Quartets Quotes

It was the quartets of Beethoven (numbers 12,13,14, and 15) which over fifty years, created and expanded the the audience of listeners to the quartets of Beethoven, thus achieving, as all masterpieces do, progress if not in the quality of artists, at least in the company of minds, which is largely composed these days of what was missing when the work appeared: people capable of liking it. ~ Marcel Proust

Desire itself is movement
Not in itself desirable;
Love is itself unmoving,
Only the cause and end of movement,
Timeless, and undesiring
Except in the aspect of time
Caught in the form of limitation
Between un-being and being. ~ T. S. Eliot

Great works of art in all cultures succeed in capturing within the constraints of their form both the pathos of anguish and a vision of its resolution. Take, for example, the languorous sentences of Proust or the haiku of Basho, the late quartets and sonatas of Beethoven, the tragicomic brushwork of Sengai or the daunting canvases of Rothko, the luminous self-portraits of Rembrandt and Hakuin. Such works achieve their resolution not through consoling or romantic images whereby anguish is transcended. They accept anguish without being overwhelmed by it. They reveal anguish as that which gives beauty its dignity and depth. ~ Stephen Batchelor

Some people write string quartets, some grow lettuce and tomatoes. There have to be a few who build railroad stations, ~ Haruki Murakami

Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling, ~ T. S. Eliot

Part of me is probably more conservative than people realise. I like my old string quartets, I don't like music that's trippy for trippy's sake. ~ Bjork

There is, it seems to us, At best, only a limited value In the knowledge derived from experience. ~ T. S. Eliot

Beethoven's last quartets were written by a deaf man and should only be listened to by a deaf man. ~ Thomas Beecham

My first strong musical memory is of the Villa-Lobos Sixth Quartet which my parents were rehearsing. I remember that it reminded me of big teddy bears dancing around. ~ Leonard Slatkin

Walker-thinkers have found various ways to accommodate the gifts that their walking brings. Caught paperless on his walks in the Czech enclaves of Iowa, maestro Dvořák scribbles the string quartets that visited his brain on his starched white shirt cuffs (so the legend goes). More proactively, Thomas Hobbes fashioned a walking stick for himself with an inkwell attached, and modern poet Mary Oliver leaves pencils in the trees along her usual pathways, in case a poem descends during her rambles. ~ Lyanda Lynn Haupt

There was one thing Beethoven didn't do. When one of his string quartets was played, you can believe the second violin wasn't improvising. ~ Wynton Marsalis

One is that you have to take time, lots of time, to let an idea grow from within. The second is that when you sign on to something, there will be issues of trust, deep trust, the way the members of a string quartet have to trust one another. ~ Yo-Yo Ma

A good quartet is like a good conversation among friends interacting to each other's ideas. ~ Stan Getz

And since I'm marrying into the Quartet, I have certain privileges and duties. If you're sleeping with Laurel - "
"I'm not sleeping with Laurel. We're dating."
"Right, and the two of you are just going to hold hands, admire the moon, and sing camp songs."
"For a while. Minus the singing. ~ Nora Roberts

I got a chance to listen to and watch Thelonious Monk and his quartet play two shows a night, for six weeks. It was a great education. There was my university, man. ~ Chick Corea

The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation. ~ T. S. Eliot

While I'm working, I stick with music that won't distract me - the dub stylings of Scientist and King Tubby, maybe some Beethoven string quartets. ~ Adam Mansbach

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance. ~ T. S. Eliot

I said to my soul
be still
and
wait
so the darkness
shall be the
light
and the stillness
the
dancing. ~ T. S. Eliot

[Art] would have helped us survive in the Pleistocene - in the period, say, 1.6 million years ago until fairly recently. The kind of imaginative abilities that artists have and that we all have in the appreciation of art - to appreciate Jane Austen, the late quartets of Beethoven. ~ Denis Dutton

I grew up listening to the quartets and I loved that so much that I wanted to see if I could make music and make it happen. It was just a series of events ... me going to concerts and saying "I think I can do that". ~ Bill Gaither

Every week seems to bring another luxuriantly creamy envelope, the thickness of a letter-bomb, containing a complex invitation – a triumph of paper engineering – and a comprehensive dossier of phone numbers, email addresses, websites, how to get there, what to wear, where to buy the gifts. Country house hotels are being block-booked, great schools of salmon are being poached, vast marquees are appearing overnight like Bedouin tent cities. Silky grey morning suits and top hats are being hired and worn with an absolutely straight face, and the times are heady and golden for florists and caterers, string quartets and Ceilidh callers, ice sculptors and the makers of disposable cameras. Decent Motown cover-bands are limp with exhaustion. Churches are back in fashion, and these days the happy couple are travelling the short distance from the place of worship to the reception on open-topped London buses, in hot-air balloons, on the backs of matching white stallions, in micro-lite planes. A wedding requires immense reserves of love and commitment and time off work, not least from the guests. Confetti costs eight pounds a box. A bag of rice from the corner shop just won't cut it anymore. ~ David Nicholls

These stories at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationary store, when almost everybody wore a hat. Here is the last of that generation of chain smokers who woke to the world in the morning with their coughing, who used to get stoned at cocktail parties and perform obsolete dance steps like 'the Cleveland Chicken,' sail for Europe on ships, who were nostalgic for love and happiness, and whose gods were as ancient as yours and mine, whoever you are. ~ John Cheever

You can play Bach on the piano, a symphony orchestra or a quartet of saxophones, but let's stop this silly, childish business of knit your own musicology ~ Paul McCreesh

