Ballad Quotes & Sayings

As for my feet, the little feet
You used to call so pretty,
There's one, I know, in Bedford Row,
The t'other's in the City. — Thomas Hood

I love a ballad but even too well if it be doleful matter merrily set down, or a very pleasant thing indeed and sung lamentably. — William Shakespeare

He was a strong and noble lord with piercing eyes of grey.
He sat upon his noble throne shining like the dawn.
His sword flashed like the brightest star.
He led our people well.
Yet here and now he lays in blood pierced with arrows.
He was the friend of many knights.
He loved the warrior games.
His heart was won by a lady fair for marriage they did wait.
A kindly prince, his duty carried him to another's bed.
And on her death true love returned, finally they wed.
He felt the grief of children lost to murder and to pain.
I was the youngest of his blood.
I'll never be the same.
Here lays my father and my lord.
I know not what to say.
Except my father and my lord was slain here on this day.
Here lays my father and my lord.
I know not what to say.
Except my father and my lord was slain here on this day ... . — Laurel A. Rockefeller

If you are the lantern, I am the flame;
If you are the lake, then I am the rain;
If you are the desert, I am the sea;
If you are the blossom, I am the bee;
If you are the fruit, then I am the core;
If you are the rock, then I am the ore;
If you are the ballad, I am the word;
If you are the sheath, then I am the sword. — Cecilia Dart-Thornton

The farmer's daughter hath soft brown hair And I met with a ballad, I can't say where, That wholly consisted of lines like these. — Charles Stuart Calverley

By the Angel, Bridget's depressing," said Henry, setting down his newspaper directly on his plate and causing the edge to soak through with egg yolk. Charlotte opened her mouth as if to object, and closed it again. "It's all heartbreak, death and unrequited love."
"Well, that is what most songs are about," said Will. "Requited love is nice, but it doesn't make much of a ballad. — Cassandra Clare

It's the subtleties of a ballad that truly make it beautiful - and it's all in the way you present it to the listener. — Natalie Cole

To sing the ballad with a knowingness about what you are talking about. If it's somebody else's lyric, and the message is a little unusual for you, it requires that you learn that new message. — Al Jarreau

You know One Direction do a lot of up tempo songs, but when they did that Ed Sheeran song 'Little Things,' that was probably their biggest song off their last album, so it shows you that a ballad never goes out of fashion. — Shane Filan

The most dangerous and wonderful creature alive is the human. — Maggie Stiefvater

So we wait?" asked Severard.
"We wait, and we look to our defences. That and we try to find some money. Do you have any cash, Severard?"
"I did have some. I gave it to a girl, down in the slums."
"Ah. Shame."
"Not really, she fucks like a madman. I'd thoroughly recommend her, if you're interested."
Glokta winced as his knee clicked. "What a thoroughly heartwarming tale, Severard, I never had you down for a romantic. I'd sing a ballad if I wasn't so short of funds."
"I could ask around. How much are we talking about?"
"Oh, not much. Say, half a million marks?"
One of the Practical's eyebrows went up sharply. He reached into his pocket, dug around for a moment, pulled his hand out and opened it. A few copper coins shone in his palm.
"Twelve bits," he said. "Twelve bits is all I can raise. — Joe Abercrombie

Climbed that roost, alighted right there.
Made mush of his head for the onlooker bears.
A two-pronger her prize, a meat most rare.
Do-gooders will pay. Do-gooders will fear. — Darrell Drake

A ballad once in a while doesn't go amiss. — Chrissie Hynde

The beauty of science fiction is its open canvas. You can hypothesize about any element of the world. It doesn't have to be laser battles and things exploding, you can be JG Ballad and maybe just change one little thing about the real world and that becomes science fiction. — Duncan Jones

When I have sung my songs to you, I'll sing no more,' goes the old ballad. But for one faithful listener, Nelson Eddy is still singing. — Ruskin Bond

