Chopin Quotes

There was with her a feeling of having descended in the social scale, with a corresponding sense of having risen in the spiritual. Every step which she took toward relieving herself from obligations added to her strength and expansion as an individual. She began to look with her own eyes; to see and to apprehend the deeper undercurrents of life. No longer was she content to "feed upon opinion" when her own soul had invited her. ~ Kate Chopin

By all the codes which I am acquainted with, I am a devilishly wicked specimen of the sex. ~ Kate Chopin

She answered her husband with friendly evasiveness - not with any fixed design to mislead him, only because all sense of reality had gone out of her life; she had abandoned herself to Fate, and awaited the consequences with indifference. ~ Kate Chopin

I love you, only you; no one but you. It was you who awoke me last summer out of a life-long, stupid dream. ~ Kate Chopin

Par exemple! I never had to ask. You were always there under my feet, like a troublesome cat." "You mean like an adoring dog. And just as soon as Ratignolle appeared on the scene, then it WAS like a dog. 'Passez! Adieu! Allez vous-en! ~ Kate Chopin

The flowers were like new acquaintances; she approached them in a familiar spirit, and made herself at home among them. ~ Kate Chopin

Do you suppose a woman knows why she loves? Does she select? Does she say to herself, 'Go to! here is a distinguished statesman with presidential possibilities; I shall proceed to fall in love with him.' or, 'I shall set my heart upon this musician, whose fame is on every tongue?' or 'this financier, who controls the world's money markets? ~ Kate Chopin

There are some people who leave impressions not so lasting as the imprint of an oar upon the water. ~ Kate Chopin

Every 30 seconds, it transmitted portions of [a Chopin Polonaise] to tell the world that the capital was still in Polish hands. Angered by the unexpected setback, the German High Command decided to pound the stubborn citadel into submission. In round-the-clock raids, bombers knocked out flourmills, gasworks, power plants and reservoirs, then sowed the residential areas with incendiaries. One witness, passing scenes of carnage, enumerated the horrors: 'Everywhere corpses, wounded humans, dead horses . . . and hastily-dug graves.' . . . Finally food ran out, and famished Poles, as one man put it, 'cut off flesh as soon as a horse fell, leaving only the skeleton.' On September 28, Warsaw Radio replaced the polonaise with a funeral dirge.15 ~ Norman Davies

Her husband seemed to her now like a person whom she had married without love as an excuse. ~ Kate Chopin

She says queer things sometimes in a bantering way that you don't notice at the time and you find yourself thinking about afterward. ~ Kate Chopin

Find a beautiful piece of art. If you fall in love with Van Gogh or Matisse or John Oliver Killens, or if you fall love with the music of Coltrane, the music of Aretha Franklin, or the music of Chopin - find some beautiful art and admire it, and realize that that was created by human beings just like you, no more human, no less. ~ Maya Angelou

One of these days," she said, "I'm going to pull myself together for a while and think - try to determine what character of a woman I am, for, candidly, I do not know. By all the codes which I am acquainted with, I am a devilishly wicked specimen of the sex. But some way I can't convince myself that I am. I must think about it. ~ Kate Chopin

Lenny Breau is one of the true geniuses of the guitar. I suppose he is a musician's musician. His knowledge of the instrument and the music is so vast, and I think that's what knocks people out about him. But he's such a tasty player too. I think if Chopin had played guitar, he would have sounded like Lenny Breau. ~ Chet Atkins

I have said it before, but I don't think I have ever came so near meaning it. ~ Kate Chopin

If the newspapers cut me up so much that I shall not venture before the world again, I have resolved to become a house painter; that would be as easy as anything else, and I should, at any rate, still be an artist! ~ Frederic Chopin

Beside being a respectable woman she was a very sensible one; and she knew there are some battles in life which a human being must fight alone. ~ Kate Chopin

When Doctor Mandelet dined with the Pontelliers on Thursday he could discern in Mrs. Pontellier no trace of that morbid condition which her husband had reported to him. She was excited and in a manner radiant. ~ Kate Chopin

Trying to capture the physicists' precise mathematical description of the quantum world with our crude words and mental images is like playing Chopin with a boxing glove on one hand and a catcher's mitt on the other. ~ George Johnson

