Malmsten Ballad Quotes

Like the old soldier of the ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away, an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Goodbye. ~ Douglas MacArthur

You know, Dean said, gesturing with his uninjured hand. If we were in an action movie, this would be the scene where you tenderly dress my wounds. then the wailing guitar ballad would kick in and we'd end up rolling around on the bed in a slow motion montage.
If I were in Q, The Winged Serpent, Xochi replied, this would be the scene where I sacrifice you to Quetzalcoatl. ~ Christa Faust

My dad [Johnny Cash] went to the [Richard] Nixon White House and refused to sing "Welfare Cadillac" (instead performing the anti-war songs "The Ballad of Ira Hayes" and "Man in Black"). He protested the Vietnam War, but he went to perform for the troops with bombs dropping all around him. He had that kind of genius: a true artist's capacity for holding two opposing thoughts at once while being large enough to encompass all realities. ~ Rosanne Cash

Well, bugger me," cried Jonas when he saw Richie with his bow, "is it Robin Hood or Adam Bell come to save us? Nay, it's Richie O'the Bow, hero of ballad and song! ~ David Pilling

'The Ballad of Black Tom' was written, in part, during the latest round of arguments about H. P. Lovecraft's legacy as both a great writer and a prejudiced man. I grew up worshipping the guy, so this issue felt quite personal to me. ~ Victor LaValle

Like the Society for Creative Anachronism, The Ballad of the White Horse depicted "the Middle Ages as they should have been." Chesterton's ballad made a lasting impression on Robert E. Howard, who praised it in letters to his friend Clyde Smith. ~ Joseph Laycock

Worse, in the video for it (which is also played everywhere constantly), Boris is singing to a girl who is dying in a hospital bed, and Boris is telling her (lyrically) that he'll give her a million stars (plus his love) if she'll find the strength within herself to not die, and love him forever.
Of course the girl is so moved by this hot rocker dude's amazing song that she doesn't die. Because it is a medical fact that people with fatal diseases only need a hot rocker dude to sit on the edge of their hospital bed and sing them a rock ballad in order to give them the strength to go on living. ~ Meg Cabot

And all men kill the thing they love,
By all let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!"
Ballad of Reading Gaol, 1898 ~ Oscar Wilde

Street Ballad

From high above the birds look down and sing because
they see
the monstrous comedies they miss, living several storeys
higher:
the dirty degradations and the gross humiliations,
they, like the gods, without pity, look down upon from a
telephone wire.

but as they sit there high above and gaze down upon our
brutal
short and messy circumstances, they do not see the one
who stands behind a cardboard tree examining them
coldly
with one eye closed and the other staring along the barrel
of a gun. ~ George Barker

He was a strong and noble lord with piercing eyes of grey.
He sat upon his noble throne shining like the dawn.
His sword flashed like the brightest star.
He led our people well.
Yet here and now he lays in blood pierced with arrows.
He was the friend of many knights.
He loved the warrior games.
His heart was won by a lady fair for marriage they did wait.
A kindly prince, his duty carried him to another's bed.
And on her death true love returned, finally they wed.
He felt the grief of children lost to murder and to pain.
I was the youngest of his blood.
I'll never be the same.
Here lays my father and my lord.
I know not what to say.
Except my father and my lord was slain here on this day.
Here lays my father and my lord.
I know not what to say.
Except my father and my lord was slain here on this day ... . ~ Laurel A. Rockefeller

Talking with her was like listening to a ballad on a radio station that fades in and out as you drive, sometimes clear and sentimental and tuned perfectly to the passing land, sometimes filled with static, lost, a song played too many times. ~ Jeff Sharlet

It's all heartbreak, death, and unrequited love." "Well, that is what most songs are about," said Will. "Requited love is ideal but doesn't make much of a ballad ~ Cassandra Clare

An important dimension of Tess of the d'Urbervilles is its debt to the oral tradition; to stories about wronged milkmaids, tales of superstition, and stories of love, betrayal and revenge, involving stock figures. This gives Tess of the d'Urbervilles an anti-realistic inflection. From the world of ballad and folktale Hardy draws such fateful coincidences as the failure of Angel to encounter Tess at the 'Club-walking' on which he intrudes with his brothers, the letter to Angel that she accidentally slips under the carpet, the loss of her shoes when she tries to visit his family, and the family portraits on the wall of their honeymoon dwelling, as well as several omens. This chimes effectively with a world in which the rural folk have a superstitious and fatalistic attitude to life. ~ Geoffrey Harvey

