Into Music Quotes

I started playing guitar at the age of 8 or 9 years. Very early, and I was like already into pop music and was just trying to copy what I heard on the radio. And at a very early age I started experimenting with old tape recorders from my parents. I was 11 or 12 at that time and then when I was like 14 or 15 I had a punk band. I made all the classic rock musician's evolutions and then in the early nineties I bought my first sampler and that is how I got into electronic music, because I was able to produce it on my own. That was quite a relief. ~ Christian Fennesz

That night changed my life: I was finally experiencing, in person, the songs that had been the soundtrack of my life for the past few years, the lyric-images I'd memorized after hours of headphone-listening on walks to school, the words that had been direct-deposited into my heart though the channel of my ears
I was hearing them here, now, in a moment that would never exist again. ~ Amanda Palmer

I finished high school, moved to Nashville for college, and set out to break into the music business. Every night when I called home with news of my experiences, my mom and dad would encourage me to keep taking those small steps. ~ Trisha Yearwood

There is a storytelling element in there. The tango form is a little like the blues in that you have a kind of structure. It's not as rigid as twelve bar, but it's very much a storytelling medium -- and there's an element of call-and-response, and a particular arc in the musical form, that suggest a story. It's about being in the moment, with the music; and responding to your partner, and the particular feeling and momentum in her body in any one moment. It's a very concentrated thing; you can't think about anything else while you are doing it. If you try to hold a conversation, it just kind of falls apart. The music was what really drew me into tango. Everyone knows a few of the more popular tango classics, but once you get into it, there's such a rich field. It's astonishing, this kind of miraculous musical form that developed in a very small locality: two cities on either side of the River Plate, in Argentina and Urugauy. It started in the 1880s or '90s, and there are all kinds of mysteries, myths and stories, about how tango started and developed. It was first of all considered really low-life, almost reptilian. Something to be avoided and not talked about. And then it became this word wide phenomena. . .and I could go on talking about tango forever. . . . but its also to do with movement. I try to get that into my pictures: a sense of movement, something flowing through. A while ago, I realised how much I'd been drawing dancing figures in the corners of my sketchbooks fo ~ Alan Lee (artist)

Dear solitude, how I missed you in the times I was so attached to the illusion of loneliness, how I secretly longed for you in times of distraction with music and addiction, how I desired to dive into the creativity of your silent whispers.. oh solitude, I remember you there when I wrote my first book, I recall your inspiring voice when that pen hit the paper.. When I was no longer by your side, oh solitude, how you silently tried to draw me back to you, by showing me the continuous struggle to feel full among unfulfilling relationships or restless nights of loneliness.. Oh solitude, if it wasn't for you, where would I find all that you could provide, only you.. ~ Virgil Kalyana Mittata Iordache

Every musician, their goal in life is to play music that people love, and I've accomplished my goal. I was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and left that chapter of my life and those people in the past. Good and bad, I've loved and am thankful for that chapter. ~ Steven Adler

Well open up your mind and see like me
Open up your plans and damn you're free
Look into your heart and you'll find love love love love
Listen to the music of the moment people dance and sing, we're just one big family
It's our God-forsaken right to be loved loved loved loved loved
((I'm Yours)) ~ Jason Mraz

I have so much music inside me I'm just trying to stay afloat. I don't tend to write for a particular band - you have to just write the songs and then let God into the room and let the music tell you what to do. ~ Jack White

I was always into pop music, Destiny's Child, songs with catchy music. Even when I was writing when I was younger, it wasn't all about expressing myself; it was just about making fun music. ~ Eliza Doolittle

Music is very, very important in my movies. In some ways the most important stage, whether it ends up being in the movie or not, is just when I come up with the idea itself before I have actually sat down and started writing. I go into my record room ... I have a big vinyl collection and I have a room kind of set up like a used record store and I just dive into my music, whether it be rock music, or lyric music, or my soundtrack collection. What I'm looking for is the spirit of the movie, the beat that the movie will play with. ~ Quentin Tarantino

When I moved to New York, I fell head over heels back into country music and probably 'cause I missed something about Texas. ~ Norah Jones

I always go in very emotionally when I'm doing music. Sad or happy, I'm always into it. I have a hard time writing for other people, writing with someone else in mind. ~ Erik Hassle

I am into nature and seeing whales. I went whale-watching, and I was really looking forward to that, but when you see it on TV and you see other programs do it, you're seeing close-ups of these massive creatures, and the music that's added gives you a certain feeling. ~ Karl Pilkington

