The Music Of What Happens Quotes

Just smile, Max. The paint cannot be stronger than a smile. But it is. ~ Bill Konigsberg

Mom always says all sorts of shit goes down in the world, and it's up to me to decide how to take it. The one way you're sure to be unhappy is to frown your way through life, she says, and she's right. Always look for the bright, vibrant color through the darkness. It's always there, but sometimes hard to see. ~ Bill Konigsberg

With my white friends, I'm always half Mexican. They never say I'm half Irish. Never say I'm half white. Like I'm tainted halfway from the standard. It's like when I was a kid and I thought vanilla ice cream meant no flavor, like it was the base of all of the flavors. But vanilla is a bean. Like chocolate is a bean. Like cinnamon is a root. All roots and beans. All flavors. There is no base. No ice cream without a flavor. ~ Bill Konigsberg

I started producing in 1992 at the age of 15, when I found out music could be made with the help of a computer. I come from a musical family, but was always the family member not as good as the others. So once I found out I could release the music that was stuck inside my head through a computer, I knew I found what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. ~ Laidback Luke

I've never used music to sell my faith and I've never used faith to sell my music. I think they are both intrinsic parts of who I am. We've always tried to define our music outside of genres ... what is a genre? A genre's a cage or a box and for us our music is best with fangs and some claws running free in the wild. ~ Jon Foreman

He calls me his Queen of the Night. He shows me the wonders in this incredible city. He encourages me to find my own way, and to choose what I think is right or wrong.
And the sex, God, the sex! I never knew what sex was until him! It's not soft music and candlelight, a choice, a deliberate action.
It's as involuntary as breathing, and as impossible not to do. It's slammed up against a wall in a dark alley, or flat on my back on cold concrete because I can't stand one more second without him. It's on my hands and knees, dry-mouthed, heart-in-my-throat, waiting for the moment he touches me, and I'm alive again. It's punishing and purifying, velvet and violent, and it makes everything else melt away, until nothing matters but getting him inside me and I wouldn't just die for him - I'd kill for him, too.
Like I did tonight. ~ Karen Marie Moning

As the attuning of music arouses emotions in the body to an unusual degree, well that there be choices made regarding what emotions are aroused and what character of music. ~ Edgar Cayce

I lived in Italy for a number of years and I was really digging around trying to get my hands dirty, trying to learn about Italian music. And what I ended up gravitating towards was this stuff from the '50s and '60s and maybe early '70s, where there were these incredibly talented pop singers that weren't using pop bands. ~ Mike Patton

Music matters," he told me once. "Pop fiction goes away, TV shows go away, and I defy you to tell me what you saw at the movies two years ago. But music lasts, even pop music. Especially pop music. Sneer at 'Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head' if you want to, but people will still be listening to that silly piece of shit fifty ~ Stephen King

At the beginning, I felt sort of reluctant about my music from my past. But in the last couple of years, I felt good about what I did in the past. The way I see my work, time passes from the time I performed or recorded a work. When I look at it now, 25 years or 30 years ago, if I see that it has value today, I will agree to release it. ~ Yoshi Wada

My dad doesn't have an iota of the depressive in him. He just depresses other people. Nothing brings him down. But this can't be true. I think it just comes out when absolutely no one else is around. It always seemed that while I knew he loved us a lot, my father actually needed nothing to be happy except books. There was enough in literature to challenge, entertain, amuse and inspire a man for a lifetime. Books and music were simply enough to sustain anyone was what he radiated. Humor, love, tragedy, it was all contained therein. And if all he needed was books, then he probably wouldn't mind if he lost the house and the wife and the whole life. Because the story was more important than the family. The story being that he was going to write the Great American Novel and finally be important, and in being important, he would be loved. Willing to lose his family to be loved by his family. Oh, the tragic blunder of this. It could almost drive someone mad. Wait, it did drive someone mad. ~ Jeanne Darst

The power of nature is what all art strives to be. The more we can get in tune with the harmony of the planet, the more our art can benefit from that relationship. ~ Rick Rubin

Music fills in for words a lot of the time when people don't know what to say, and I think music can be more eloquent than words. ~ Bono