People whose sensibility is destroyed by music in trains, airports, lifts, cannot concentrate on a Beethoven Quartet. ~ Witold Lutoslawski

When I was seven years old, I was leading a quartet and trio, and that really laid the groundwork for me as a musician. ~ Anne Akiko Meyers

The playwright Edward Albee has characterized [the suddenness of the appearance of fruits and flowers in evolutionary history] as 'that heartbreaking second when it all got together: the sugars and the acids and the ultraviolets, and the next thing you knew there were tangerines and string quartets. ~ Adam Leith Gollner

The Quartets have been a major part of my work. ~ Elliott Carter

Time past and time future allow but a little consciousness. To be conscious is not to be in time. ~ T. S. Eliot

What's fun about homonyms is hearig a word in a sentence and suddenly realizing that it has a homonym or maybe two (or three, but that's so rare I don't often think about homonym quartets) and that you haven't thought of that homonym pair or trio before. ~ Ann M. Martin

To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not. ~ T. S. Eliot

I realized very early that I was never going to make by living by writing string quartets. But I wanted to write music and I didn't want to have to do anything else. ~ Richard Rodney Bennett

Music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but
you are the music
While the music lasts. ~ T. S. Eliot

Or a saint who had spent all his years preparing for his grand entry into heaven, only to discover on his deathbed that heaven was not some blue expanse full of angelic string quartets and opalescent clouds, but an eternity granted for reliving one's happiest moments, and that he had none to remember; ~ Olga Grushin

My family was very encouraging, and both of my grandparents were both beautiful singers. My grandmother was a coloratura soprano, and my grandfather was an Irish tenor in a barbershop quartet. ~ Clare Bowen

Reading to kids is to ordinary reading what jazz is to a string quartet. ~ Sean Wilentz

And the end and the beginning where always there, before the beginning and after the end. ~ T. S. Eliot

History may be servitude. History may be freedom. See, now they vanish. The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them, to become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern. ~ T. S. Eliot

We spend most of the day together at school, but not in a way that limits our interactions with other people. If anything, we incorporate our friends into what we have between us. We exist as individuals. We exist as a pair. We exist as parts of trios, quartets, and so on. And it all feels right. ~ David Levithan

On one hand you have a string quartet, which is not a symphony. On the other hand is you have me sampling them and making it sound like there is many more people playing, so the whole notion of, kind of, sampling applied to classical music is very intriguing to me because composers throughout history have borrowed motifs and quotes from one another. ~ DJ Spooky

The past and future / Are conquered, and reconciled. ~ T. S. Eliot

They were always nice to Jess when he went over, but then they would suddenly begin talking about French politics or string quartets (which he at first thought was a square box made out of string), or how to save the timber wolves or redwoods or singing whales, and he was scared to open his mouth and show once and for all how dumb he was. ~ Katherine Paterson

Shostakovich's final pieces, his quartets, are scratching the surface of another world. ~ Simon McBurney

I would give my best quartet for a good razor, ~ Joseph Haydn

Once a month I play with a chamber music quartet. I play almost no solo music anymore because I so enjoy the interaction. The members of my quartet have become some of my best friends and so I really enjoy it now in ways that I didn't before. ~ Condoleezza Rice

In his late quartets, Beethoven introduces an element that shouldn't be there, that should be left for meditation, though I love them. I can see that through them came Wagner and Mahler and Schoenberg and Berg. And then came Tracey Emin. And I can see it all as one downward path. ~ John Tavener

And if, as all philosophers on the subject have noted, art is a human activity that relies on the senses to reach the soul, did it not also stand to reason that dogs
at least dogs of Mr. Bones' caliber
would have it in them to feel a similar aesthetic impulse? Would they not, in other words, be able to appreciate art? As far as Willy knew, no one had ever thought of this before. Did that make him the first man in recorded history to believe such a thing was possible? No matter. It was an idea whose time had come. If dogs were beyond the pull of oil paintings and string quartets, who was to say they wouldn't respond to an art based on the sense of smell? Why not an olfactory art? Why not an art for dogs that dealt with the world as dogs knew it? ~ Paul Auster

The great thing about string quartets is the players are kind of like family. They work really well as a unit, so you can write things that let them use those talents of association and intuition-all the things they've developed together as a group. ~ Terry Riley

We used to play the underground clubs like the UFO, and Middle Earth, and they were great because they would have on things like a poet, string quartets, and then a rock band! It was kinda cool! ~ Alvin Lee

T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets, William Blake's "Proverbs of Hell," and Walt Whitman's Song of Myself. I ~ Robin Rinaldi

Why should a novelist not also be a historian? To force unnatural divisions within the English language is to work against its capacious and accommodating nature. To expect a writer to produce only novels, or only histories, is equivalent to demanding from a composer that he or she write only string quartets or piano sonatas. ~ Peter Ackroyd

Beethoven's string quartets express pain itself; it is not MY pain. ~ Karen Armstrong

In spite of all the refinements of civilization that conspired to make art
the dizzying perfection of the string quartet or the sprawling grandeur of Fragonard's canvases
beauty was savage. It was as dangerous and lawless as the earth had been eons before man had one single coherent thought in his head or wrote codes of conduct on tablets of clay. Beauty was a Savage Garden. ~ Anne Rice

The question who ought to be boss is like who ought to be the tenor in the quartet? Obviously, the man who can sing tunor. ~ Henry Ford

I listen to music when I write. I need the musical background. Classical music. I'm behind the times. I'm still with Baroque music, Gregorian chant, the requiems, and with the quartets of Beethoven and Brahms. That is what I need for the climate, for the surroundings, for the landscape: the music. ~ Elie Wiesel