Our music has depth, and attempts philosophical thought and meaning with discussions of infinity, eternity and mortality. There is a line which people cross that turns it into some magical, mystical realm, for which I dont claim responsibility and dont hold any great truck with. ~ David Gilmour

Wrapped up in the music, I threw myself into an overstuffed chair and let my legs dangle over the arm, the position in which Nature intended music to be listened to, and for the first time in days I felt the muscles in my neck relaxing. ~ Alan Bradley

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. ~ Debra Dean

It wasn't until my late teens that I really got into soul music and then I was like 'Ooh, this is good!' You'd always here it at old family parties, like, Gladys Knight and I'd always love it but I didn't really get to know it and respect it until I was a bit older. ~ Rebecca Ferguson

As much as I would really like to have saved myself heartache, embarrassment or gossip, I also know that my biggest mistakes have turned into my best lessons and sometimes my greatest career triumphs. If my life had been turbulence-free, no bumps in the road at all, maybe my music would be beige, maybe the stadiums wouldn't be full and the mantle would be a little more empty. ~ Taylor Swift

What is music? Music is language. A human being wants to express ideas in this language, but not ideas that can be translated into concepts ... ~ Anton Webern

Well, I didn't really grow up playing or listening to metal, like many of the kids I went to school with. I only got into it in my late teens, so when Marilyn Manson formed, it was at a time when I was still excited about approaching music from that angle. ~ Daisy Berkowitz

The fluteplayer puts breath into a flute, and who makes the music? Not the flute. The Fluteplayer! ~ Rumi

The gospel of Jesus points us and indeed urges us to be at the leading edge of the whole culture, articulating in story and music and art and philosophy and education and poetry and politics and theology and even, heaven help us, biblical studies, a worldview that will mount the historically rooted Christian challenge to both modernity and postmodernity, leading the way into the postmodern world with joy and humor and gentleness and good judgment and true wisdom. ~ N. T. Wright

No one wants to admit we're addicted to music. That's just not possible. No one's addicted to music and television and radio. We just need more of it, more channels, a larger screen, more volume. We can't bear to be without it, but no, nobody's addicted. We could turn it off anytime we wanted. I fit a window frame into a brick wall. With a little brush, the size for fingernail polish, I glue it. The window is the size of a fingernail. The glue smells like hair spray. The smell tastes like oranges and gasoline. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

I love music and I enjoy creating sounds. I got into making music when I was a child, starting with the spoons and the koto before moving onto the piano. ~ Tobe Hooper

I'm interested in the cultural thing - music, then eventually cinema. I think it's part of my struggle as a cultural worker. I'm not into the armed thing. I cannot be violent. ~ Lav Diaz

These solo concerts were without precedent, not only in jazz history, but also in the entire history of the piano. They were not renditions of composed music committed to memory, nor were they a series of variations on composed themes. They were attempts at very long stretches (up to an hour at a time) of total improvisation, the creation from scratch of everything: rhythms, themes, structures, harmonic sequences and textures. Before a concert, Jarrett would try to empty himself of all preconceived ideas, and then allow the music to flow through and out of him. He said that if he was not able to empty himself he would, almost invariably, have a concert that was not as good. There might be periods when he seemed to be marking time but and feeling his way into a new area, but this was also part of the total experience which delighted and enthralled audiences. The sustained intensity of Jarrett's inspiration during these marathons was literally awesome and, almost in the sense of preacher and congregation, he seemed to want the audiences to be not only witnesses but also participators on the occasion... ~ Ian Carr

I think music is what takes the experience off the screen into your soul, into your head. ~ Matthew Vaughn

Reading is the strangest art. Your eye takes a shape, turns it into music, then story, then spirit, so a curl of ink laid long ago by a sliver of reed can become, a thousand years later, your own breath. ~ Keith Miller

My music is just fresh. Everybody say it's a breath of fresh air because it's not like the normal Houston sound you would hear. I am from Houston and I use that same slang and I carry myself the same way as a Houstonian and I'm a Houston dude born and raised, but the music is a lil bit different due to the things I've seen and the things I've learned and put that into my music. ~ Short Dawg

It was my love for the guitar that first got me into music and singing. ~ Ed Sheeran

My music is very emotional. The reason why I want to play music is very emotional. I want to call out my emotions and package them into music. ~ Hiromi

What needs to be discharged is the intolerable tenderness of the past, the past gone and grieved over and never made sense of. Music ransoms us from the past, declares an amnesty, brackets and sets aside the old puzzles. Sing a new song. Start a new life, get a girl, look into her shadowy eyes, smile. ~ Walker Percy

