Symphony Quotes - Page 12

• There are moments in a woman's life when her heart flips in her chest, when the world suddenly seems uncommonly pink and perfect, when a symphony can be heard in the tinkle of a doorbell.

  Julia Quinn

  Heart, Perfect, Flip

  Julia Quinn (2009). “Romancing Mr Bridgerton: Number 4 in series”, p.92, Hachette UK

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• What a grin he had, what ferocious eyes, what a creature he was. He had dreamt himself an entire life and death. Ronan said, "I want to go back." "Then take it," said his father. "You know how now." And Ronan did. Because Niall Lynch was a forest fire, a rising sea, a car crash, a closing curtain, a blistering symphony, a catalyst with planets inside him. And he had given all of that to his middle son.

  Maggie Stiefvater

  Father, Eye, Son

  Maggie Stiefvater (2013). “The Dream Thieves (The Raven Cycle, Book 2)”, p.329, Scholastic Inc.

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• If you were meant to cure cancer or write a symphony or crack cold fusion and you don't do it, you not only hurt yourself, even destroy yourself. You hurt your children. You hurt me. You hurt the planet.

  Steven Pressfield

  Hurt, Children, Cancer

  Steven Pressfield (2002). “The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles”, p.165, Black Irish Entertainment LLC

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• I have had much pleasure in working with Orphei Drängar during my time as chief conductor of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, and I consider OD to be one of the most brilliant men´s choirs in the world. The singers are highly professional and their repertoire is of a very wide range, but then they have been trained for years by Eric Ericson, the world´s leading choir conductor. I also admire the strength and the beauty of their voices. OD is an extraordinary powerful choir!

  Neeme Jarvi

  Powerful, Men, Years

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• These motivational tapes have really inspired me! I'm going to make a million dollars, buy my own company and retire early. Then, I'm going to write a novel and a symphony and give all the profits to charity. Then next month, I'll figure out how to do it.

  Randy Glasbergen

  Inspirational, Funny, Motivation

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• My ex-wife was trying to be nice once, so she took me to a concert in Los Angeles. I went with her to Symphony Hall, and the orchestra was playing. When the show started, the spotlight was sharp on this one man (Andres Segovia) and he had sombrero on and his guitar propped up like this and, oh man ... he was a master ! - I really heard it. That one guitar sounded like a whole orchestra to me.

  B. B. King

  Music, Nice, Men

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• Few tears will be shed over the demise of the East German army, but what about East Germany’s eighty symphony orchestras, bound to lose some subsidies? Or the whole East German system, which covered everyone in a security blanket from day care to health care, from housing to education? Some people are beginning to express, if ever so slightly, nostalgia for that Berlin Wall.

  Bob Simon

  Wall, Army, Day Care

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• Muti is going to do the Alpine Symphony this year. He will do it well because it is not very well known.

  Eugene Ormandy

  Funny, Years, Orchestra

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• Bizet was a very young man when he composed this symphony, so play it softly.

  Eugene Ormandy

  Funny, Men, Play

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• I'm too busy playing. When I'm playing I don't pay attention to who's listening. When I was listening I listened to symphony orchestras, Beethoven, Bach, Brahms, Stravinsky. You don't listen to one instrument; you listen to music.

  Charles Mingus

  Listening, Attention, Orchestra

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• I listen to the summer symphony outside my window. Truthfully, it's not a symphony at all. There's no tune, no melody, only the same notes over and over. Chirps and tweets and trills and burples. It's as if the insect orchestra is forever tuning its instruments, forever waiting for the maestro to tap his baton and bring them to order. I, for one, hope the maestro never comes. I love the music mess of it.

  Jerry Spinelli

  Music, Summer, Order

  Jerry Spinelli (2007). “Love, Stargirl”, p.74, Knopf Books for Young Readers

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• A great painting or symphony or play, doesn't diminish us, but enlarges us, and we, too, want to make our own cry of affirmation to the power of Creation behind the Universe.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Dream, Play, Want

  Madeleine L'Engle (2016). “A Circle of Quiet”, p.89, Open Road Media

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• The drama, like the symphony, does not teach or prove anything.

