Jukebox Quotes

I pushed through the door into Kelly's. Inside they sat with their fat hands around their beers while the jukebox sang softly to itself. You'd think they'd found out how, by sitting still and holding their necks just so, to look down into lost worlds. ~ Denis Johnson

The fireplace is warm nook Penina Mezei's house in fairy tale in which the "fairy-tale-in Jukebox" can listen to while in the "fairy library" books are fairy tales and books of fairy tales, but also some fairy-tale subject. ~ Penina Mezei

Sometimes I become the comedy jukebox. I read the emails, people give me requests.The shows are just amazing; they're packed with people and they're so much fun to do. ~ Pablo Francisco

Apparently our portmanteau is trending on Twitter." He let out a self-deprecating laugh. "I didn't even know what a portmanteau was before Jukebox Hero. It's a mashup of our names, like Brangelina or Robsten. No idea what ours is
what do our names make?" He considered this a for a moment before shaking his head.
"It's probably awful," he decided. "Could be worse, though; I hear the portmanteau for the main characters in The Hunger Games is ... well, their names are Peeta and Katniss. I'll let you guys figure that one out on your own. ~ Andrea D. Smith

Then she spotted in the corner, glowing wonderfully, a Wurlitzer jukebox. ' Holy shit!' It was like being on a commuter train through the Bronx and seeing among the piles of crushed cars a pasture with a lone white horse. ~ Garth Risk Hallberg

At that moment the dull sound of a rumbling crash from outside filtered through the low murmur of the pub, through the sound of the jukebox, through the sound of the man next to Ford hiccuping over the whiskey Ford had eventually bought him.
Arthur choked on his beer, leaped to his feet.
"What's that?" he yelped.
"Don't worry," said Ford, "they haven't started yet."
"Thank God for that," said Arthur, and relaxed.
"It's probably just your house being knocked down," said Ford, downing his last pint.
"What?" shouted Arthur. Suddenly Ford's spell was broken. Arthur looked wildly around him and ran to the window.
"My God, they are! They're knocking my house down. What the hell am I doing in the pub, Ford?"
"It hardly makes any difference at this stage," said Ford, "let them have their fun. ~ Douglas Adams

The smell of cigarette smoke in the air in a tavern that changes names often,
a bar cursed because of a girl who died of a drug overdose
in the basement, we put a few coins in the jukebox;
chose "Angel Band" by Johnny Cash and sat down at the bar,
ordered a soda, you wanted a whiskey on the rocks.
We saw the coal miner who moved here from West Virginia
knocking back liquor like I drink sweet tea.
No one asked why he was so solemn today.
It was warm. It was relatively quiet.
To anyone else, this place could feel sinister.
But to us, it was freedom. It was a hiding place.
No one was ever here long enough to know us.
And we liked it that way. ~ Taylor Rhodes

I knelt at the altar of Ray Charles for years. I worked at a restaurant, and that's all there was on the jukebox. ~ Tom Waits

When a sex tape gets made a star is born with a publicity agent on speed dial a six figure payout and a line of tacky lingerie in the works ~ Saira Viola

I swung around downtown and slowed down to miss a solitary drunk emerging blindly from the Tripoli bar and out upon the street in a sort of gangling somnambulistic trot, pursued on his way by the hollow roar of the juke box from the ghastly lit and empty bar. 'Sunstroke,' I murmured absently. 'Simply a crazed victim of the midnight sun.' As I parked my mud-spattered Coupe alongside the Miners' State Bank, across from my office over the dime store, I reflected that there were few more forlorn and lonely sounds than the midnight wail of a jukebox in a deserted small town, those raucous proclamations of joy and fun where, instead, there dwelt only fatigue and hangover and boredom. To me the wavering hoot of an owl sounded utterly gay by comparison. ~ Robert Traver

…a bar he sometimes sneaked into called The Slab. (They served bloody marys and zombies – stiff drinks they called them – and the jukebox only played dirges. A spotlight pinned dead go-go boys in cages, and though he'd never ventured to the refrigerated back room, he'd heard stories.) ~ Robert Dunbar