Fame requires every kind of excess. I mean true fame, a devouring neon, not the somber renown of waning statesmen or chinless kings. I mean long journeys across gray space. I mean danger, the edge of every void, the circumstance of one man imparting an erotic terror to the dreams of the republic. Understand the man who must inhabit these extreme regions, monstrous and vulval, damp with memories of violation. Even if half-mad he is absorbed into the public's total madness; even if fully rational, a bureaucrat in hell, a secret genius of survival, he is sure to be destroyed by the public's contempt for survivors. Fame, this special kind, feeds itself on outrage, on what the counselors of lesser men would consider bad publicity-hysteria in limousines, knife fights in the audience, bizarre litigation, treachery, pandemonium and drugs. Perhaps the only natural law attaching to true fame is that the famous man is compelled, eventually, to commit suicide.
(Is it clear I was a hero of rock'n'roll?)
Toward the end of the final tour it became apparent that our audience wanted more than music, more even than its own reduplicated noise. It's possible the culture had reached its limit, a point of severe tension. There was less sense of simple visceral abandon at our concerts during these last weeks. Few cases of arson and vandalism. Fewer still of rape. No smoke bombs or threats of worse explosives. Our followers, in their isolation, were not concerned with precedent now. They w ~ Don DeLillo

For me personally - because I do it myself - the scoring of a picture is fun. I edit the picture and when I've finished I go into my room and I have many many records - jazz, classical and popular music. And I have this all at my disposal. I don't have to get a composer. ~ Woody Allen

Liv runs. Every morning, and some evenings too. Running has taken the place of thinking, of eating, sometimes of sleeping. She runs until her shins burn and her lungs feel as if they will explode ... She plugs in her iPod earphones, closes the door of the block, rams her keys into the pocket of her shorts, and sets off at a pace. She lets her mind flood with the deafening thumping beat, dance music so relentless that it leaves no room for thought. ~ Jojo Moyes

I was really, really, really enthusiastic as a kid. I was up for anything. I was hugely into music and theatre. I was a big musical theatre kid; I loved reading. ~ Amanda Marshall

The basic idea of a hyper instrument is where the technology is built right into the instrument so that the instrument knows how it's being played - literally what the expression is, what the meaning is, what the direction of the music is. ~ Tod Machover

He was sitting in the midst of a children's party at Harold's Cross. His silent watchful manner had grown upon him and he took little part in the games. The children, wearing the spoils of their crackers, danced and romped noisily and, though he tried to share their merriment, he felt himself a gloomy figure amid the gay cocked hats and sunbonnets.
But when he had sung his song and withdrawn into a snug corner of the room he began to taste the joy of his loneliness. The mirth, which in the beginning of the evening had seemed to him false and trivial, was like a sothing air to him, passing gaily by his senses, hiding from other eyes the feverish agitation of his blood while through the circling of the dancers and amid the music and laughter her glance travelled to his corner, flattering, taunting, searching, exciting his heart. ~ James Joyce

She [Joni Mitchell] wanted to have that (jazz) element in her music. Of course, when she heard Jaco's [Jaco Pastorius'] music and met him, that floored her
really grabbed her. She decided that Wayne Shorter was really conducive to her music. She would speak metaphorically about things. "I want this to sound like a taxicab driver, or a taxi in New York," or "I want this to sound like a telephone ringing." She would speak to musicians like that, and we really tuned into what she would want our music to be. ~ Don Alias

Don't fall in love with a woman who reads, a woman who feels too much, a woman who writes...
Don't fall in love with an educated, magical, delusional, crazy woman. Don't fall in love with a woman who thinks, who knows what she knows and also knows how to fly; a woman sure of herself.
Don't fall in love with a woman who laughs or cries making love, knows how to turn her spirit into flesh; let alone one that loves poetry (these are the most dangerous), or spends half an hour contemplating a painting and isn't able to live without music.
Don't fall in love with a woman who is interested in politics and is rebellious and feel a huge horror from injustice. One who does not like to watch television at all. Or a woman who is beautiful no matter the features of her face or her body.
Don't fall in love with a woman who is intense, entertaining, lucid and irreverent. Don't wish to fall in love with a woman like that. Because when you fall in love with a woman like that, whether she stays with you or not, whether she loves you or not, from a woman like that, you never come back. ~ Martha Rivera-Garrido