As long as I have health and strength, I will gladly work all my days. ~ Frederic Chopin

My earthly body has been a terrible disappointment to me. ~ Frederic Chopin

The crowd intimidates me, its breath suffocates me. I feel paralyzed by its curious look, and the unknown faces make me dumb. ~ Frederic Chopin

Many of them were familiar from childhood with the fables of La Fontaine. Or they had read Voltaire or Racine or Molière in English translations. But that was about the sum of any familiarity they had with French literature. And none, of course, could have known in advance that the 1830s and '40s in Paris were to mark the beginning of the great era of Victor Hugo, Balzac, George Sand, and Baudelaire, not to say anything of Delacroix in painting or Chopin and Liszt in music. ~ David McCullough

She liked then to wander alone into strange and unfamiliar places. She discovered many a sunny, sleepy corner, fashioned to dream in. ~ Kate Chopin

My mother Elizabeth Ivey Brubeck was a pianist who studied with Dame Myra Hess and Tobias Matthey. As a child in California I used to listen to her play Chopin. ~ Dave Brubeck

I've been working like a machine, and feeling like a lost soul. ~ Kate Chopin

One needs only to study a certain positioning of the hand in relation to the keys to obtain with ease the most beautiful sounds, to know how to play long notes and short notes and to achieve certain unlimited dexterity. A well formed technique, it seems to me, can control and vary a beautiful sound quality. ~ Frederic Chopin

Romances serve but to feed the imagination of the young; they add nothing to the sum of truth. ~ Kate Chopin

Discover her appetite, and to see the relish with which she ate the ~ Kate Chopin

The peace and beauty of a spring day had descended upon the earth like a benediction. ~ Kate Chopin

I'm tired," she uttered complainingly.
"I know you are."
"You don't know anything about it. Why should you know? I never was so exhausted in my life. But it isn't unpleasant. A thousand emotions have swept through me to-night. I don't comprehend half on them. Don't mind what I'm saying; I am just thinking aloud. ~ Kate Chopin

She felt as if a mist had been lifted from her eyes, enabling her to look upon and comprehend the significance of life, that monster made up of beauty and brutality. ~ Kate Chopin

Has she," asked the Doctor, with a smile, "has she been associating of late with a circle of pseudo-intellectual women - super-spiritual superior beings? My wife has been telling me about them. ~ Kate Chopin

Perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one's life. ~ Kate Chopin

She grew daring and reckless, overestimating her strength. She wanted to swim far out, where no woman had swum before. ~ Kate Chopin

I used to play the piano by listening to it - like Chopin pieces, when I was, like, a little kid - and then the minute my parents got me lessons to read music, I couldn't do it anymore. ~ Eliza Coupe

She says a wedding is one of the most lamentable spectacles on earth. ~ Kate Chopin

I love music. I have a fondness for Chopin, and I very much like his 'Raindrop Prelude.' ~ Daniel Tammet

I'm a revolutionary, money means nothing to me. ~ Frederic Chopin

I couldn't help loving you if you were ten times his wife; but so long as I went away from you and kept away I could help telling you so. ~ Kate Chopin

I cannot listen to Beethoven or Mahler or Chopin or Bach when I write because those composers require you stop what you are doing and listen. ~ Antonio Damasio

You are burnt beyond recognition, he added, looking at his wife as one looks at a valuable piece of personal property which has suffered some damage. She held up her hands, strong, shapely hands, and surveyed them critically, drawing up her fawn sleeves above the wrists. Looking at them reminded her of her rings, which she had given to her husband before leaving for the beach. She silently reached out to him, and he, understanding, took the rings from his vest pocket and dropped them into her open palm. She slipped them upon her fingers; then clasping her knees, she looked across at Robert and began to laugh. The rings sparkled upon her fingers. He sent back an answering smile. ~ Kate Chopin

Don't go; don't go! Oh! Edna, stay with me. ~ Kate Chopin

Chopin
Two embalmers at work upon a minor poetthe scent of tuberosesAutumn rain. ~ H.L. Mencken