When I have sung my songs to you, I'll sing no more,' goes the old ballad. But for one faithful listener, Nelson Eddy is still singing. ~ Ruskin Bond

And see ye not that braid braid road
That lies across that lily leven?
That is the path of wickedness
Though some call it the road to heaven ~ Walter Scott

Lee Morgan used to stand behind me when I was playing a ballad and he'd be hollering, "Play the pretty notes, man, play the pretty notes." I thought I was playing the pretty notes, but you know, things like that help you to reach a little further. ~ Gary Bartz

The way Leo figured it, he spent more time crashing than he did flying. If there were a rewards card for frequent crashers, he'd be, like, double platinum level. Leo couldn't fly. He had a couple of minutes at most before he'd hit the water and go ker-splat. He decided he didn't like that ending to the Epic Ballad of Leo. ~ Rick Riordan

This summer-sweet night is only one minute upon one minute upon another
Beautiful cacophony, sugar upon lips, dancing to exhaustion
I thought of you, before this minute upon another minute upon another
Until, numb, my lips fell onto the mouth of another, and I was undone.

~from Golden Tongue: The Poems of Steven Slaughter which is a fictional book in
Ballad: A gathering of faerie ~ Maggie Stiefvater

My love was Bob Dylan, but as I got older I realized a good ballad was a good ballad. ~ Bonnie Raitt

The subconscious leaves its fingerprints, but there's a stranger down there, too. A hell of a weird guy who knows a hell of a lot. (Ballad of the Flexible Bullet) ~ Stephen King

Hearing may make shorter intuitive leaps than sight, but it too is subject to illusions. The most pleasant of these are 'mondegreens,' named by the author Sylvia Wright from her youthful mishearing of the Scottish ballad that actually says, 'They hae slain the Earl o' Moray / and they layd him on the green'--not, alas, 'the Lady Mondegreen.' Children, with their relaxed expectations for logic, are a rich source of these (pledging allegiance to 'one Asian in the vestibule, with little tea and just rice for all'), but everyone has the talent to infer the ridiculous from the inaudible--and, what's more, to believe in it. Here, at least, we do behave like computers, in that our voice-recognition software has little regard for probability but boldly assumes we live in a world of surrealist poets. We are certain that Mick Jagger will never leave our pizza burning and that the Shadow knows what evil lurks in the hot cement. ~ Michael Kaplan

I like "God Give Me the Strength" very much. It's not really a blues and to call it a ballad is absurd. I don't know, its mid-tempo. Mark (St. John) actually wrote it and I think its very telling of our lives in the 60s. Its just a good song, ya know ... ~ Dick Taylor

If you are the lantern, I am the flame;
If you are the lake, then I am the rain;
If you are the desert, I am the sea;
If you are the blossom, I am the bee;
If you are the fruit, then I am the core;
If you are the rock, then I am the ore;
If you are the ballad, I am the word;
If you are the sheath, then I am the sword. ~ Cecilia Dart-Thornton

Too many musicians rush through everything with too many notes. I need time to take the picture. A ballad should be a ballad. It's important to understand what the song is saying, and learn how to tell the story. It takes time. I can't rush it. I really can't rush it. ~ Shirley Horn

[of Nan Goldin] In an afterword to Ballad written in 2012, she declared: 'I decided as a young girl I was going to leave a record of my life and experience that no one could rewrite or deny. ~ Olivia Laing

The Ballad of Lucy Jordan
The morning sun touched lightly on the eyes of Lucy Jordan
In a white suburban bedroom in a white suburban town
As she lay there 'neath the covers dreaming of a thousand lovers
Till the world turned to orange and the room went spinning round.

At the age of thirty-seven she realised she'd never
Ride through Paris in a sports car with the warm wind in her hair.
So she let the phone keep ringing and she sat there softly singing
Little nursery rhymes she'd memorised in her daddy's easy chair.