Galois's ideas, with all their brilliance, did not appear out of thin air. They addressed a problem whose roots could be traced all the way back to ancient Babylon. Still, the revolution that Galois had started grouped together entire domains that were previously unrelated. Much like the Cambrian explosion-that stunning burst of diversification in life forms on Earth-the abstraction of group theory opened windows into an infinity of truths. Fields as far apart as the laws of nature and music suddenly became mysteriously connected. The Tower of Babel of symmetries miraculously fused into a single language. ~ Mario Livio

A foolish German had said that man thought in words. It was totally false; a pernicious doctrine; the thoughts flashed into being in a hundred simultaneous forms, with a thousand associations, and the speaking mind selected one, forming it grossly into the inadequate symbols of words, inadequate because common to disparate situations - admitted to be inadequate for vast regions of expression, since for them there were the parallel languages of music and painting. Words were not called for in many or indeed most forms of thought: Mozart certainly thought in terms of music. He himself at this moment was thinking in terms of scent. ~ Patrick O'Brian

I was just glad to meet somebody outside of my group of small town friends who was into music. Somebody else who had aspirations to do something more than sing at a record hop. ~ John Oates

All the fears and doubts surrounding her grief and regrets were swept up into the tempest of the music, poising here in the centre of the moment, a clear vessel of joy. ~ Alison Croggon

At the end of the '90s and into 2000, electronic music was still an underground phenomenon, especially in America. ~ Tiesto

I sang in English my whole life; I just happened to decide that I had a passion for Latin music, and I wanted to jump into Latin music first. ~ Prince Royce

As soon as I got into music, I tried to be a working, real artist who gets paid for what he does, who doesn't have a day job. ~ Frank Black

The thing in jazz that will get Bix Beiderbecke out of his bed at two o'clock in the morning, pick that cornet up and practice into the pillow for another two or three hours, or that would make Louis Armstrong travel around the world for fifty plus years non stop, just get up out of his sick bed, crawl up on the bandstand and play, the thing that would make Duke Ellington, the thing that would make Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Mary Lou Williams, the thing that would make all of these people give their lives for this, and they did give their lives, is that it gives us a glimpse into what America is going to be when it becomes itself. And this music tells you that it will become itself. And when you get a taste of that, there's just nothing else you're going to taste that's as sweet. ~ Wynton Marsalis

Music is important. It says things you heart can't say any other way, and in a language everyone speaks. Music crosses borders, turns smiles into frowns, and vice versa. These observations are shared with a hope: that, when schools cut back on music classes, they really think about what they're doing - and don't take music for granted. ~ Dan Rather

Once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That's it. And what's more, the people at the very top don't work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

Music isn't just playing notes on a page. You've got to put your heart into it. I'm not saying lost control. I'm saying let what's happening inside you come out" -Donna ~ Lisa Jenn Bigelow

I was always into music. I think everyone is when they're a teenager, as a way to drown out the world. ~ Penelope Spheeris

It's easy to get thousands of people to come to your Church. Easy. Just have good entertainment. And so you go to worship services and you're entertained by music, the lights, the action...you're entertained. The preacher comes out, he has lots of funny stories or heart-rending stories and you'll live contented. You live satisfied emotionally.

I'm for numbers, I'm for reaching people for Christ. But when you become numbers-driven, then everything in the worship service is aimed at that. If you have numbers, you have to have big Churches. If you have big Churches, you gotta have big debts. So you have to get people to come, you gotta entertain them, and cause them to be emotionally satisfied. So, we're back into this man-centeredness that has destroyed worship service in the 20th century. ~ Dr. Joe Morecraft

It's much harder, much more work to be your own artist, and it's hard for me to just want to do one thing. I love doing my own music, but I really have to get into a groove with it, which has been difficult over the last few years because I've had so much great work coming in. ~ Gail Ann Dorsey

So you have chosen aloneness. You have chosen the security and the relative freedom of solitude, because there is no risk involved. You can stay up every night and watch your TV shows and eat ice cream out of the box and scroll through your Tumblr and never let your brain sit still, not even for a moment. You can fill your days up with books and coffees and trips to the store where you forget what you wanted the second you walk in the automatic sliding door. You can do so many little, pointless things throughout the day that all you can think of is how badly you want to sleep, how heavy your whole body is, how much your feet hurt. You can wear yourself out again and again on the pavement, and you do, and it feels good. No one will ever bridge that gap and point to your stomach or your hair or your eyes in the mirror and magically make you see the wonderful things about getting to be next to you. And maybe that's it, after all, this fear that no one will ever truly feel about you the way you want to be felt about. Maybe what you want is someone to make you love yourself, to put sense into all that positive rhetoric, to make it so the aloneness of TV and blasting music in your ears at all times isn't the most happy place you can think of. Maybe you want someone who makes you so sure of how wonderful things are that you cannot help but to tell them your feelings first, even at the risk of being humiliated. Because you will know that, when you're telling them you love them, what ~ Chelsea Fagan

