Sopranos Quotes

What am I? The modest narrator who accompanies your triumphs; the dancer who supports you when you rise in your lovely grace; the branch upon which you rest a moment when you are tired of flying; the bass that interposes itself below the soprano's fervour to let it climb even higher - what am I? I am the earthly gravity that keeps you on the ground. What am I, then? Body, mass, earth, dust and ashes. - You, my Cordelia, you are soul and spirit."

- Johannes the Seducer, from_Either/Or_ ~ Søren Kierkegaard

Belief in oneself is a crucial quality of leadership, because 'a house divided against itself cannot stand.' A leader who fluctuates back and forth sends a very wavery signal. Like the soprano who can shatter glass by finding that high note and holding it, a leader who can hold that high note, without wavering, can shatter walls. ~ Laurie Beth Jones

It's great to hear someone really care for the soprano saxophone. ~ Rufus Reid

The director of The Sopranos told me that, if I wouldn't gain weight, I would lose my job. I didn't look like the girl who ate pasta all day. This was an extra stimulation to fight my eating problems. ~ Jamie-Lynn Sigler

The thing that attracts people to "The Sopranos" is the family element. It shows that America still has a longing for that traditional upbringing. ~ Christine O'Donnell

Rapture

I can feel she has got out of bed.
That means it is seven a.m.
I have been lying with eyes shut,
thinking, or possibly dreaming,
of how she might look if, at breakfast,
I spoke about the hidden place in her
which, to me, is like a soprano's tremolo,
and right then, over toast and bramble jelly,
if such things are possible, she came.
I imagine she would show it while trying to conceal it.
I imagine her hair would fall about her face
and she would become apparently downcast,
as she does at a concert when she is moved.
The hypnopompic play passes, and I open my eyes
and there she is, next to the bed,
bending to a low drawer, picking over
various small smooth black, white,
and pink items of underwear. She bends
so low her back runs parallel to the earth,
but there is no sway in it, there is little burden, the day has hardly begun.
The two mounds of muscles for walking, leaping, lovemaking,
lift toward the east - what can I say?
Simile is useless; there is nothing like them on earth.
Her breasts fall full; the nipples
are deep pink in the glare shining up through the iron bars
of the gate under the earth where those who could not love
press, wanting to be born again.
I reach out and take her wrist
and she falls back into bed and at once starts unbuttoning my pajamas.
Later, when I open my eyes, there she is again,
~ Galway Kinnell

'The Sopranos' all came down to the writing. I wouldn't have been on for as long as I was if the writing weren't so good. ~ James Gandolfini

I'm a huge fan of The Sopranos, and suddenly, you find yourself going one-to-one with this guy who you've been watching for years, watching every flicker in his eye and every detail on his face. ~ Peter Capaldi

Being lectured by the president on fiscal responsibility is a little bit like Tony Soprano talking to me about law and order in this country. ~ John F. Kerry

My interest in women's voices started when I was in the boys' choir and we were singing in opera choruses. That was my first close-up experience with the female soprano voice. I was amazed at how it could be within the same scale but so different in quality. ~ Alexander Chee

'The Sopranos' is filled with really retrograde humor. Bathroom humor, falls, stupid puns, bad jokes - infantile, adolescent stuff, but it makes me laugh. ~ David Chase

One FBI agent told us early on that on Monday morning, they would get to the FBI office, and all the agents would talk about 'The Sopranos', having the same conversation about the show, but always from the flip side. ~ Terence Winter

There was certainly less profanity in the Godfather than in the Sopranos. There was a kind of respect. It's not that I totally agreed with it, but it was a great piece of art. ~ Danny Aiello

Cancer don't respect nothing. ~ David Chase

It's people politics, people dynamics that make a show really good, whether it's 'Desperate Housewives' or 'Lost' or 'The Sopranos.' It's the people we've grown to love or otherwise. ~ Esai Morales

Nobody inspired me more than Julie Andrews, who is a classically trained soprano herself. ~ Lesley Garrett

Everything has become so pop-rock oriented that finding a role for a soprano, and finding an audience for a soprano, is tricky. Unless you're dealing with a revival, which is why I do so many revivals - because my specific tone and vocal quality lends itself to that type of writing. ~ Laura Benanti

Julius Caesar. His murder is a pivot point for the rest of the action to take place. Other examples?"