Luke grabs my hand. I turn to see a look of pure horror on his face. "This," he says, "is a dance?" "You were expecting what?" I say. "Why are they not dancing?" I look around the gym again. "Well, most people are dancing." I nod at the freshman boys, who have resorted to doing the robot. "They're dancing." Luke looks completely unconvinced. "And the music," he says, "is it always this.....loud?" I laugh. "You sound like you're forty. You have been to a dance before, right?" Luke looks offended. "Yes. Of course. But it was more..." he surveys the gyrating bodies around us "....civilised that this." He turns to me accusatory. "And you. Have you been to a dance? ~ Laura Bradley Rede

Way back in the old days, say in Europe of the Middle Ages, you had an aristocracy, and they could afford to pay for musicians. The kings and queens had musicians in the castles, and that developed into symphony orchestras and what we call "Classical music" now. ~ Pete Seeger

The Blues? It's the mother of American music. That's what is is - the source. ~ B.B. King

You can see it on the Internet: There's an argument going on continually about, 'What is folk music?' And I don't really want to get involved in that. It's an endless argument, a 'How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?' kind of argument. ~ Roger McGuinn

I got on the phone with the president of my label and I said, "Obviously, I write songs in a lot of styles and play a lot of different kinds of music. We're getting toward the end of our business collaboration. If you could envision a record that you wanted to hear from me, what kind of record would it be?" It wasn't like asking him to fill an order, it was really just a conversation. For all the things I'd ever asked him, this was one thing I'd never asked, and I don't know why. So I was curious. And the thing that he was most interested in hearing was a solo record. ~ Ryan Adams

We need to have music that contributes to the well-being of the spirit. Music that cradles people's lives and makes things a little easier. That's what I try to do, and what I want to do. You don't want to close the door on hope. ~ Merle Haggard

And the way I loved her was like nothing else. This, I decided, was the love all other loves were measured against. They say girls look to marry their fathers, but I decided after having Maxie that we all, every one of us, were looking to marry our mothers. Sitting on the sofa with her wrapped in a soft blanket in my arms, I'd think, 'This baby has it so good.'
It just seemed that the love I'd been searching and hoping for all my life was what Maxie already had right now: two big arms and a lap, a warm blanket, the background music of a heartbeat and a pair of lungs, food at a moment's notice, sleep at every urge, and a person totally obsessed with her, whose every moment - waking or otherwise - was totally devoted to her comfort and care. Was that so much to ask for? ~ Katherine Center

We know how to think. We know how to laugh. We know we're going to die, which gives us a lot to think about, and we have a need for, what I would call, "the transcendent" or "the numinous" or even "the ecstatic" that comes out in love and music, poetry, and landscape. I wouldn't trust anyone who didn't respond to things of that sort. ~ Christopher Hitchens

The music comes first, like, 99 percent of the time. I come up with the basic chord structure and the melody first and then I get really obsessed with arranging, adding, and subtracting parts. The last step of the process, for me, is finding words that fit into that structure and figuring out exactly what I want to talk about. ~ Mikal Cronin

If we ask a vague question, such as, 'What is poetry?' we expect a vague answer, such as, 'Poetry is the music of words,' or 'Poetry is the linguistic correction of disorder.' ~ A.R. Ammons

I don't want to be a flash in the pan. I want to be around for a very long time. I want to be like a Sheryl Crow or a Melissa Etheridge or even a Madonna with how her career has lasted so long and she is still respected in the music business. That's really what I am aiming for. I'm not really looking for 15 minutes of fame. ~ Cheyenne Kimball

I always have a feeling you should move the playing field and the minute you know what you're doing, you're wrong. Therefore, I wanted us not to try to follow Spamalot immediately, but to do something different. This is perfect because it uses all the same skills, like story telling and lyric writing and music writing, but it's presenting it in a different form. And of course it gives me and John a nice chance to perform and show off which is also fun. ~ Eric Idle

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

That's what it is that you rehearse - the making of music, not the playing of notes as abstractions. ~ Sarah Caldwell

Not as we are but as we must appear,
contractual ghosts of pity; not as we
desire life, but as they would have us live,
set apart in timeless colloquy.
So it is required; so we bear witness,
despite ourselves, to what is beyond us,
each distant sphere of harmony forever
poised, unanswerable. It is without
consequence when we vaunt and suffer,
or if it is not, all echoes are the same
in such eternity. Then tell me, love,
how that should comfort us-or anyone
dragged half-unnerved out of this worldly place
crying to the end "I have not finished."
From 'Funeral Music ~ Geoffrey Hill