Two opposing things can be equally true. Counting the days till Christmas doesn't mean we hate Halloween. I go to church on Sundays, and still hold the same faith at the pub on Saturday night. I shamelessly play a steady stream of eighties pop music and likewise have an undying devotion to Chopin. And perhaps most significantly: I love to travel and I love my home. ~ Tsh Oxenreider

We shall be everything to each other. Nothing else shall be of any consequence. ~ Kate Chopin

I should never deem a man of ordinary caliber worthy of my devotion. ~ Kate Chopin

Something flickered in the distance, dressing the darkness in a soft veil of blue. Out of the blue came an explosion of sounds followed by the seamlessly expressed melancholy of Chopin's "Ballade no. 1. ~ Ella Leya

Bach is like an astronomer who, with the help of ciphers, finds the most wonderful stars ... Beethoven embraced the universe with the power of his spirit ... I do not climb so high. A long time ago I decided that my universe will be the soul and heart of man. ~ Frederic Chopin

I tell you piano the things I used to tell you ~ Frederic Chopin

His manner invited easy confidence. The preliminary stage of becoming acquainted was one which he always endeavored to ignore when a pretty and engaging woman was concerned. ~ Kate Chopin

Nothing is more beautiful than a guitar, except, possibly two. ~ Frederic Chopin

Who can tell what metals the gods use in forging the subtle bond which we call sympathy, which we might as well call love. ~ Kate Chopin

I haven't heard anything so great for a long time; Beethoven snaps his fingers at the whole world ... ~ Frederic Chopin

It was an unforgettable picture to see Chopin sitting at the piano like a clairvoyant, lost in his dreams; to see how his vision communicated itself through his playing, and how, at the end of each piece, he had the sad habit of running one finger over the length of the plaintive keyboard, as though to tear himself forcibly away from his dream. ~ Robert Schumann

I feel like a novice, just as I felt before I knew anything of the keyboard. It is far too original, and I shall end up not being able to learn it myself. ~ Frederic Chopin

The mother-women seemed to prevail that summer at Grand Isle. It was easy to know them, fluttering about with extended, protecting wings when any harm, real or imaginary, threatened their precious brood. They were women who idolized their children, worshiped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels. ~ Kate Chopin

If ever a fusion of two human beings into one has been accomplished on this sphere it was surely their union. ~ Kate Chopin

It seemed to be a law of society that hair must be parted and brushed. ~ Kate Chopin

So the storm passed and every one was happy. ~ Kate Chopin

In the background, classical music plays from a paint-splattered radio, the New York station with the ancient announcer more frequently heard in doctors' waiting rooms and other places where signs prohibit the use of cell phones – the last bastions of Beethoven or Chopin or, on racier days, Shostakovich. ~ Kate Walbert

She looked into the distance, and the old terror flamed up for an instant, then sank again. Edna heard her father's voice and her sister Margaret's. She heard the barking of an old dog that was chained to the sycamore tree. The spurs of the cavalry officer clanged as he walked across the porch. There was the hum of bees, and the musky odor of pinks filled the air. (last lines) ~ Kate Chopin

Oh, how miserable it is to have no one to share your sorrows and joys, and, when your heart is heavy, to have no soul to whom you can pour out your woes. ~ Frederic Chopin

She knew that she would weep again when she saw the kind, tender hands folded in death; the face that had never looked save with love upon her, fixed and gray and dead. But she saw beyond that bitter moment a long procession of years to come that would belong to her absolutely. And she opened and spread her arms out to them in welcome. ~ Kate Chopin

To me, art almost always speaks more forcefully when it appears in an imperfect, accidental, and fragmentary way, somehow just signaling its presence, allowing one to feel it through the ineptitude of the interpretation. I prefer the Chopin that reaches me in the street from an open window to the Chopin served in great style from the concert stage. ~ Witold Gombrowicz

The discovery of useful forms is precious. Once found, they should never be abandoned for trivial reasons. It's easy to imagine today's art instructor cautioning Chopin that the Mazurka thing is getting a little repetitive, that the work is not progressing. Well, true, it may not have been progressing - but that's not the issue. Writing Mazurkas may have been useful only to Chopin - as a vehicle for getting back into the work, and as a place to begin making the next piece. For most artists, making good art depends upon making lots of art, and any device that carries the first brushstroke to the next blank canvas has tangible, practical value. Only ~ David Bayles