"Othello," said Amber.

"Murder for jealousy. Others?"

"Hamlet," offered Heather.

"Murder for power. Others?"

"The Sopranos," said Rick. Everyone laughed.

"Murder of the English language," Skyler quipped, gathering another smattering of laughter. ~ Haley Walsh

Opera is when a tenor and soprano want to make love, but are prevented from doing so by a baritone. ~ George Bernard Shaw

I can stay in the bath for, well, the longest has been seven or eight hours. I get completely set up with my laptop so I can watch 'The Sopranos,' put out some scented candles, music. I have a towel nearby so I can dry my hand to change the music or the TV. I make a little heaven for myself. And then I just refill and refill. ~ Suki Waterhouse

And in the night sky, the soaring sopranos fly out over the city, guarding it with song, catching the souls of those rare, lovely heart-thinkers. ~ David Arnold

There's no disputing that for pols, the Internet is a great way to connect with people and raise some cash and post 'Sopranos' parodies or play your opponent's macaca moments. But in a 'net root' sense, it's pretty useless for getting someone elected. ~ John Ridley

Personally, I don't think we could do such a show if we didn't get along. The subtext of all this is that we're women in a show so we can't possibly get along. It's not like they write about The Sopranos like that. ~ Kristin Davis

This is gonna sound stupid, but I saw at one point that our mothers are ... bus drivers. No, they are the bus. See, they're the vehicle that gets us here. They drop us off and go on their way. They continue on their journey. And the problem is that we keep tryin' to get back on the bus, instead of just lettin' it go. ~ James Gandolfini

I've been in so many funeral scenes from The Sopranos, and I think I've even been in one on Sons of Anarchy. Those scenes, as a human being, are the most tedious scenes, of all time. You're waiting, all day, in the blistering hot heat. So, I didn't need to be there. ~ Drea De Matteo

Watching Italian opera, all those male sopranos screeching, stupid fat couples rolling their eyes about. That's not love, it's just rubbish. ~ Peter Shaffer

I really loved the 'Sopranos' but didn't have HBO. So someone would send me tapes of the show with three or four episodes. I would watch one episode and go: 'Oh my God, I've got to watch one more.' I'd watch the whole tape and champ at the bit for the next one. ~ Ted Sarandos

I hardly ever belted; I was a soprano and a comedienne and intended on doing mostly soprano legit roles but my first equity show, to my surprise, was Blues in The Night at The Cleveland Playhouse. ~ Erica Schroeder

I can't say I have enough experience with Hollywood to feel that I've encountered racism there. I can tell you that I did about five fruitless years of auditioning for voiceovers where I did variations on tacos and Latin accents, and my first screen role was as a bellhop on 'The Sopranos.' ~ Lin-Manuel Miranda

The Sopranos was the first show about the life of the writer. I never made any secret about the fact that it was about my mother. ~ David Chase

Very often at the end of 'The Sopranos' you get the feeling that its not under control, you should be very worried, and life is kind of really, really messed up at lot of times. It leaves you feeling very disconcerted. That was kind of the point of it. ~ Terence Winter

I'm not one of these people who say how much better American drama is than English. I find it mostly too American, except for The Sopranos, which I think is the best thing. ~ Andrew Davies

I was a huge 'Sopranos' fan, obviously. ~ Michael De Luca

You know when I was depressed I said I didn't want to live? Well, I'll tell you something - I didn't want to die. ~ Bill Vaughan

When you think of things like The Sopranos, The Wire, Damages, they are beating film on a regular basis. Most films are terrible. It's only the 2% that are good. There's things you can do on TV which you can't do on film. There is something about those episodic, serialisations that are grand and operatic. ~ Ricky Gervais