Her husband, he's off to work and the kids are off to school,
And there are, oh, so many ways for her to spend the day.
She could clean the house for hours or rearrange the flowers
Or run naked through the shady street screaming all the way.

At the age of thirty-seven she realised she'd never
Ride through Paris in a sports car with the warm wind in her hair
So she let the phone keep ringing as she sat there softly singing
Pretty nursery rhymes she'd memorised in her daddy's easy chair.

The evening sun touched gently on the eyes of Lucy Jordan
On the roof top where she climbed when all the laughter grew too loud
And she bowed and curtsied to the man who reached and offered her his hand,
And he led her down to the long white car that waited past the crowd.

At the age of thirty-seven she knew she'd found forever
As she rode along t ~ Marianne Faithfull

I realize how arrogant it is to claim I can sort what is relevant from what is irrelevant. ~ Caitlin R. Kiernan

As for my feet, the little feet
You used to call so pretty,
There's one, I know, in Bedford Row,
The t'other's in the City. ~ Thomas Hood

Tis a morning pure and sweet, And a dewy splendour falls On the little flower that clings To the turrets and the walls; 'Tis a morning pure and sweet, And the light and shadow fleet; She is walking in the meadow, And the woodland echo rings; In a moment we shall meet; She is singing in the meadow, And the rivulet at her feet Ripples on in light and shadow To the ballad that she sings. ~ Alfred Lord Tennyson

Oh, I'm a ballad queen for sure ... I don't dig dance stuff very much but I seem to hit the charts with it. Go figure ... ~ Phyllis Hyman

So I did 'Something Happened on the Way to Heaven' and the original version is a ballad. The original Phil record is uptempo but we slowed it down and made it a ballad. ~ Deborah Cox

At four lines, with the quatrain, we reach the basic stanza form familiar from a whole range of English poetic practice. This is the length of the ballad stanza, the verse of a hymn, and innumerable other kinds of verse. ~ James Fenton

Ah! Happy they whose hearts can break
And peace of pardon win!
How else may man make straight his path
And cleanse his soul from sin?
How else but through a broken heart
May the Lord Christ enter in? ~ Oscar Wilde

The progress of Sybilla though a market was the progress of worker bee through a bower of intently propagating blossoms. Everything stuck. From the toy stall she bought two ivory dolls, a hen whistle, a rattle and a charming set of miniature bells for a child's skirts: all were heroically received and borne by Tom, henceforth marked by a faint, distracted jingling. From the spice booth, set with delicious traps for the fat purse, she took cinnamon, figs, cumin seed and saffron, ginger, flower of gillyflower and crocus and - an afterthought - some brazil for dyeing her new wool. These were distributed between Christian and Tom. They listened to a balladmonger, paid him for all the verses of "When Tay's Bank," and bought a lengthy scroll containing a brand-new ballad which Tom Erskine read briefly and then discreetly lost. "No matter," said the Dowager cheerfully, when told. "Dangerous quantity, music. Because it spouts sweet venom in their ears and makes their minds all effeminate, you know. We can't have that." He was never very sure whether she was laughing at him, but rather thought not. They pursued their course purposefully, and the Dowager bought a new set of playing cards, some thread, a boxful of ox feet, a quantity of silver lace and a pair of scissors. She was dissuaded from buying a channel stone, which Tom, no curling enthusiast, refused utterly to carry, and got a toothpick in its case instead. They watched acrobats, invested sixpence for an unconvincing mermaid a ~ Dorothy Dunnett

There's a story behind every old ballad or work song or nonsense song that I ever knew. Sometimes it's a fascinating story. A story of people struggling for freedom, struggling to get along in this old world. ~ Pete Seeger

I have a passion for ballad ... They are the gypsy children of song, born under green hedgerows in the leafy lanes and bypaths of literature,
in the genial Summertime. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The people who live happily ever after - they don't appear in the history books. They just fade away. I reckon that's what happiness is.
Pauline Foster - " The Ballad of Tom Dooley ", Sharyn McCrumb, p. 271 ~ Sharyn McCrumb

I love a ballad in print o' life, for then we are sure they are true. ~ William Shakespeare

