Heifetz Violin Quotes

It throbbed and pulsed, channeled by elemental forces of fear, love, hope, and sadness. The bow stabbed and flitted across the strings in a violent whorl of creation; its hairs tore and split until it seemed the last strands would sever in a scrape of dissonance. Those who saw the last fragile remnants held their breath against the breaking. The music rippled across the ship like a spirit, like a thing alive and eldritch and pregnant with mystery. The song held. More than held, it deepened. It groaned. It resounded in the hollows of those who heard. Then it softened into tones long, slow, and patient and reminded men of the faintest stars trembling dimly in defiance of a ravening dark. At the last, when the golden hairs of the bow had given all the sound they knew, the music fled in a whisper. Fin was both emptied and filled, and the song sighed away on the wind. ~ A.S. Peterson

The statue was of a nude woman playing a slide trombone. It was entitles, enigmatically, Evelyn and Her Magic Violin. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

And leadership then is about mobilizing and engaging the people with the problem rather than trying to anesthetize them so you can go off and solve it on your own. ~ Ronald A. Heifetz

To take up the violin or any instrument was an act of hope, it implied a future. ~ Ian McEwan

I inherited a painting and a violin which turned out to be a Rembrandt and a Stradivarius. Unfortunately, Rembrandt made lousy violins and Stradivarius was a terrible painter. ~ Tommy Cooper

She didn't own him. Had never owned him, she was only borrowing.
"I'm yours."
Her eyes flew open and he gazed at her without fear and without a lick of hesitancy.
"I've always been yours, Violin Girl. I've just been hoping you would take me. ~ Cari Quinn

The Karmic Philharmonic of Chesapeake Bay [10w]
The Philharmonic's evil second violin
reincarnated as a fiddler crab. ~ Beryl Dov

Siem began to play the first familiar chords of "Theme from Out of Africa," and sighs of delight could be heard from the audience, Oliver noted, "It's all about that chin, isn't it, clenched against the violin as if he's makine savage love to it. That marvelous chin is what's making all the ladies cream their knickers. ~ Kevin Kwan

To diagnose a system or yourself while in the midst of action requires the ability to achieve some distance from those on-the-ground events. We use the metaphor of "getting on the balcony" above the "dance floor" to depict what it means to gain the distanced perspective you need to see what is really happening. ~ Ronald A. Heifetz

Every single one of us can do things that no one else can do - can love things that no one else can love. We are like violins. We can be used for doorstops, or we can make music. You know what to do. ~ Barbara Sher

A Gift for You
I send you ...
A cottage retreat on a hill in Ireland. This cottage is filled with fresh flowers, art supplies, and a double-wide chaise lounge in front of a wood-burning fireplace. There is a cabinet near the front door, where your favorite meals appear, several times a day. Desserts are plentiful and calorie free. The closet is stocked with colorful robes and pajamas, and a painting in the bedroom slides aside to reveal a plasma television screen with every movie you've ever wanted to watch. A wooden mailbox at the end of the lane is filled daily with beguiling invitations to tea parties, horse-and-carriage rides, theatrical performances, and violin concerts. There is no obligation or need to respond.
You sleep deeply and peacefully each night, and feel profoundly healthy. This cottage is yours to return to at any time. ~ SARK

I basically started playing violin at the age of six. That lasted about three years because my previous teacher died and the second teacher didn't really know how to successfully get me going. ~ Miroslav Vitous

Dave Matthews is mixing violin solos with saxophone solos and it's bad for the baby ~ Rob Sheffield

When a street musician lowered his violin to inquire, 'Hey lovely, what you got there?' she said, 'Musicians who ask questions,' and kept on dragging. ~ Laini Taylor

Your silence creates a vacuum for others to fill The key is to stay present and keep listening. The silence of holding steady is different from the silence of holding back. ~ Ronald A. Heifetz

When God looks at sin, what he sees is what a violin maker would see if the player were to use his lovely creation as a tennis racquet. ~ Tom Wright

He was the second violin and a secret poet, which is to say that no one in the Symphony knew he wrote poetry except Kirsten and the seventh guitar. ~ Emily St. John Mandel

