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"Music is an expression of sound that reflects the beauty of life." - Paul Winter "Without music, life would be a mistake." - Friedrich Nietzche "It was the music of hill and moon, a calling-down music, keening and wild. There was a stag's lowing in it, the murmur of sea against shore. There was moonlight in it and the slow grind of earth against stone. There was harping in it, and the sound of the wind as it sped across the gorse-backed hills." - Charles de Lint, Into the Green "Since once I sat upon a promontory, And heard a mermaid on a dolphin's back Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath, That the rude sea grew civil at her song, And certain stars shot madly from their spheres, To hear the sea-maid's music." - William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream "The harpist is the only musician who is of noble standing. Flute-players, trumpeters and timpanists, as well as jugglers, conjurers and equestrians who stand on the backs of horses at fairs, have no status of their own in the community, only that of the noble chieftain to whom they are attached." - from Ireland's ancient Brehon laws "What every true artist wants, really wants, is to be paid." - Terry Pratchett, Soul Music "If music be the food of love, play on!" - William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night "I couldn't stop them from coming. And some of the things they were telling me I didn't want to know. I would have difficulty finishing a song, and then a voice would tell me, 'That's because you haven't experienced the second verse yet.' Sometimes, in the middle of a concert, it would arrive." - Tori Amos "Song writing is about getting the demon out of me. It's like being possessed. You try to go to sleep, but the song won't let you. So you have to get up and make it into something, and then you're allowed to sleep." - John Lennon "Music is nothing else but wild sounds civilized into time and tune." - Thomas Fuller "Stone walls confine a tinker; cold iron binds a witch; but a musician's music can never be fettered, for it lives first in her heart and mind." - Charles de Lint, Hedgework & Guessery "The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not mov'd with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils; The motions of his spirit are dull as night, And his affections dark as Erebus: Let no such man be trusted." - William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice "Music has charms to soothe a savage breast, to soften rocks, or to bend a knotted oak." - William Congreve "Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent." - Victor Hugo "Men profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give no evidence in their opinions and lives that they have heard it. It would not leave them narrow-minded and bigoted." - Henry David Thoreau "Music ... can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable." - Leonard Bernstein "She knew this music -- knew it down to the very core of her being -- but she had never heard it before. Unfamiliar, it had still always been there inside her, waiting to be woken. It grew from the core of mystery that gives a secret its special delight, religion its awe. It demanded to be accepted by simple faith, not dissected or questioned, and at the same time, it begged to be doubted and probed. There was wonder in its strains, and bright flares of joy that set the heart on fire, but there was darkness in it as well, a shadow that could reach into the soul and cloud all one's perceptions with a bleak grey shroud. The path between the two was narrow and treacherous, like the winding track that old folk songs claimed led one into Faerie." - Charles de Lint, The Little Country "An admirable musician! O, she will sing the savageness out of a bear." - William Shakespeare, Othello "Entertainment is about telling everybody that everything is alright but music is on the side of the upsetters and that's where I'm at." - Bill Bruford, drummer for Yes, King Crimson, etc. "I made my viol commit such sins of sound, and I didn't mind." - Christopher Fry, The Lady's Not for Burning "I can suck melancholy out of a song as a weasel sucks eggs." - William Shakespeare, As You Like It "I don't know anything about music. In my line you don't have to." - Elvis Presley "Music should be the words of the soul." - David B. Newberry "Music is the vernacular of the human soul." - Geoffrey Latham "The kind of music he really liked was the kind that never got played. It ruined music, in his opinion, to torment it by involving it on dried skins, bits of dead cat, and lumps of metal hammered into wires and tubes. It ought to stay written down, on the page, in rows of little dots and crochets all neatly caught between lines. Only there was it pure. It was when people started doing things with it that the rot set in. Much better to sit quietly in a room and read the sheets, with nothing between yourself and the mind of the composer but a scribble of ink." - Terry Pratchett, Soul Music "Of all noises, I think music is the least disagreeable." - Samuel Johnson "In the end we shall have had enough of cynicism and skepticism and humbug, and we shall want to live more musically." - Van Gogh "If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it." - Isadora Duncan "This music crept by me upon the waters, allaying both their fury, and my passion, with its sweet air." - William Shakespeare "Music heard so deeply that it is not heard at all, but you are the music while the music lasts." - Thomas Eliot "Medicine, to produce health, has to examine disease; and music, to create harmony, must investigate discord." - Plutarch "Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life." - Berthold Auerbach "Nobody cares if you can't dance well. Just get up and dance." - Dave Barry "Irish folk music is the most schizophrenic I have ever heard. How can it be so sad and happy at the same time, even within the same note? Simple and direct, it tells you yes, the world is full of pain, but this is the way through. As long as you're in the music, the bad things stay away." - Jonathan Carroll, The Marriage of Sticks "Have another drink and just listen to the music." - Charles de Lint, Forests of the Heart |