“There is music you never hear unless you play it yourself.”
“Music is the weapon in the war against unhappiness.”
“I close my eyes, letting the calm wash over me, and putting my bow against the cello s strings, I play.”
“Some days there won t be a song in your heart. Sing anyway.”
“I like music, she said slowly, because when I hear it, I...I lose myself within myself if that makes any sense. I become empty and full all at once.”
“There is no dark side of the moon really. As a matter of fact it s all dark.”
“No matter how many people give me advice, I am going to do what my heart tells me to do”
“Three films a day, three books a week and records of great music would be enough to make me happy to the day I die.”
“The world needs poetry now more than ever. It s the only thing that can keep music from copying itself and sounding the same.”
“When you re happy, you enjoy the music but when you re sad, you undestand the lyrics.”
“Noise has one advantage. It drowns out words. And suddenly he realized that all his life he had done nothing but talk, write, lecture, concoct sentences, search for formulations and amend them, so in the end no words were precise, their meanings were obliterated, their content lost, they turned into trash, chaff dust, sand; prowling through his brain, tearing at his head. they were his insomnia, his illness. And what he yearned for at that moment, vaguely, but with all his might, was unbounded music, absolute sound, a pleasant and happy all-encompassing, over-poering, window-rattling din to engulf, once and for all, the pain, the futility, the vanity of words. Music was the negation of sentences, music was the anti-word!”
“Life is a lot like jazz - it s best when you improvise.”
“That’s one of the great things about music. You can sing a song to 85,000 people and they’ll sing it back for 85,000 different reasons.”
“The job of feets is walking, but their hobby is dancing.”
“Who are you, Martin Eden? he demanded of himself in the looking- glass, that night when he got back to his room. He gazed at himself long and curiously. Who are you? What are you? Where do you belong? You belong by rights to girls like Lizzie Connolly. You belong with the legions of toil, with all that is low, and vulgar, and unbeautiful. You belong with the oxen and the drudges, in dirty surroundings among smells and stenches. There are the stale vegetables now. Those potatoes are rotting. Smell them, damn you, smell them. And yet you dare to open the books, to listen to beautiful music, to learn to love beautiful paintings, to speak good English, to think thoughts that none of your own kind thinks, to tear yourself away from the oxen and the Lizzie Connollys and to love a pale spirit of a woman who is a million miles beyond you and who lives in the stars! Who are you? and what are you? damn you! And are you going to make good?”
“The aim and final end of all music should be none other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul.”
“Play always as if in the presence of a master.”