With technology and everything, compact discs are going to be, like, vintage soon, right? The way vinyl is now. Like, if I ever have kids, they're going to look at CDs and think, 'What is this crap, geez, how clunky.' By then everyone will have the fiftieth edition of iPods - or maybe they'll just have music downloaded directly into their brains, like with microchips, or something. And I'll be the old lady in the corner going, 'Back when I was a kid, we had mix tapes, and floppy disks, and gas didn't cost twenty bucks a gallon, and oh, yeah, MTV actually played music videos, if you can believe it.' And they'll probably say, 'Oh, Mom, you and your stories, we're jetting to the oxygen bar, see you later,' and take off in their flying cars. You know there'll be flying cars, it's only a matter of time. ~ Hannah Harrington

Cheap music, childish images, the vulgate in language, in its crassest sense, can penetrate to the deeps of our necessities and dreams. It can assert irrevocable tenure there. The opening bars, the hammer-beat accelerando of Edith Piaf's Je ne regrette rien - the text is infantile, the tune stentorian, and the politics which enlisted the song unattractive - tempt every nerve in me, touch the bone with a cold burn and draw me into God knows what infidelities to reason, each time I hear the song, and hear it, uncalled for, recurrent inside me. ~ George Steiner

I grew up thinking art was pictures until I got into music and found I was an artist and didn't paint. ~ Chuck Berry

I started classical and operatic lessons when I was 8 and become an operatic singer and went to competition. I write my own music. A lot of the songs, growing up, I was into writing dark stories and poems, and one day I started putting melodies to them. ~ Cassie Steele

I realized a lot of my friends were going to nightclubs and listening to house music. I was hanging out with them and going to clubs as well but I didn't really understand that kind of music. I was listening to country music and was heavily into Hank Williams, bluegrass, and Bob Dylan. So I just decided I really needed to understand what this music I was hearing in the clubs was all about. ~ Hans-Peter Lindstrom

Music, art, writing ... it's like some
magical psychic drainage. A way of
tapping into the bigger picture of all
it is to be human. ~ Lou Rhodes

The philosophic mind inclines always to an elaborate life
the life of Goethe or of Leonardo da Vinci; but the life of the poet isintense
the life of Blake or of Dante
taking into its centre the life that surrounds it and flinging it abroad again amid planetary music. ~ James Joyce

It didn't look like a house they'd just moved into. There were LEGO robots on the stairs and two cats sleeping on the sofa in the living room. The coffee table was stacked with magazines, and a little kid's winter coat was spread on the floor. The whole house smelled like fresh-baked chocolate-chip cookies. There was jazz music coming from the kitchen. It seemed like a messy, happy kind of home - the kind of place that had been lived in forever. ~ Rick Riordan

Go on from here, Ada, please. (She). Billions of boys. Take one fairly decent decade. A billion of Bills, good, gifted, tender and passionate, not only spiritually but physically well-meaning Billions, have bared the jillions of their no less tender and brilliant Jills during that decade, at stations and under conditions that have to be controlled and specified by the worker, lest the entire report be choked up by the weeds of statistics and waist-high generalizations. No point would there be, if we left out, for example, the little matter of prodigious individual awareness and young genius, which makes, in some cases, of this or that particular gasp an unprecedented and unrepeatable event in the continuum of life or at least a thematic anthemia of such events in a work of art, or a denouncer's article. The details that shine through or shade through: the local leaf through the hyaline skin, the green sun in the brown humid eye, tout ceci, vsyo eto, in tit and toto, must be taken into account, now prepare to take over (no, Ada, go on, ya zaslushalsya: I'm all enchantment and ears), if we wish to convey the fact, the fact, the fact - that among those billions of brilliant couples in one cross section of what you will allow me to call spacetime (for the convenience of reasoning), one couple is a unique super-imperial couple, sverhimperator-skaya cheta, in consequence of which (to be inquired into, to be painted, to be denounced, to be put to music, or to the question and death, ~ Vladimir Nabokov