We must regard Sarah Palin as the Carmella Soprano of the GOP
an enabling wife of organized crime, who sees, hears and speaks no evil of the boys in her old-boy network for whom she does this ideological lap dance. ~ Cintra Wilson

There're lots of musicians in my family, too. My mother sings incredibly well. I've got to make a record with my mother's voice on it. She sings a lyric soprano. We do the opposite. I'm a baritone. She's a star singer in her church. She always does her solo. ~ Grace Jones

I believe another one of the Song girls has a birthday coming up." He sings, "You are sixteen, going on seventeen…" I feel a strong surge of love for him, my dad who I am so lucky to have.
"What song are you singing?" Kitty interrupts.
I take Kitty's hands and spin her around the kitchen with me. "I am sixteen, going on seventeen; I know that I'm naïve. Fellows I meet may tell me I'm sweet; willingly I believe."
Daddy throws his dish towel over his shoulder and marches in place. In a deep voice he baritones, "You need someone older and wiser telling you what to do…"
"This song is sexist," Kitty says as I dip her.
"Indeed it is," Daddy agrees, swatting her with the towel. "And the boy in question was not, in fact, older and wiser. He was a Nazi in training."
Kitty skitters away from both of us. "What are you guys even talking about?"
"It's from The Sound of Music," I say.
"You mean that movie about the nun? Never seen it."
"How have you seen The Sopranos but not The Sound of Music?"
Alarmed, Daddy says, "Kitty's been watching The Sopranos?"
"Just the commercials," Kitty quickly says.
I go on singing to myself, spinning in a circle like Liesl at the gazebo. "I am sixteen going on seventeen, innocent as a rose…Fellows I meet may tell me I'm sweet, and willingly I believe…"
"Why would you just willingly believe some random fellows you don't even know?"
"It's the song, Kitty, not me! God!" I stop spinning. "Lies ~ Jenny Han

Our amour fou with 'The Sopranos' is headed for long-term parking, like so many of its most memorable characters. We'll never see a show like this again. ~ Rob Sheffield

Not to toot our own horn, but when 'The Sopranos' was on, it was as good as any movie that was coming out in the theater. I think that goes for a lot of shows today. ~ Michael Imperioli

The birds on the branches, the lilies in the field, the deer in the forest, the fishes in the sea, countless hosts of happy men, exultantly proclaim: God is love. But underneath all these sopranos, supporting them as it were, as the bass part does, is audible the de profundis which issues from the sacrificed one: God is love. ~ Walter Lowrie

I think the people who probably have it the best are the people on cable like on 'Entourage', 'the Sopranos', etc. who have 13 episodes per season and breaks to do films and theatre. I think that's the most ideal life. ~ T. J. Thyne

There's no mistaking the fact that some of the best longform fiction out there now is in American television. 'The Wire' and 'Deadwood' and 'The Sopranos.' ~ Kevin Barry

Do not feed that beggar. Hamlet, lie down." The dog ignored her.
"Down," Viktor ordered, his deep voice stern. The dog whined and then lay down. The prince looked at her. "You need to be more forceful."
"I suppose my forcefulness will improve once my voice changes. Sopranos get no respect. ~ Patricia Grasso

You got to play the flute as a flute, like that. You can't play like a tenor concept on soprano; it sounds wrong. But some guys do it, and they think it's O.K., but not so! ~ Jerome Richardson

'The Wire's definitely one of them. 'The Sopranos' is one of my all-time favorites. Those are two big ones for me. ~ Ben Bass

I can't actually believe how good 'The Sopranos' is. I genuinely am dumbfounded by it. It's like when you realize how good The Beatles are, and you think, 'How did they do that?' ~ Martin Freeman

I was on a show called '12 Miles of Bad Road' with Lily Tomlin - it was an incredible HBO show. We shot 6 episodes, previewed it before the finale of 'The Sopranos;' it was written up as a 'Great New Show on HBO,' and then the whole thing was canned. Gone. Disappeared. That's when I realized anything can happen in this business. ~ Eliza Coupe

