"Language."

"Shit." Isaac blew out a breath. "A hundred quid, Mum."

"Isaac, language."

"Hey no," Dex said, holding up a hand. "I mean a hundred each. I could use these as stencils. At this size I could pretty much charge double that, if not more, each time they're used. Probably twice again if they have them in colour."

The three of us looked at Dex in awe. He wanted to buy my talented boy's drawings for a hundred pounds each.

"Well?" I prompted.

"Fuck yeah."

"Language," I said, barely above a whisper, still in a state of shock.

"It's a deal." Dex grinned. "Speaking of which, I said I'd show you my designs, but I gotta be honest, I'm not sure they're as good as these."

"Oh fuck," I muttered.

"Language," Charlie cried.

As Dex stripped off his shirt, I genuinely thought I heard a choir of angels sing and saw a shaft of light shine through the darkness outside and into my lounge.

There was only one word for what I was looking at – wondrous. He could honestly market himself as a tourist attraction and sell tickets. ~ Nikki Ashton

My father has a beautiful, beautiful voice. His father was a pastor of a church. He sang in church. My mother sang in a church choir. I can take no credit for my vocal talent, because, both my father, and mother have beautiful, beautiful voices. ~ Deniece Williams

Digital synchronization occurs when all parts of the choir sing their respective parts in harmony. ~ Pearl Zhu

Christine Bass was my high school music teacher. She took a program on its last legs and within a few years turned into one of the best programs in the country. Our high school dominated national choir competitions all through her 20-plus year tenure. ~ Aaron Lazar

I'm a choir girl gone horribly, desperately wrong. ~ Florence Welch

Here's what I know about the realm of possibility - it is always expanding, it is never what you think it is. Everything around us was once deemed impossible. From the airplane overhead to the phones in our pockets to the choir girl putting her arm around the metalhead. As hard as it is for us to see sometimes, we all exist within the realm of possibility. Most of the limits are of our own world's devising. And yet, every day we each do so many things that were once impossible to us. ~ David Levithan

The suburban evening was grey and yellow on Sunday; the gardens of the small houses to left and right were rank with ivy and tall grass and lilac bushes; the tropical South London verdure was dusty above and mouldy below; the tepid air swarmed with flies. Eeldrop, at the window, welcomed the smoky smell of lilac, the gramaphones, the choir of the Baptist chapel, and the sight of three small girls playing cards on the steps of the police station. ~ T. S. Eliot

I got in the school band and the school choir. It all hit me like a ton of bricks, everything just came out. I played percussion for a while, and stayed after school forever just tinkering around with different things, the clarinets and the violins. ~ Quincy Jones

I started out in a professional choir at 13 years old. We traveled to different places, and I had a close relationship with the leaders of our choir. We were recording when I was 15, so it wasn't like I had to wait until 25 to find out certain things. ~ Yolanda Adams

A Summer's Singing"

"Where does that singing start, you know,
that thin sound - almost pure light?
Not the birds at false dawn or their song
when morning comes, feathered throats
warm with meaning. A different kind of music.

Listen, it is somewhere near you.
In the heart, emptied of fear,
stubbornly in love
with itself at last, the old
desires a ruined chorus,
a radiant bloody choir.

Where does the singing start?
Here, where you are, there's room
between your heartbeats,
as if everything you have ever been
begins, inside, to sing. ~ Lorna Crozier

My father had played cornet, although I never saw him play it. I found his mouthpiece when I was a kid. I used to buzz it. And my mother played piano and sang in the church choir for different functions. So there was always music in the house, jazz, gospel, or whatever. Especially jazz records. ~ Johnny Griffin

I can't explain the birds to you even if I tried. In the early morning, when the sun's rays peek over the mountain and subtly light up the landscape in a glow that, if audible, would sound like a hum, the birds sing. They sing in a layered symphony, hundreds deep. You really can't believe how beautiful it is. You hear bass notes from across the farm and soprano notes from the tree in front of you all at once, at varying volumes, like a massive choir that stretches across fifty acres of land. I love birds. But not as much as my wife loves them. My wife thinks about them, whereas I only notice them once they call for attention. But she looks for them, builds fountains for them, and saves them after they crash into windows. I've seen her save many birds. She holds them gently in the palm of her hand, and she takes them to one of the fountains she's built especially for them and holds their beaks up to the gentle trickle of water to let them drink, to wake them up from their dazed stupor. No matter how much time it takes, she doesn't leave them until they recover. And they mostly always do. ~ Portia De Rossi

I sang "O Holy Night" in a school choir. My mother came and listened to me and complimented me. So that was the high point. I cannot sing a note. ~ Toni Morrison

Oh may I join the choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence. ~ George Eliot

I grew up loving music, like, loving it. I was involved in church choir, leading worship and all the choirs in my school - even glee club. ~ Kelsea Ballerini