He ordered Ronan to put on some terrible music
Ronan was always too happy to oblige in this department
and then he abused the Camaro at every stoplight on the way out of town. "Put your back into it!" Gansey shouted breathlessly. He was talking to himself, of course, or to the gearbox. "Don't let it smell fear on you!" Blue wailed each time the engine revved up, but not unhappily. Noah played the drums on the back of Ronan's headrest. Adam, for his part, was not wild, but he did his best not to appear unwild, so as not to ruin it for the others. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

Get into the music business. This is the business that you have absolutely no requirements. You listen to music, you need no college degree. ~ Curtis Jackson

And what struck my heart almost as much as the song itself was the way that he seemed with his whole body to lean into the music, to press his soul like an ear to the instrument. ~ Anne Rice

When we remove all emotion, all judgement, and all expectation there is only love left. Love is found in the stillness of the soul. Love is without action, without attachment or need. Love is the subtle energy that flows through all of creation. Love transcends your being into ascension. Love is the harmony and the music of the universe, love is all there is. ~ L.J. Vanier

When I was growing up in the early '70s and really getting into music, waiting outside the record store for that 45, waiting for a single from The Dead, The Clash, David Bowie, or T-Rex or something to be there. There was something about that that was so special. ~ Dave Gahan

I'm into song-writing; I'm into melodies that break your heart a little bit. That's the thing that got me into music; that's what I look for in music for the most part. ~ Danger Mouse

My touring isn't about collecting souvenirs and always being on the go. My souvenirs are writing in my journal and creating new music, because that fits easily into my backpack when I'm travelling around the world. It's something that I can share later with fans or with future family members. ~ Jason Mraz

I would love to sign on to do a movie if it was the right role and if it was the right script, because I would be taking time away from music to tell a big grand story, and spend all of my time and pouring all of my emotions into being someone else. So for me to do that, it would have to be a story worth telling. ~ Taylor Swift

I played the vina until my heart turned into the same instrument. Then I offered this instrument to the Divine Musician, the only muscian existing. Since then I have become His flute, and when He chooses He plays His music. The people give me credit for this music which, in reality, is not due to me, but to the Musician who plays his own instrument. ~ Hazrat Inayat Khan

Rock was different from rock and roll. Rock was virtuosic and adult, as opposed to popsy and teenaged. Rock and roll was apolitical and fun, while rock was "heavy" and often political, creating vistas of psychic energy that carried beyond the music itself and into radical politics and art. ~ Stephen Davis

Human lives are conmposed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of an individual's life. ~ Milan Kundera

The music defied classification. If I had been writing a
review of the show, I would have labeled it progressive,
guitar-driven rock 'n' roll. But the guitars made sounds guitars
didn't always make. Symphonic sounds. Sacred sounds.
The music dug in so deep you didn't hear it so much as feel
it, reminding me of a dream I used to have when I was a kid,
where I would be standing on a street corner, I would jump
into the air, flap my arms, and soar up into the sky.
That's the only way I could describe the music.
It was the sonic equivalent of flight. ~ Tiffanie DeBartolo

I think there's such a thing, as a performance gene. If it's in your DNA it needs to come out. For me it originally came out through music, then segued into acting and came out through there. I always needed to get up and perform. ~ Cillian Murphy

Walk slowly," said a voice from behind me, and I turned around and felt my heart jump in delight. "Remember, you're on a crutch and she's an old lady."
"You came!" I said.
"I heard you were looking for me. Julian told me."
"I didn't think I'd see you. Not till, you know, till it was my turn."
"I couldn't wait," he said.
"You look exactly the same as you did on that last day. In Central Park."
"Actually, I'm a few pounds lighter," he said. "I've been on a fitness drive."
"Good for you." I stared at him and felt the tears forming in my eyes. "Do you know how much I've missed you?" I asked him. "It's been almost thirty years. I shouldn't have had to spend all that time on my own."
"I know, but it's nearly over. And you haven't done a bad job of it at the same time, given the mess you made of the first thirty. The years apart will feel like nothing compared to what we have before us."
"The music's started," said my mother, clutching me to her.
"I have to go, Bastiaan," I said. "Will I see you later?"
"No. But I'll be there in November when you arrive."
"All right." I took a deep breath. "I love you."
"I love you too," said my mother. "Shall we go?"
I nodded and stepped forward, and slowly we made our way down the aisle, passing the faces of our friends and family, and I delivered her into the arms of a kind man who swore to love her and take care of her for the rest of her life.
And at the end, when the e ~ John Boyne

I was only beginning to enter into the infinite subtlety of Gregorian chant. It was - and remains - the only public prayer I have ever been able to engage in without feeling like a phony and a jackass. But then, one day in 1965 or so, it was simply abolished. With a stroke of his pen, Pope John XXIII - who had such good ideas about other things - declared that liturgy would henceforth be in the vernacular language of the people. That was, effectively, the end of Latin chant.