No matter how old you are now. You are never too young or too old for success or going after what you want. Here's a short list of people who accomplished great things at different ages
1) Helen Keller, at the age of 19 months, became deaf and blind. But that didn't stop her. She was the first deaf and blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree.
2) Mozart was already competent on keyboard and violin; he composed from the age of 5.
3) Shirley Temple was 6 when she became a movie star on "Bright Eyes."
4) Anne Frank was 12 when she wrote the diary of Anne Frank.
5) Magnus Carlsen became a chess Grandmaster at the age of 13.
6) Nadia Comăneci was a gymnast from Romania that scored seven perfect 10.0 and won three gold medals at the Olympics at age 14.
7) Tenzin Gyatso was formally recognized as the 14th Dalai Lama in November 1950, at the age of 15.
8) Pele, a soccer superstar, was 17 years old when he won the world cup in 1958 with Brazil.
9) Elvis was a superstar by age 19.
10) John Lennon was 20 years and Paul Mcartney was 18 when the Beatles had their first concert in 1961.
11) Jesse Owens was 22 when he won 4 gold medals in Berlin 1936.
12) Beethoven was a piano virtuoso by age 23
13) Issac Newton wrote Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica at age 24
14) Roger Bannister was 25 when he broke the 4 minute mile record
15) Albert Einstein was 26 when he wrote the theory of relativity
16) ~ Pablo

I can't use logic concerning my feelings, my feelings demand musical notes, violins, guitar solos, the stomping of feet, poetic language, metaphors, poetic lines about birds or deserts or tree-crowded forests. ~ Noah Cicero

Go, go," she urged. "Don't worry about me. I'll find some
other poor unsuspecting fool to torture. And yes, before you feel
the need to protest, I did just call you a fool."
"That, I think, may be the one privilege that consanguinity does
allow."
She cackled with delight. "You are a prince among nephews,"
she proclaimed.
"Your second favorite," he murmured.
"You'll rise to the top of the list if you find a way to destroy her
violin. ~ Julia Quinn

It seems to be the special peculiarity of human beings that they reflect: they think about thinking and know that they know. This, like other feedback systems, may lead to vicious circles and confusions if improperly managed, but self-awareness makes human experience resonant. It imparts that simultaneous "echo" to all that we think and feel as the box of a violin reverberates with the sound of the strings. It gives depth and volume to what would otherwise be shallow and flat. ~ Alan Watts

And then she caught the song. She fell upon it and music poured from the fiddle's hollow, bright and liquid like fire out of the heart of the earth. Pierre-Jean drew back and stood mesmerized. The room around Fin stirred as every ear bent to the ring of heartsong. It rushed through Fin and spread to the outermost and tiniest capillary reaches of her body. Her flesh sang. The hairs of her arms and neck roused and stood. She sped the bow across the strings. Her fingers danced on the fingerboard quick as fat raindrops. Every man in the room that night would later swear that there was a wind within it. They would tell their children and lovers that a hurricane had filled the room, toppled chairs, driven papers and sheets before it and blew not merely around them but through them, taking fears, grudges, malice, and contempt with it, sending them spiraling out into the night where they vanished among the stars like embers rising from a bonfire.

And though the spirited cry of the fiddle's song blew through others and around the room and everything in it, Fin sat at the heart of it. It poured into her. It found room in the closets and hollow places of her soul to settle and root. It planted seeds: courage, resolve, steadfastness. Fin gulped it in, seized it, held it fast. She needed it, had thirsted for it all her days. She saw the road ahead of her, and though she didn't understand it or comprehend her part in it, she knew that she needed the ancient and reckless power o ~ A.S. Peterson

Our entire being is fashioned as an instrument of praise. Just as a master violin maker designs an instrument to produce maximum aesthetic results, so God tailor-made our bodies, souls and spirits to work together in consonance to produce pleasing expressions of praise and worship. When we use body language to express praise, that which is internal becomes visible. ~ LaMar Boschman

Sonnet V
I touch you as a lonely violin touches the suburbs of the faraway place
patiently the river asks for its share of the drizzle
and, bit by bit, a tomorrow passing in poems approaches
so I carry faraway's land and it carries me on travel's road
On a mare made of your virtues, my soul weaves
a natural sky made of your shadows, one chrysalis at a time.
I am the son of what you do in the earth, son of my wounds
that have lit up the pomegranate blossoms in your closed-up gardens
Out of jasmine the night's blood streams white. Your perfume,
my weakness and your secret, follows me like a snakebite. And your hair
is a tent of wind autumn in color. I walk along with speech
to the last of the words a bedouin told a pair of doves
I palpate you as a violin palpates the silk of the faraway time
and around me and you sprouts the grass of an ancient place - anew ~ Mahmoud Darwish

Fun was fun and Sam was strung like a violin. I could play sweet music when I plucked at some of her strings. ~ Tijan

When you play a violin piece, you are a storyteller, and you're telling a story. ~ Joshua Bell

If I can add, say, 10 great new violin concertos to the repertoire before I'm done, that will be truly exciting. ~ Leila Josefowicz

I come from a very musical family. My dad taught me to play guitar. I play violin and drums as well. Violin, I started in elementary school. Drums actually came when I was in a program called 'Rock Star,' which was really awesome. We were doing a song by the Ramones, so I thought, 'Why not play the drums?' ~ Amandla Stenberg