I had rather be a Kitten, and cry mew, Than one of these same Meeter Ballad-mongers: I had rather heare a Brazen Candlestick turn'd, Or a dry Wheele grate on the Axle-tree, And that would set my teeth nothing an edge, Nothing so much, as mincing Poetrie ... — William Shakespeare

But neither milk-white rose nor red
May bloom in prison air;
The shard, the pebble, and the flint,
Are what they give us there:
For flowers have been known to heal
A common man's despair. — Oscar Wilde

I wanted to bring back that big, ballad type of music that we used to love so much. Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, when they first came out, that's what I grew up singing. — LaToya London

What's supposed to happen, at the end of a quest? Cheers and accolades, Josh knew; people throw their hats in the air, and you glow with pride as they lift you to their shoulders. What else? Medals, speeches and a great feast, and then a ballad about your exploits, and finally, as the fireworks go off overhead, a soft, clean, fresh bed. — Isabel Hoving

For a ballad's a thing you expect to find lies in. — Samuel Lover

All night i have been making songs for you in my head. A lay for your eyes, a ballad for your lips, a duet to your breasts. I will ot sing them, through. They were poor things, unworthy of such beauty. — George R R Martin

Although Lewis Carroll thought of The Hunting of the Snark as a nonsense ballad for children, it is hard to imagine - in fact one shudders to imagine - a child of today reading and enjoying it. — Martin Gardner

There will be hundreds of sons making the same journey,' he says. 'All of us riding with broken hearts, all of us thinking of vengeance. This is what I feared would come; this is what I have dreaded. It is not very bright and honorable as you have always thought it; it is not like a ballad. It is a muddle and a mess, and a sinful waste, and good men have died and more will follow. — Philippa Gregory

Too many musicians rush through everything with too many notes. I need time to take the picture. A ballad should be a ballad. It's important to understand what the song is saying, and learn how to tell the story. It takes time. I can't rush it. I really can't rush it. — Shirley Horn

To me, ballads are special, because you can have a pop song that'll be know for three weeks and then you'll hear nothing else about it. Nobody else will record it and it'll just be gone. But if you do a good ballad, it'll be in the world forever. — Michael Jackson

They trapped the Lion on Shamu's plain; They weighted his limbs with an iron chain; They cried aloud in the trumpet-blast, They cried, "The lion is caged at last!" Woe to the Cities of river and plain If ever the Lion stalks again! - Old Ballad. — Robert E. Howard

I'm interested in feedback and learning what people want. It's a tricky thing for me when I do a set list. You get bored doing the same songs. Let's say we do one ballad in two hours, and it's "Wild Horses." If you say, I'm tired of that, let's try something less well known, and then you're out there stumbling through this song you just relearned at sound check, and you realize people probably want "Wild Horses" instead of this (laughs). You do need to do some songs that aren't so well known. The question is how many? I'm open to people posting their requests. — Mick Jagger

At four lines, with the quatrain, we reach the basic stanza form familiar from a whole range of English poetic practice. This is the length of the ballad stanza, the verse of a hymn, and innumerable other kinds of verse. — James Fenton

I love a ballad in print o' life, for then we are sure they are true. — William Shakespeare

Would you believe that Sammy Davis, Jr. taught me how to sing a ballad? 'You can be in an arena,' he said, 'and you should be able to hold their attention.' — Gladys Knight

The way Leo figured it, he spent more time crashing than he did flying. If there were a rewards card for frequent crashers, he'd be, like, double platinum level. Leo couldn't fly. He had a couple of minutes at most before he'd hit the water and go ker-splat. He decided he didn't like that ending to the Epic Ballad of Leo. — Rick Riordan

I was kind of known as a ballad singer. People would send ballads. Some of them would go over my shoulder and float off the top of my head, and I just didn't feel anything. Then I would hear a song that would absolutely shake me. — Rita Coolidge

During the 'ballad' years for me, the politics was latent; I was just falling in love with the ballads and my boyfriend. And there was the beauty of the songs. — Joan Baez

Her ballad did nothing to make the serpants lovely. Her ballad hid nothing of their dread. But the music itself spoke of faith and certainty; the melody announced the presence of God. — Walter Wangerin Jr.