So one must be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going? Are we to grow used to the idea that every man relives ancient torments, which are all the more profound because they grow comic with repetition? That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox ... ~ Stanislaw Lem

It's important to realize that everybody who went into country music, and most everybody who went into rock and roll in the '50s, they had no more goal than a hit on the jukebox. Johnny Cash from the very beginning had a goal that he wanted to make music that lifted people's spirits. ~ Robert Hilburn

He's not a pretty boy. Is he?" Nico's about thirty feet away, and for once I'm grateful that the jukebox music from the house speakers is just a little too loud. But I lower my voice anyway. "I mean, he's pretty and he's a boy, but he's not a pretty boy."
"Please. I bet his semen is sparkly and it sings Beatles love songs while shooting out of his perfect penis. ~ Kayley Loring

I closed my eyes and I thought of the lash of her skirt snapping around her as she danced one evening in a bar on the South Side to a jukebox that was playing "Barefootin'," of the downy slope of her neck and the declivity in her nightgown as she bent to wash her face in the bathroom sink, of a tuna salad sandwich she'd handed me one windy afternoon as we sat at a picnic table in Lucia, California, and looked out for the passage of whales, and I felt that I loved Emily insofar as I loved those things – beyond reason, and with a longing that made me want to hang my head – but it was a love that felt an awful lot like nostalgia. ~ Michael Chabon

In the bar, the jukebox comes on. Molley must be trying to drown out the sounds of raised voices. I move toward her, unable to resist; her eyes are wet, her face flushed, and I can finally look at her, want her, let myself touch her without grief turning everything to ashes in my mouth. ~ Amie Kaufman

Bubba shot the jukebox last night, said it played a sad song and it made him cry. ~ Mark Chesnutt

The Everlasting Staircase"
Jeffrey McDaniel

When the call came, saying twenty-four hours to live,
my first thought was: can't she postpone her exit

from this planet for a week? I've got places to do,
people to be. Then grief hit between the ribs,

said disappear or reappear more fully. so I boarded
a red eyeball and shot across America,

hoping the nurses had enough quarters to keep
the jukebox of Grandma's heart playing. She grew up

poor in Appalachia. And while world war II
functioned like Prozac for the Great Depression,

she believed poverty was a double feature,
that the comfort of her adult years was merely

an intermission, that hunger would hobble back,
hurl its prosthetic leg through her window,

so she clipped, clipped, clipped -- became the Jacques
Cousteau of the bargain bin, her wetsuit

stuffed with coupons. And now --pupils fixed, chin
dangling like the boots of a hanged man --

I press my ear to her lampshade-thin chest
and listen to that little soldier march toward whatever

plateau, or simply exhaust his arsenal of beats.
I hate when people ask if she even knew I was there.

The point is I knew, holding the one-sided
conversation of her hand. Once I believed the heart

was like a bar of soap -- the more you use it,
the smaller it gets; care too much and it'll ~ Jeffrey McDaniel

In the hall itself the din of the music - for this is the real way to play a jukebox and what it was originally for - was so tremendous that it shattered Dean and Stan and me for a moment in the realization that we had never dared to play music as we wanted, and this was how loud we wanted. ~ Jack Kerouac

Fuck hope and all the tiny little towns, one-horse towns, the one-stoplight towns, three-bars country-music jukebox-magic parquet-towns, pressure-cooker pot-roast frozen-peas bad-coffee married-heterosexual towns, crying-kids-in-the-Oldsmobile-beat-your-kid-in the-Thriftway-aisles towns, one-bank one-service-station Greyhound-Bus-stop-at-the-Pepsi-Cafe towns, two-television towns, Miracle Mile towns, Viv's Double Wide Beauty Salon towns, schizophrenic-mother towns, buy-yourself-a-handgun towns, sister-suicide towns, only-Injun's-a-dead-Injun towns, Catholic-Protestant-Mormon-Baptist religious-right five-churches Republican-trickle-down-to-poverty family-values sexual-abuse pro-life creation-theory NRA towns, nervous-mother rodeo-clown-father those little-town-blues towns. ~ Tom Spanbauer

She was all slump and sag her spirit withering like a tuckering weed shambling for a way out ~ Saira Viola