Then all those monks and nuns who had devoted hours and hours a day began to sicken and fall into depressions, but nobody noticed for a long time. Maybe, as I can well believe, the music toned up their systems in some mysterious way. Or perhaps chant really was a language that God understood. Faced with numerous liturgical scholas shrieking away in the new vernacular hymns, Divinity may have covered its ears and withdrawn, leaving the monks to pine. We parish musicians, illiterate in anything written after the 13th century, stumbled around trying to score liturgies for guitar and bongo drums, trying to make sense of texts like "Eat his body! Drink his blood!"

It wasn't because the music got so bad that I quit going to Mass, but it certainly was the beginning of my doubts about papal infallibility. ~ Mary Rose O'Reilley

I know a lot of people don't listen to music when they're writing because it distracts them, but for me it's almost a way to get into the self-hypnotic state that I need to be in to write. ~ Dan Chaon

Horace, we've had a complaint that the music was playing too loudly in the Waiting Area," one board member announced as Mr. Brutish showed them into the board room and directed them to a row of seats lining the front wall. "The soul music?" a male spirit clarified, clearly irritated. ~ L.R.W. Lee

On the platform in the opposite corner of the bar, the jazz ensemble was playing a perky little tune. Admittedly, when the Count had first encountered jazz, he hadn't much of an affinity for it. He had been raised to appreciate music of sentiment and nuance, music that rewarded patience and attention with crescendos and diminuendos, allegros and adagios artfully arranged over four whole movements – not a fistful of notes crammed higgledy-piggledy into thirty measures.
And yet…
And yet, the art form had grown on him. Like the American correspondents, jazz seemed a naturally gregarious force – one that was a little unruly and prone to say the first thing that popped into its head, but generally of good humor and friendly intent. In addition, it seemed decidedly unconcerned with where it had been or where it was going – exhibiting somehow simultaneously the confidence of the master and the inexperience of the apprentice. Was there any wonder that such an art had failed to originate in Europe? ~ Amor Towles

To be a full-blooded hillbilly was to be a living koan. Half of you wanted to be dignified and half of you couldn't tolerate any restraint. You could see it in the regional art and hear it in the music. Wood carving with chainsaws. Cloggers who danced up a storm with the lower half of their bodies, but held the upper half perfectly still and stared off into the distance stone-faced. Or a group of bluegrass musicians who'd be playing the most raucous tunes imaginable, looking around at each other with bemused expressions that seemed to say where's all that racket comin from?
Phoebe believed that nearly all the adult males everywhere were pretty much the same way. Most of them could manage to keep the top half of themselves under a semblance of control, but the bottom half tended to run wild. As she continued to descend the trail she couldn't help but think that most men were mentally ill below the waist. ~ Carolyn Jourdan

Have you ever had a lyric from a really crappy song or advertising jingle get stuck in your head? Something that just won't go away, no matter how much you don't want it to be there?

Imagine if, instead of a silly piece of music, it was an image. Imagine that image was something you found disturbing; say, rivers of rich burgundy blood gushing from slashes in your forearms.

What if, instead of this being a fleeting, irritating image, it took hold in your mind. It would be there on waking, it would push itself into your thoughts while you were watching television, driving, sitting at your desk. What if, gradually, your mind became your own personal continuously screening horror movie, starring yourself.

What would you do? Would you feel compelled to act on these thoughts? Do you think, if you did, it would help? Would you think yourself mad?

Would you tell anyone? ~ Victoria Leatham

The music takes you. It has to be alive. It's like you hammer something, and the way it happens to bleed leads you into new directions. ~ Michael Gira

You can tell all of us are morphing into full-blown adults, wingtip adults, because all the time now the Big Question is, What are you going to do? After the summer, about your scholarship, about choosing a college, after graduation, with the rest of your life. When you are thirteen, the question is, Smooth or crunchy? That's it. Later, at the onset of full-blown adulthood, the Big Question changes a little bit - instead of, What are you going to do? it turns into, What do you do? I hear it all the time when my parents have parties, all the men standing around. After they talk sports, they always ask, What do you do? It's just part of the code that they mean "for a living" because no one ever answers it by saying, I go for walks and listen to music full-blast and don't care about my hearing thirty years from now, and I drink milk out of the carton, and I cough when someone lights up a cigarette, and I dig rainy days because they make me sad in a way I like, and I read books until I fall asleep holding them, and I put on sock-shoe, sock-shoe instead of sock-sock, shoe-shoe because I think it's better luck. Never that. People are always in something. I'm in advertising. I'm in real estate. I'm in sales and marketing. ~ Brad Barkley