  John Millington Synge

  Drama, Writing, Doe

  John Millington Synge, Ann Saddlemyer (1998). “Playboy of the Western World and Other Plays”, p.28, Oxford University Press, USA

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• Making a garden is somehow like conducting a symphony - different plants come forward at different times and you need to think very carefully about their placement in relation to each other.

  Elisabeth Murdoch

  Garden, Thinking, Different

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• [As a kid] I felt it was really weird that music schools behaved like a conveyor belt to make performers for those symphony orchestras. If you were really good and practiced your violin for a few hours a day for ten years you might be invited to this VIP elite club. For me music was not about that. It is about freedom and expression and individuality and impulsiveness and spontaneity. It wasn't so Apollonian; it was more Dionysian.

  Bjork

  School, Kids, Expression

  Interview with Brandon Stosuy, www.stereogum.com. June 29, 2011.

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• And what, then, is belief? It is the demi-cadence which closes a musical phrase in the symphony of our intellectual life.

  Charles Sanders Peirce

  Intellectual, Musical, Phrases

  Charles Sanders Peirce (1958). “Selected Writings (Values in a Universe of Chance)”, p.121, Courier Corporation

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• Proportion ... You can't help thinking about it in these London streets, where it doesn't exist ... It's like listening to a symphony of cats to walk along them. Senseless discords and a horrible disorder all the way ... We need no barbarians from outside; they're on the premises, all the time.

  Aldous Huxley

  Cat, Thinking, Listening

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• Abolishing the book is like abolishing the symphony, or sonata form, or the sonnet, or the wall painting.

  David Gelernter

  Wall, Book, Painting

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

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• Why is composing symphonies tough? I don't know. It's just very few people in the world can do it well. And I think that's the case with upfront design. It is very hard to do well.

  Martin Fowler

  Thinking, People, Design

  "Evolutionary Design". Interview with Bill Venners, www.artima.com. November 18, 2002.

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• ...I is another. If the brass wakes the trumpet, it’s not its fault. That’s obvious to me: I witness the unfolding of my own thought: I watch it, I hear it: I make a stroke with the bow: the symphony begins in the depths, or springs with a bound onto the stage. If the old imbeciles hadn’t discovered only the false significance of Self, we wouldn’t have to now sweep away those millions of skeletons which have been piling up the products of their one-eyed intellect since time immemorial, and claiming themselves to be their authors!

  Arthur Rimbaud

  Spring, Skeletons, Self

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• What is history? Its beginning is that of the centuries of systematic work devoted to the solution of the enigma of death, so that death itself may eventually be overcome. That is why people write symphonies, and why they discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves.

  Boris Pasternak

  Writing, People, Overcoming

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• Why learn a number like pi to so many decimal places? The answer I gave then as I do now is that pi is for me an extremely beautiful and utterly unique thing. Like the Mona Lisa or a Mozart symphony, pi is its own reason for loving it.

  Daniel Tammet

  Beautiful, Unique, Numbers

  Daniel Tammet (2007). “Born On A Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant”, p.185, Simon and Schuster

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• Paris in the early morning has a cheerful, bustling aspect, a promise of delicious things to come, a positive smell of coffee and croissants, quite peculiar to itself. The people welcome a new day as if they were certain of liking it, the shopkeepers pull up their blinds serene in the expectation of good trade, the workers go happily to their work, the people who have sat up all night in night-clubs go happily to their rest, the orchestra of motor-car horns, of clanking trams, of whistling policemen tunes up for the daily symphony, and everywhere is joy.

  Nancy Mitford

  Morning, Coffee, Night

  Nancy Mitford (1963). “The Nancy Mitford Omnibus”

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• One song isn't going to ever change things, but I suppose it's the accumulation of music generally [that is]. If you can imagine a world that has no music in it, it would be a very different world, so music does change the world by virtue of all the music in it. Cumulative music of every kind, from banging a drum to playing a flute or recording symphonies, or singing 'War, what is it good for?' All those things change the whole way we live.

  Mick Jagger

  Song, War, Singing

  Source: www.indielondon.co.uk

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• your concert-goer, though he feed upon symphony as a lamb upon milk, is no true lover if he play no instrument. Your true lover does more than admire the muse; he sweats a little in her service.

  Catherine Drinker Bowen

  Music, Play, Sweat

  Catherine Drinker Bowen (1939). “Friends and fiddlers”

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