He reproached his wife with her inattention, her habitual neglect of the children. If it was not a mother's place to look after children, whose on earth was it? He himself had his hands full with his brokerage business. ~ Kate Chopin

I dance with people I despise; amuse myself with men whose only talent lies in their feet, gain the disapprobation of people I honor and respect; return home at day break with my brain in a state which was never intended for it; and arise in the middle of the next day feeling infinitely more, in spirit and flesh like a Liliputian, than a woman with body and soul. Entry (when she was eighteen) in her Commonplace Book, 1868-1869. ~ Kate Chopin

No multitude of words could have been more significant than those moments of silence, or more pregnant with the first-felt throbbings of desire. ~ Kate Chopin

She wanted something to happen - something, anything: she did not know what. ~ Kate Chopin

Love hasn't got anything to do with the heart, the heart's a disgusting organ, a sort of pump full of blood. Love is primarily concerned with the lungs. People shouldn't say "she's broken my heart" but "she's stifled my lungs." Lungs are the most romantic organs: lovers and artists always contract tuberculosis. It's not a coincidence that Chekhov, Kafka, D.H. Lawrence, Chopin, George Orwell and St Thérèse of Lisieux all died of it; as for Camus, Moravia, Boudard and Katherine Mansfield, would they have written the same books if it werent for TB? ~ Frederic Beigbeder

She was fond of her children in an uneven, impulsive way. She would sometimes gather them passionately to her heart; she would sometimes forget them. ~ Kate Chopin

A person can't have everything in this world; and it was a little unreasonable of her to expect it. ~ Kate Chopin

The three most celebrated doctors on the island have been to see me. One sniffed at what I spat, the second tapped where I spat from, and the third sounded me and listened as I spat. The first said I was dead, the second that I was dying and the third that I'm going to die. ~ Frederic Chopin

The delicous breath of rain was in the air. ~ Kate Chopin

No, I only think you cruel, as I said the other day. Maybe not intentionally cruel; but you seem to be forcing me into disclosures which can result in nothing; as if you would have me bare a wound for the pleasure of looking at it, without the intention or power of healing it. ~ Kate Chopin

In the procession I should feel the crushing feet, the clashing discords, the ruthless hands and stifling breath. I could not hear the rhythm of the march. ~ Kate Chopin

Exhaustion was pressing upon and overpowering her.
"Good-by
because I love you." He did not know; he did not understand. He would never understand. Perhaps Doctor Mandelet would have understood if she had seen him
but it was too late; the shore was far behind her, and her strength was gone.
She looked into the distance, and the old terror flamed up for an instant, then sank again. ~ Kate Chopin

Music is the worst of them - roiling and boiling - overly emotionalized on the one hand, overly intellectuallized on the other. Bach and Mozart indeed! Bach inevitably makes me think of fish in a barrel! round and round and round they go and nothing ever happens. Nothing ! Tum -de-dum-dum. Tum -de-dum-dum and that's all! Tum -de-dum-de-bloody-dum-dum! As for Mozart, his emotions did not mature beyond the age of twelve. never achieved adolescence, let alone puberty. his music merely combines a popular talent for slapstick and a commercial talent for tears. No - not tears. For sobs. Beethoven, pompous. Chopin - sickly sweet and given to tantrums - Tum -de-dum-dum- Bang! and Wagner - a self -centred bore. and Stravinsky - discordant, rude and blows his music through his nose ~ Timothy Findley

Mrs. Pontellier gave over being astonished, and concluded that wonders would never cease. ~ Kate Chopin

There was no despondency when she fell asleep that night; nor was there hope when she awoke in the morning. ~ Kate Chopin

For the first time, she recognized the symptoms of infatuation which she had felt incipiently as a child, as a girl in her early teens, and later as a young woman. The recognition did not lessen the reality, the poignancy of the revelation by any suggestion or promise of instability. The past was nothing to her; offered no lesson which she was willing to heed. The future was a mystery which she never attempted to penetrate. The present alone was significant; was hers, to torture her as it was doing then with the biting conviction that she had lost that which she had held, she had been denied that which her impassioned, newly awakened being demanded. ~ Kate Chopin