All you need is a pool table, beer, an electric jukebox and good conversation. The day a girl beats me in a game of Beirut [a kind of beer pong] is a good sign! ~ Chace Crawford

Childhood memories were like airplane luggage; no matter how far you were traveling or how long you needed them to last, you were only ever allowed two bags. And while those bags might hold a few hazy recollections - a diner with a jukebox at the table, being pushed on a swing set, the way it felt to be picked up and spun around - it didn't seem enough to last a whole lifetime. ~ Jennifer E. Smith

Reality Tv had become the preferred drug of choice for the George Clooney obsessed housewives strung out on empty promises and splintered dreams ~ Saira Viola

Misery loves another idiot with a jukebox where his soul should be. ~ Steve Almond

The jukebox changed to Elvis's "Don't Be Cruel," and Tinsley smiled her patented Carmichael smile, the one that seemed to say, I'm holding all the cards, but be honored that I've let you play. ~ Cecily Von Ziegesar

All summer long we spent dancin' in the sand, and the jukebox kept on playing Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. ~ Johnny Ramistella

If I look closely, I bet I could see my own past, lying on the floor somewhere between the ancient jukebox and the pool table. ~ Kol Anderson

Some estimate Hulu IPO could bring in $2 billion. What will the content providers get? Zero. What is Hulu without content? An empty jukebox. ~ Steven Levitan

I wanna be strong, I wanna laugh along, I wanna belong to the living. Alive, alive, I wanna get up and jive, Wanna wreck my stockings in some jukebox dive. ~ Joni Mitchell

has traveled to Brogan's Point for the occasion. But Cory's and Talia's plans - and their emotions - are thrown into turmoil when they hear the Magic Jukebox play "Moondance." Can a single song make them ~ Judith Arnold

I was bored at college, so I put $10 in a jukebox in this place where people played ping-pong and pool. I put in $10 of 'Jingle Bell Rock,' and this was back in the '90s, so it played 'Jingle Bell Rock,' like, 40 times in a row. It was just really fun to watch because after the fourth time, people were just losing-their-minds angry. ~ Kyle Dunnigan

Jukeboxes, radio and television, going from dawn to dusk, help spread the poison of synthetic, artificial, rhythmical noise. ~ Maria Franziska Von Trapp

Tonight the song you always despised strides from the jukebox full-bodied and you hear the lyrics for the first time, understand the lyrics for the first time after all these years. This new you with an older soul. Now it's your favorite. All this time singing the wrong words. ~ Colson Whitehead

I did 'The Frank Skinner Show,' and they gave me a little jukebox-shaped CD player, which looks nice in the kitchen. ~ Robert Webb

I'm not a jukebox; I don't play exactly what the crowd wants to hear - that doesn't make sense. But, I do look at people requests. At the end of the day, they are the ticket payers and they are the ones that come to the show. If I played music that purely entertains me, I'd play very weird music. ~ Armin Van Buuren

This is the biggest damn IPod I've ever seen," Claire said, which made him choke on his beer. "Kidding. I have seen a jukebox before. ~ Rachel Caine

Ninety-nine percent of the world's lovers are not with their first choice. That's what makes the jukebox play. ~ Willie Nelson

What makes 'American Pie' so unusual is that it isn't a relic from the counterculture but a talisman, which, like a sacred river, keeps bringing joy to listeners everywhere. When 'American Pie' suddenly is played on a jukebox or radio, it's almost impossible not to sing along. ~ Douglas Brinkley

I'm one of those guys that is still a bit afraid of the telephone, its implications for conversation. I still wonder if the jukebox might be the death of live music. ~ Tom Waits

Ninety percent of the people in the world end up with the wrong person. And that's what makes the jukebox spin. ~ Laurie Anderson

My nickname is Dickie Jukebox. ~ Richard Simmons

Sometimes when you have to go into something, unless you're gifted and can just turn it on and off like a jukebox, you find someplace where there's nothing going on to get yourself into whatever state your character is entering into. ~ Susan Sarandon