I don't like to put tags on my music. I leave that to others. Seems like some people see me as the founder of "space disco", although that's a bit weird since there were lots of music from the late 70s and early 80s that easily fits into this genre. I can understand why we need genres, but I don't feel comfortable using any on my own music. ~ Hans-Peter Lindstrom

I'd spent five hours that morning trying to write a song that was meaningful and good, and I finally gave up and lay down. Then, "Nowhere Man" came, words and music, the whole damn thing, as I lay down ... Song writing is about getting the demon out of me. It's like being possessed. You try to go to sleep, but the song won't let you. So you have to get up and make it into something, and then you're allowed sleep. ~ John Lennon

I think some of my inspiration came from just being around music. My family was into music. My uncle had his own band and my father use to sing in my uncle's band. If you want to go to the music influences we could be here all day. That's everybody from Michael Jackson all the way up to people in the game now that inspire me. ~ Nelly

During the writing process, I tend not to listen to too much music. I obviously wear a lot of influences on my sleeve, but if I was listening to too many records, I would turn into too much of a monkey. ~ Jay Reatard

Every day was like a day out of someone else's life. Nothing had ever happened to me, and now everything was happening to me -- and by everything, I really meant Lena. An hour was both faster and slower. I felt like I had sucked the air out of a giant balloon, like my brain wasn't getting enough oxygen. Clouds were more interesting, the lunchroom less disgusting, music sounded better, the same old jokes were funnier, and Jackson went from being a clump of grayish-green industrial buildings to a map of times and places where I might run into her. I found myself smiling for no reason, keeping my earphones in and replaying our conversations in my head, just so I could listen to them again. I had seen this kind of thing before. I had just never felt it. ~ Kami Garcia

The towering, uniformed, blonde man demanded, rather than ordered yet another whisky. This was one of life's luxuries exempt from rationing. To the swinging music of 'Glenn Miller', Lieutenant Patrick Starkey of the King's Royal Rifle Corps drank himself into oblivion; the bloody war forgotten for now. ~ Anthony Hulse

I am a futurist, projecting trends in science into the next decades and century, but ironically my two daughters - one is a neuroscientist and the other is a pastry chef - tell me that my taste in music is positively prehistoric. ~ Michio Kaku

I dive down into the depth of the ocean of forms, hoping to gain the perfect pearl of the formless.
No more sailing from harbour to harbour with this my weather-beaten boat. The days are long passed when my sport was to be tossed on waves.
And now I am eager to die into the deathless.
Into the audience hall by the fathomless abyss where swells up the music of toneless strings I shall take this harp of my life.
I shall tune it to the notes of forever, and when it has sobbed out its last utterance, lay down my silent harp at the feet of the silent. ~ Rabindranath Tagore

Searching for music is like searching for God. They're very similar. There's an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unseeable, the unspeakable, all those things, comes into being a composer and to writing music and to searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don't exist. ~ David Bowie

So some hope. I am going to be honest. It's gonna get way worse. Brace yourself. BUT ALSO know there is a new tomorrow. Be grateful for everyday you are on this big blue marble because death is for a real long time. Life is brief. The world is better with you on it. Trust me when I say I understand how you feel! I understand depression. You know what helps. I say read a book or watch comedy, not mine necessarily. Just think about it. Who moves you? What comedy do you love? Not into comedy, listen to music, hell go to your porch and watch what's going on. Wild life isn't just lions and frogs but also squirrels and Birds. Like someone fun? Watch him or her or they or whomever. Look you'll get through this! Stay in together! ~ Johnny Corn

I like the fervor of religious music, the zealous aspect - that preachers can go from a conversational cadence into this passionate singing. ~ Yannis Philippakis

I think one of the worst things schools have done is taken out all of the stuff like art, music, woodworking, sewing, cooking, welding, auto-shop. All these things you can turn into careers. How can you get interested in these careers if you don't try them on a little bit? ~ Temple Grandin

There is a long and interesting tradition of really marginal left-field music that becomes commercially successful. And I will, for a brief minute, fit into that tradition. ~ Moby

I've finally tapped into that spirit of self-destruction that makes rock-n-roll the king of music! ~ Homer