She perceived that her will had blazed up, stubborn and resistant. She could not at that moment have done other than denied and resisted. She wondered if her husband had ever spoken to her like that before. and if she had submitted to his command. Of course she had; she remembered that she had. But she could not realise why or how she should have yielded, feeling as she then did. ~ Kate Chopin

But she saw beyond that bitter moment a long procession of years to come that would belong to her absolutely. ~ Kate Chopin

She was rather handsome than beautiful. Her face was captivating by reason of a certain frankness of expression and a contradictory subtle play of features. ~ Kate Chopin

She had resolved to never take another step backward. ~ Kate Chopin

[On Chopin's Preludes:]
His genius was filled with the mysterious sounds of nature, but transformed into sublime equivalents in musical thought, and not through slavish imitation of the actual external sounds. His composition of that night was surely filled with raindrops, resounding clearly on the tiles of the Charterhouse, but it had been transformed in his imagination and in his song into tears falling upon his heart from the sky ... The gift of Chopin is [the expression of] the deepest and fullest feelings and emotions that have ever existed. He made a single instrument speak a language of infinity. He could often sum up, in ten lines that a child could play, poems of a boundless exaltation, dramas of unequalled power. ~ George Sand

She had been taught in her girlhood to fondle and cherish those long-necked, sinuous creatures, the phrases of Chopin, so free, so flexible, so tactile, which begin by seeking their ultimate resting-place somewhere beyond and far wide of the direction in which they started, the point which one might have expected them to reach, phrases which divert themselves in those fantastic bypaths only to return more deliberately - with a more premediated reaction, with more precision, as on a crystal bowl which, if you strike it, will ring and throb until you cry aloud in anguish - to clutch at one's heart. ~ Marcel Proust

Most women are moody and whimsical. ~ Kate Chopin

She was a grown young woman when she was overtaken by what she supposed to be the climax of her fate. It was when the face and figure of a great tragedian began to haunt her imagination and stir her senses. The persistence of the infatuation lent it an aspect of genuineness. The hopelessness of it colored it with the lofty tones of a great passion. ~ Kate Chopin

The stillest hour of the night had come, the hour before dawn, when the world seems to hold its breath. The moon hung low, and had turned from silver to copper in the sleeping sky. ~ Kate Chopin

Why? Because his hair is brown and grows away from his temples; because he opens and shuts his eyes, and his nose is a little out of drawing; because he has two lips and a square chin, and a little finger which he can't straighten from having played baseball too energetically in his youth. Because - ~ Kate Chopin

She turned her face seaward to gather in an impression of space and solitude, which the vast expanse of water, meeting and melting with the moonlit sky, conveyed to her excited fancy. As she swam she seemed to be reaching out for the unlimited in which to lose herself. ~ Kate Chopin

I got obsessed with classical music, I got obsessed with Chopin, with playing the piano. ~ Gary Oldman

Even in winter it shall be green in my heart. ~ Frederic Chopin

Having nothing to do, I am correcting the Paris edition of Bach; not only the engraver's mistakes, but also the mistakes hallowed by those who are supposed to understand Bach (I have no pretensions to understand better, but I do think that sometimes I can guess). ~ Frederic Chopin

So imagine a fire going
wood snapping the way it does when it's a little green - the wind rattling the windows behind the curtains
and one of those Chopin melodies that feel like sorrow and ecstasy all mixed together pouring from the keys
and you have my idea of happiness. Or just reading, reading and lamplight, the sound of pages turning.
And so you dare to be happy.
You do that thing.
You dare. ~ Steven Millhauser

But she laughed and looked at him with eyes that at once gave him courage to wait and made it torture to wait. ~ Kate Chopin

She was happy to be alive and breathing, when her whole being seemed to be one with the sunlight, the color, the odors, the luxuriant warmth of some perfect Southern day. ~ Kate Chopin

You can't go home and listen to Chopin, and just use it. ~ Mick Farren