Think of history as a giant old jukebox. The many records it contains play the same music over and over, time after time, year after year, no matter where you take it. From Rome to Constantinople; to greater Europe, to America, the songs are the same. The knowledge of history can be used by the people to prevent the mistakes of the past and in due course, advance the human condition. ~ Daniel Rundquist

For a long time, my subconscious rested in a dark place, ticking through memories like a jukebox selecting a record ... ~ Chelsie Shakespeare

I know I'm not the kind of person who's gonna wind up a walking jukebox, like many rock 'n' roll artists. They just play their hits and that's it. That doesn't appeal to me. ~ Carlos Santana

Early on, before rock 'n' roll, I listened to big band music - anything that came over the radio - and music played by bands in hotels that our parents could dance to. We had a big radio that looked like a jukebox, with a record player on the top. The radio/record player played 78rpm records. When we moved to that house, there was a record on there, with a red label. It was Bill Monroe, or maybe it was the Stanley Brothers. I'd never heard anything like that before. Ever. And it moved me away from all the conventional music that I was hearing. ~ Bob Dylan

As filthy as any night was, a New York City morning is always clean. The eyes get washed.
Flowers in white deli buckets are replenished. The population bathes, in marble mausoleums of Upper East Side showers, or in Greenwich Village tubs, or in the sink of a Chinatown one-bedroom crammed with fifteen people. Some bar opens and the first song on the jukebox is Johnny Thunders, while bums pick up cigarette butts to see what's left to smoke. The smell of espresso and hot croissants. The weather vane squeaks in the sun. Pigeons are reborn out of the mouths of blue windows. ~ Jardine Libaire

Orpheus in Hell"

When he first brought his music into hell
He was absurdly confident. Even over the noise of the
shapeless fires
And the jukebox groaning of the damned
Some of them would hear him. In the upper world
He had forced the stones to listen.
It wasn't quite the same. And the people he remembered
Weren't quite the same either. He began looking at faces
Wondering if all of hell were without music.
He tried an old song but pain
Was screaming on the jukebox and the bright fire
Was pelting away the faces and he heard a voice saying,
"Orpheus!"
He was at the entrance again
And a little three-headed dog was barking at him.
Later he would remember all those dead voices
And call them Eurydice. ~ Jack Spicer

The city is designed to keep you in a state of perpetual adolescence. You never need to learn to drive if you don't want to. And even if you do drive you can go back to that bar you went to when you were twenty-one, and it will still be there, and it will still be called Molly's, and the older waitress there will still remember you and let you sit where you want. And five years later, when she is no longer there, when there is just a picture of her above the bar in a place of sad honor, and you know what that means and you don't want to think about it, guess what: you do not have to. Because no one is driving home, and you're back again, listening to "Fairytale of New York," which is still on every jukebox, falling into the same conversations you had with the same friends in the '90s: about how the internet is going to change culture, and what you are going to do when you grow up. ~ John Hodgman

Even the jukebox plays nothing but oldies, mostly ~ James Patterson

In an artistic sense, cool came to refer to someone with a signature artistic style so integral as to exude an authentic mode-of-being in the world: Miles, Bogart, Brando, Eastwood, Greco, Elvis, Lady Day, Sinatra. Such a person created something from nothing and gave the world some new artistic or psychological 'equipment for living,' to use a phrase of Kenneth Burke's. A signature style is yours and can only be carried by you: it cannot be abstracted except through dilution and commodification since it reflects an individual's complex personal experience. In this sense, cool was 'making a dollar out of fifteen cents,' to pull another phrase from the Africa-American vernacular. Lester Young was once at a bar when a tenor saxophone solo floated out of the jukebox. 'That's me,' he said happily. As he listened his mood collapsed - he realized it was one of his many imitators. 'No, that's not me,' he said sadly. To steal someone else's sound or style and capitalize on it has always been un-cool, the pretense of posers. ~ Joel Dinerstein

I said, "I need to hear something that's going to save my life."
Re: Selecting songs from a jukebox.
~ Michael Chabon

I really think that the 'Jersey Boys' musical - and this is just my opinion - lends itself to being cinematic in some way, because it's a jukebox musical; the characters break into song only for the scene transitions. ~ Vincent Piazza