By middle school, I said to myself that it's time I begin to speak. I joined the choir, not because I wanted to. I forced myself. ~ Juan Felipe Herrera

I was a choir boy for 3 years in high school at St. George's in Newport, Rhode Island. ~ Billy Bush

I don't just want to talk to the choir. I want to sit down and be respectful of the people who are most unlike me, to get them to hear me and think. It doesn't mean you're going to change them right there, but just so they can hear you and what you're saying. ~ Sandra Cisneros

Rigel, Betelgeuse, and Orion. There was no finer church, no finer choir, than the stars speaking in silence to the many consumptives silently condemned, a legion upon the dark rooftops. The wind came down from the north like a runner in lacrosse, violent and hard, to batter every living thing. They were there, each one alone in conversation with the stars, mining ephemeral love from cold and distant light. ~ Mark Helprin

The real Julian Wells didn't die in a cherry-red convertible, overdosing on a highway in Joshua Tree while a choir soared over the sound track. ~ Bret Easton Ellis

Let us quake before the great Spirit, Who is my God, Who has made me know God, Who is God there above, and Who forms God here: almighty, imparting manifold gifts, Him Whom the holy choir hymns, Who brings life to those in heaven and on earth, and is enthroned on high, coming from the Father, the divine force, self-commandeered; He is not a Child (for there is one worthy Child of the One who is best), nor is He outside the unseen Godhead, but of identical honor. ~ Gregory Of Nazianzus

In monasteries of old, the monk's dharma, his purpose in life, was said to be this: to support the choir. In Latin, propter chorum. Literally, his life was lived "in support of the choir." He was not a soloist. He was not a diva. He was part of a magnificent whole. ~ Stephen Cope

Growing up, I was vaguely aware of things that went on in church, because I was in the boys' choir at the local Episcopal church. But I got the clear message that I was supposed to learn music there, and not pay too much attention to the rest of it, and I followed those instructions very carefully. ~ Francis Collins

I got put out of my church choir because my pastor said, 'We can't have baby sister singing the blues and coming in here and singing on Sunday morning.' ~ Merry Clayton

One who sings with his tongue on fire, gargles in the rat race choir. ~ Bob Dylan

It's possible, and I stress possible, that such a moment may never come: you may not fall in love, you may not be able to or you may not wish to give your whole life to anyone, and, like me, you may turn forty-five one day and realize that you're no longer young and you have never found a choir of cupids with lyres or a bed of white roses leading to the altar. The only revenge left for you then will be to steal from life the pleasure of firm and passionate flesh - a pleasure that evaporates faster than good intentions and is the nearest thing to heaven you will find in this stinking world where everything decays, beginning with beauty and ending with memory. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon

I was in a church choir early on and that really helped me musically in terms of chops, learning how to sing harmonies. ~ Emily Saliers

Then the singing enveloped me. It was furry and resonant, coming from everyone's very heart. There was no sense of performance or judgment, only that the music was breath and food. ~ Anne Lamott

Don't let a loud few determine the nature of the sound. It makes for poor harmony and diminishes the song. ~ Vera Nazarian

Preaching to the choir actually arms the choir with arguments and elevates the choir's discourse. There's a reason the right does it and does it well and triumphs. ~ Dan Savage

I was in a choir as a kid. It was from those early days that my outlook on harmonies and arrangements were nurtured. I always took that with me, even on the earliest Bad Religion record, which strangely was only about six years after that. ~ Greg Graffin

I am not saying that Hitler was a choir boy. But I am saying, let him who was innocent in the Second World War cast the first stone. ~ Ernst Zundel

Singing is my pleasure, but not in church, for the parson said the gargoyles must remain on the outside, not seek room in the choir stalls. So I sing inside the mountain of my flesh, and my voice is as slender as a reed and my voice has no lard in it. When I sing the dogs sit quiet and people who pass in the night stop their jabbering and discontent and think of other times, when they were happy. And I sing of other times, when I was happy, though I know that these are figments of my mind and nowhere I have been. But does it matter if the place cannot be mapped as long as I can still describe it? ~ Jeanette Winterson

I have such happy memories of performing in a choir and I don't think I'd have got where I am today without all that experience. So my advice to young singers is to either join your school or church's choir or find one in your local area. Choral music at any level teaches you so much about musicianship and blending your voice. ~ Katherine Jenkins

I was a founding member of the 'Dungeons and Dragons' club at my high school. I was in chorus, I was in swing choir. I was an outcast but I was an outcast among a group of outcasts. ~ John C. Reilly

Sometimes I think the choir gets a little ticked with me because I haven't sung in a long time and I can sing. ~ Della Reese

She marking them begins a wailing note And sings extemporally a woeful ditty How love makes young men thrall and old men dote How love is wise in folly, foolish-witty Her heavy anthem still concludes in woe, And still the choir of echoes answer so. ~ William Shakespeare