Only a drummer-boy in a ballad or a story could have been so in the thick of the fight. She was taken into the confidence of passions on which she fixed just the stare she might have had for images bounding across the wall in the slide of a magic-lantern. Her little world was phantasmagoric - strange shadows dancing on a sheet. It was as if the whole performance had been given for her - a mite of a half-scared infant in a great dim theatre. She was in short introduced to life with a liberality in which the selfishness of others found its account, and there was nothing to avert the sacrifice but the modesty of her youth. ~ Henry James

The farmer's daughter hath soft brown hair And I met with a ballad, I can't say where, That wholly consisted of lines like these. ~ Charles Stuart Calverley

I compelled myself all through to write an exercise in verse, in a different form, every day of the year. I turned out my page every day, of some sort
I mean I didn't give a damn about the meaning, I just wanted to master the form
all the way from free verse, Walt Whitman, to the most elaborate of villanelles and ballad forms. Very good training. I've always told everybody who has ever come to me that I thought that was the first thing to do. ~ Conrad Aiken

I

On the calm black water where the stars are sleeping
White Ophelia floats like a great lily;
Floats very slowly, lying in her long veils...
- In the far-off woods you can hear them sound the mort.

For more than a thousand years sad Ophelia
Has passed, a white phantom, down the long black river.
For more than a thousand years her sweet madness
Has murmured its ballad to the evening breeze.

The wind kisses her breasts and unfolds in a wreath
Her great veils rising and falling with the waters;
The shivering willows weep on her shoulder,
The rushes lean over her wide, dreaming brow.

The ruffled water-lilies are sighing around her;
At times she rouses, in a slumbering alder,
Some nest from which escapes a small rustle of wings;
- A mysterious anthem falls from the golden stars.

II

O pale Ophelia! beautiful as snow!
Yes child, you died, carried off by a river!
- It was the winds descending from the great mountains of Norway
That spoke to you in low voices of better freedom.

It was a breath of wind, that, twisting your great hair,
Brought strange rumors to your dreaming mind;
It was your heart listening to the song of Nature
In the groans of the tree and the sighs of the nights;

It was the voice of mad seas, the great roar,
That shattered your child's heart, too human and too soft;
It was a hands ~ Arthur Rimbaud

Besides my fast and slooow songs, I further divide my work into three main song types: the ballad or story song, the variation on a theme (saying the same thing over and over and over again) song, and the weird song. It's important to have weird songs, but I find that a little weirdness goes a long way. ~ David Massengill

That innate love of melody, which she had inherited from her ballad-singing mother, gave the simplest music a power which could well-nigh drag her heart out of her bosom at times. ~ Thomas Hardy

Between the sleeping and the waking, it is there.

Between the rising and the resting, it is there.

It is always there.

It gnaws on my heart. It chews on my soul.

I turn aside and see it. I stop my ears and hear it. I cover myself and feel it.

There are no human words for what I mean.

It is the language of the bare bough and the cold stone, pronounced in the fell wind's sullen whisper and the metronomic drip-drip of the rain. It is the song the falling snow sings and the discordant clamour of sunlight ripped apart by the canopy and miserly filtered down.

It is what the unseeing eye sees. It is what the deaf ear heres.

It is the romantic ballad of death's embrace; the solemn hymn of offal dripping from bloody teeth; the lamentation of the bloated corpse rotting in the sun; the graceful ballet of maggots twisting in the ruins of God's temple.

Here in this gray land, we have no name. We are the carcasses reflected in the yellow eye.

Our bones are bleached within our skin; our empty sockets regard the crow.

Here in this shadow country, our tiny voices scratch like a fly's wing against unmoving air.

Ours is the language of imbeciles, the gibberish of idiots. The root and the vine have more to say than us. ~ Rick Yancey

He looks like a faerie lover stepped out of a ballad, the kind where no good comes to the girl who runs away with him. ~ Holly Black

I've been waiting for you forever."
"Forever' as in several hundred years, or forever as in since my lesson began? ~ Maggie Stiefvater

The scene was horrid, yet it had the purity of a stanza from a ballad come to life, a ballad composed about tragic events in some border hell. ~ Lucius Shepard