I think of myself as a jazz player, and my music as a natural extension of the jazz tradition. What I'm doing is completely free improvisation ('composing in real time') with nothing predetermined. I've had a lot of experience playing many different kinds of music and several different instruments, and since I tend not to waste anything, it all shows up somewhere in the music I'm playing now. ~ Richard Grossman

I see people who work on their look and they work on their poster and their website and you know, the music will speak for itself no matter what. So if you put maybe like 95% of your energy on music and 5% on playing out and telling people about it. That's kind of a good equation. ~ Kaki King

The reasons why anthropologists haven't been able to come up with a simple, compelling story for the origins of money is because there's no reason to believe there could be one. Money was no more ever "invented" than music or mathematics or jewelry. What we call "money" isn't a "thing" at all; it's a way of comparing things mathematically, as proportions: of saying one of X is equivalent to six of Y. As such it is probably as old as human thought. ~ David Graeber

What I like about music is the songs you can remember the lines of in a single second. ~ Karl Lagerfeld

It is a strange world, a sad world, a world full of miseries, and woes, and troubles. And yet when King Laugh come, he make them all dance to the tune he play. Bleeding hearts, and dry bones of the churchyard, and tears that burn as they fall, all dance together to the music that he make with that smileless mouth of him. Ah, we men and women are like ropes drawn tight with strain that pull us different ways. Then tears come, and like the rain on the ropes, they brace us up, until perhaps the strain become too great, and we break. But King Laugh he come like the sunshine, and he ease off the strain again, and we bear to go on with our labor, what it may be. ~ Bram Stoker

I am of the opinion that the appreciation and the desire for what is good takes more study and insight than does the understanding and test for the best music and art. ~ Laurance Rockefeller

I'm not planning what I listen to, except when I think the music can guide me to some emotional place I want to be reminded of. ~ Jonathan Lethem

I feel fortunate that I've had a lot of songs recorded by other people, because I take my songwriting very seriously. It's only those people that have followed me over the years and really know my work that know how serious I am about all of it - including the way I look. You can't take my high heels from me, you can't have my long fingernails, you can't take all this hair from me, because it's part of this thing that I've become. I wouldn't want to give any of it up. Do I have to be ugly to be a songwriter? This is the way I am, and it's what I choose to be. ~ Dolly Parton

I don't even know if I always entirely get what I'm trying to say right away with lyrics. I like a lot of things that are more subtext. I grew up mishearing lyrics my whole life, but somehow there's so much more, too, that's implied in vocal delivery and the music itself and the gestural quality of it. ~ Kim Gordon

From my perspective, music allows me to escape from the world of what is happening right in front of me ... to the world of my thoughts, my dreams, my hopes and ideas - for the world, for my own life, for the day, even for the moment. ~ Danielle De Niese

I am always hearing ... the sound of a far off song. I do not exactly know where it is, or what it means; and I don't hear much of it, only the odour of its music, as it were, flitting across the great billows of the ocean outside this air in which I make such a storm; but what I do hear, is quite enough to make me able to bear the cry from the drowning ship. So it would you if you could hear it.'
'No it wouldn't,' returned Diamond stoutly. 'For they wouldn't hear the music of the far-away song; and if they did, it wouldn't do them any good. You see you and I are not going to be drowned, and so we might enjoy it.'
'But you have never heard the psalm, and you don't know what it is like. Somehow, I can't say how, it tells me that all is right; that it is coming to swallow up all the cries ... It wouldn't be the song it seems if it did not swallow up all their fear and pain too, and set them singing it themselves with all the rest. ~ George MacDonald

What I believe to be jazz is constructed and improvised music which is in the air right now. But I don't think that's most people's definition of jazz, you know? We don't know what we're talking about, because we don't know the definition. ~ John Lurie

I think that hip-hop has done what it was supposed to have done, which is it defied all the laws of what is statistically a music genre and what statistically is not a music genre. Because it wasn't supposed to be here. ~ Monie Love