I think that 'The Sopranos' uses music incredibly well. ~ Alexandra Patsavas

I had already been a young singer. And once, as a profession, I was a young singer, what you would call a soprano in England, but I was an alto in singing Jewish music in bar mitzvahs and weddings and synagogues throughout New York City because, after Israel, New York is probably the biggest Jewish community in the world. ~ Charlemagne Palestine

Working with HBO was an opportunity to experience creative freedom and 'long-form development' that filmmakers didn't have a chance to do before the emergence of shows like 'The Sopranos.' ~ Martin Scorsese

Maybe there would be a bad outcome for some of the others, but no one was going to shoot a soprano. ~ Ann Patchett

I never knew what Amazon was. I've never seen any of those series, even on cable. I've never seen The Sopranos, or Mad Men. I'm out every night and when I come home, I watch the end of the baseball or basketball game, and there's Charlie Rose and I go to sleep. ~ Woody Allen

There was some rustling as the gown was cast over the soprano's shoulders, or so Lina assumed, and then the alto and Madame Rocque started cooing.
But the soprano cut through it decisively. 'I look like an orange without its rind,' she said firmly. ~ Eloisa James

Nobody was playing the soprano saxophone and certainly nobody was trying to do anything with it. So I was all alone. I didn't know that at first. ~ Steve Lacy

John Ventimiglia, who was on 'The Sopranos,' was in my first acting class and we have been friends since that time. Alec Baldwin was in my class back then, Sean Young and Andrew McCarthy. ~ Michael Imperioli

I think that the difference between 'The Sopranos' and the shows that came before it was that it was really personal. There had been a lot of dramas, a lot of really good ones, a lot of really bad ones, but they were always franchise shows about cops, or doctors, or lawyers. They weren't about the writer himself. ~ David Chase

I feel most spiritual when I am listening to a soprano voice soaring to the top of its range at the most dramatic point of an aria. It feels like a geyser shooting up from the center of the earth and reaching for the stars. ~ China Forbes

Every player in every game is subjected to a cold and ceaseless accounting; no ball is thrown and no base is gained without an instant responding judgment - ball or strike, hit or error, yea or nay - and an ensuing statistic. This encompassing neatness permits the baseball fan, aided by experience and memory, to extract from a box score the same joy, the same hallucinatory reality, that prickles the scalp of a musician when he glances at a page of his score of Don Giovanni and actually hears bassos and sopranos, woodwinds and violins. ~ Roger Angell

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

Shortly after this I was made a member of the boys' choir, it being found that I possessed a clear, strong soprano voice. I enjoyed the singing very much. ~ James Weldon Johnson

They're naughty, all those writers - they mess around with people. I know James Gandolfini got a bit fed up on 'The Sopranos': if he said anything in front of a writer, told them a story from his life, it could make its way into the script. ~ Kelly Macdonald

Mr. Gruffydd turned to my father, and he blew the note on the reed pipe.

Ivor raised his finger, and from top of the Hill down to bottom men and women hummed softly to have the proper key, with sopranos going up to find the octave, and altos climbing, and tenors making silver and contraltos and baritones resting in comfort and basso down on the octave below, and the sound they all made was a life-time of loveliness, so solid, so warm, so deep, and yet so delicate. It will be no surprise to me if the flowers of the gardens of heaven are made from such sound. And O, to smell a smell as good to the nose as that sound sounds to the ear.