It is as absurd to say that a man can't love one woman all the time as it is to say that a violinist needs several violins to play the same piece of music. ~ Honore De Balzac

Stay diagnostic even as you take action. ~ Ronald A. Heifetz

I love power. But it is as an artist that I love it. I love it as a musician loves his violin, to draw out its sounds and chords and harmonies. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte

I Brought My Grandma's Teeth to School

I brought my grandma's teeth to school to share for show-and-tell.
Billy showed his sneakers. It was more like show-and-smell.
Kevin brought a violin and showed he couldn't play.
Katie brought a snake to school - too bad it got away.
Our class likes show-and-tell a lot, so we were sad to hear
our teacher say that show-and-tell is canceled till next year. ~ Robert Pottle

I started playing the violin at age 3, and I was very fortunate because there were people who heard me who were influential in getting me auditions. By the time I was 7, I was playing concerts - it was just ridiculous. ~ Phil Ramone

Now against the specialist, against the man who studies only art or electricity, or the violin, or the thumbscrew or what not, there is only one really important argument, and that, for some reason or other, is never offered. People say that specialists are inhuman; but that is unjust. People say an expert is not a man; but that is unkind and untrue. The real difficulty about the specialist or expert is much more singular and fascinating. The trouble with the expert is never that he is not a man; it is always that wherever he is not an expert he is too much of an ordinary man. Wherever he is not exceptionally learned he is quite casually ignorant. This is the great fallacy in the case of what is called the impartiality of men of science. If scientific men had no idea beyond their scientific work it might be all very well - that is to say, all very well for everybody except them. But the truth is that, beyond their scientific ideas, they have not the absence of ideas but the presence of the most vulgar and sentimental ideas that happen to be common to their social clique. If a biologist had no views on art and morals it might be all very well. The truth is that the biologist has all the wrong views of art and morals that happen to be going about in the smart set of his time. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Very touching. Do you want me to imitate a violin? ~ L.J.Smith

If this world is a plucked violin string, am I part of its sound or its stillness? ~ Paige Lewis

Agnes shut her eyes, clenched her fists, opened her mouth and screamed.

It started low. Plaster dust drifted down from the ceiling. The prisms on the chandelier chimed gently as they shook.
It rose, passing quickly through the mysterious pitch at fourteen cycles per second where the human spirit begins to feel distinctly uncomfortable about the universe and the place in it of the bowels. Small items around the Opera House vibrated off shelves and smashed on the floor.

The note climbed, rang like a bell, climbed again. In the Pit, all the violin strings snapped, one by one.
As the tone rose, the crystal prisms shook in the chandelier. In the bar, champagne corks fired a salvo. Ice jingled and shattered in its bucket. A line of wine-glasses joined in the chorus, blurred around the rims, and then exploded like hazardous thistledown with attitude.

There were harmonics and echoes that caused strange effects. In the dressing-rooms the No. 3 greasepaint melted. Mirrors cracked, filling the ballet school with a million fractured images.
Dust rose, insects fell. In the stones of the Opera House tiny particles of quartz danced briefly...

Then there was silence, broken by the occasional thud and tinkle.
Nanny grinned.
'Ah,' she said, 'now the opera's over. ~ Terry Pratchett

Inside the house, violin music, richer than the darkest chocolate, started playing. It seeped outside and whispered to Scarlett as Julian's smile turned seductive, all shameless curves and immoral promises. An invitation to places that proper young ladies didn't think about, let alone visit. ~ Stephanie Garber

I have discovered three things which know no geographical borders - classical music, American jazz, and applause as the sign of the public's favor. ~ Jascha Heifetz

I occasionally play works by contemporary composers and for two reasons. First to discourage the composer from writing any more and secondly to remind myself how much I appreciate Beethoven. ~ Jascha Heifetz

A sandwich and a cup of coffee, and then off to violin-land, where all is sweetness and delicacy and harmony. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

Practice like it means everything in the world to you. Perform like you don't give a damn. ~ Jascha Heifetz

To be alone - the eternal refrain of life. It wasn't better or worse than anything else. One talked too much about it. One was always and never alone. A violin, suddenly - somewhere out of a twilight - in a garden on the hills around Budapest. The heavy scent of chestnuts. The wind. And dreams crouched on one's shoulders like young owls, their eyes becoming lighter in the dusk. A night that never became night. The hour when all women were beautiful. ~ Erich Maria Remarque

The camera for an artist is just another tool. It is no more mechanical than a violin if you analyze it. Beyond the rudiments, it is up to the artist to create art, not the camera. ~ Brett Weston