But even heaven could not be so beautiful, or we would all be drunk with beauty day and night, and no work done anywhere, and nobody to blame. Drunk with beauty. There is lovely. ~ Richard Llewellyn

The point is, our health-care system is a terrible mess. It's expensive, wasteful, inefficient, unresponsive, and infested with lawyers. Which is why there has been a big push, in some quarters, to place it under the management of...
The federal government.
This is like saying that if your local police department has a corruption problem, the solution is to turn law enforcement over to the Sopranos. ~ Dave Barry

I liked the ending of The Sopranos. The screen suddenly went black. In the middle of a scene. Without any of the plotlines being resolved. That's what real life is like. Everything keeps going, until someone turns off the lights and you're dead. And even then the story continues, without you. There is no such thing as a happy ending. ~ Oliver Markus Malloy

The tendency of modern American women to exclaim 'Hiiiiiiiiiiii!' in soprano octaves and hug each other upon sight can be disconcerting to those unfamiliar with it. ~ Kevin Hearne

It was just as shocking for me to sing opera in a falsetto soprano in Germany. ~ Klaus Nomi

I don't know anyone who curses the way they do on the Sopranos. Not in an Italian household. I never said the word hell in front of my mother. ~ Danny Aiello

And like a soprano shattering glass, Juliet heard something snap deep inside.
It was the sound of her heart breaking. ~ Alexandra Potter

I never know what I'm going to get. A 'Sopranos' fan is very different from a 'Big Lebowski' fan. ~ Steve Buscemi

'The Sopranos' only reflected the tenor of how things are done in New Jersey. They didn't invent it. And I say that as a fan of both 'The Sopranos' and New Jersey. ~ Kevin Bleyer

It's a cliche to say this now, but to me, 'The Sopranos' is like Dickens. It's able to take this very focused look at something but make it epic and profound. ~ Stephen Merchant

I didn't watch T.V. from the time I was 18 'til my mid-30s. And then I got a T.V. to watch 'The Sopranos.' I realized, 'Oh, T.V. is really interesting.' ~ Ira Glass

HBO churn out some unbelievable stuff. They really got me with things like 'Band of Brothers.' But you can't beat 'The Sopranos.' ~ Mark Lawrenson

I don't want to see a 'Sopranos' movie. This is just me. I like to think the end is where it was on TV as opposed to becoming a movie. ~ Denis Leary

The government itself is running exactly like the Sopranos and they sit back and they make deals. And they say okay, 'I'm going do this: France, you're getting the pipelines.' ~ George Clooney

And then you have the classical ballerinas, they're like sopranos. Applied to the dance. ~ Ninette De Valois

I actually got more attention from one episode of 'The Sopranos' than I did from two years of 'The L Word.' ~ Sarah Shahi

Whenever I work on anything, there's always the fantasy that what one is doing is the next 'Citizen Kane'-slash-'Sopranos.' ~ Elizabeth McGovern

What I really want to do is create great roles for women. And I'm not talking Nicholas Sparks romance. I think women's roles have gotten ghettoized in these sort of places ... I'm thinking women in action, comic books, or like the Tony Soprano of women. We need some complex roles. ~ Melissa Rosenberg

Scroll, scroll, scroll, play - now, to disappear completely into an entirely other world.
In that world: every faction left me alone.
In that world: I was not one seven-billionth of the planet's population.
In that world: I was one-fourth of the planet's population: it was Dad, the sopranos, and me.
In that world: we soared through the sky and clouds, above it all, not a care in the world, the most miraculous of gaggles, catching the soul of those rare, lovely heart-thinkers.
In that world: my wing was mended. ~ David Arnold

Like many other touchstones of twenty-first-century pop culture, 'The Sopranos' was hatched in the late Nineties, predicting a future that never arrived. It was designed for a decade that would be just like the Nineties, except more so, in an America that enjoyed seeing itself as smarter and braver and freer than ever before. ~ Rob Sheffield

If you see the Sopranos, you're not going to be speaking in the Shakespearean English. ~ Lucy Liu

A soprano's voice is a little like a mother's cry, which is why it attracts all human beings. ~ Montserrat Caballe

I remember turning 'The Sopranos' on once and within two minutes nearly throwing a brick through the screen. ~ Camille Paglia

The way that Dickens structured his books has a form that we most readily recognize now from, say, the great T.V. series, like 'The Wire' or 'The Sopranos.' There's one central plot line, but then from that spin off all kinds of subplots. ~ Jennifer Egan

I must be the oldest living child soprano. ~ Kathryn Grayson