I sang my song called "In This Song." David Foster wrote the song for me. I thought that I should sing a ballad song. — Charice Pempengco

She set out for revenge, to run them through, to do what an elf, an elf must do."
The next verse was Merill's to improvise. "Climbed that roost, alighted right there. Made mush of his head for the onlooker bears."
"A two-pronger her prize, a meat most rare. Do-gooders will pay. Do-gooders will fear."
"Ballad of the loneliest ones," lamented Merill.
"The loneliest ones," said Almi. She accepted that title; they were the loneliest. The elf gloomed. — Darrell Drake

You know, Dean said, gesturing with his uninjured hand. If we were in an action movie, this would be the scene where you tenderly dress my wounds. then the wailing guitar ballad would kick in and we'd end up rolling around on the bed in a slow motion montage.
If I were in Q, The Winged Serpent, Xochi replied, this would be the scene where I sacrifice you to Quetzalcoatl. — Christa Faust

There's a story behind every old ballad or work song or nonsense song that I ever knew. Sometimes it's a fascinating story. A story of people struggling for freedom, struggling to get along in this old world. — Pete Seeger

Well, bugger me," cried Jonas when he saw Richie with his bow, "is it Robin Hood or Adam Bell come to save us? Nay, it's Richie O'the Bow, hero of ballad and song! — David Pilling

One of Mr. [Thomas] Hardy's ancestors must have married a weeping willow. There are pages and pages in his collected poems which are simply plain narratives in ballad form of how an unenjoyable time was had by all. — Rebecca West

I have a passion for ballad ... They are the gypsy children of song, born under green hedgerows in the leafy lanes and bypaths of literature,
in the genial Summertime. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Same tall build, same golden hair, same dark-brown eyes. But this man isn't old enough to have gray in his hair; he's only a few years older than me, and his skin is smooth, sporting just a patch of stubble on his chin. He's much more handsome than Noam too, not quite as harsh, like he's more apt to sing a ballad than lead a kingdom. — Sara Raasch

Worse, in the video for it (which is also played everywhere constantly), Boris is singing to a girl who is dying in a hospital bed, and Boris is telling her (lyrically) that he'll give her a million stars (plus his love) if she'll find the strength within herself to not die, and love him forever.
Of course the girl is so moved by this hot rocker dude's amazing song that she doesn't die. Because it is a medical fact that people with fatal diseases only need a hot rocker dude to sit on the edge of their hospital bed and sing them a rock ballad in order to give them the strength to go on living. — Meg Cabot

Street Ballad

From high above the birds look down and sing because
they see
the monstrous comedies they miss, living several storeys
higher:
the dirty degradations and the gross humiliations,
they, like the gods, without pity, look down upon from a
telephone wire.

but as they sit there high above and gaze down upon our
brutal
short and messy circumstances, they do not see the one
who stands behind a cardboard tree examining them
coldly
with one eye closed and the other staring along the barrel
of a gun. — George Barker

Seasons didn't come behind the nicotine-stained walls of Mountain City's prison, so Harm always imagined it spring--the locust trees clustered with shaggy white blooms, the wet woods flecked with bloodroot, and wild roses and honeysuckle flashing white among the chestnuts on the mountainsides... — Sharyn McCrumb

My love was Bob Dylan, but as I got older I realized a good ballad was a good ballad. — Bonnie Raitt

It's an Irish Republican rebel ballad from the 1840s. The reason I know is because I was once in a bar in Liverpool and a couple of lads started singing it and a couple others objected and a fight broke out. As a loyal subject of the Crown, I was on the side of the objectors. We eventually prevailed, but, even if we hadn't, 'A Nation Once Again' is a fine song to get your head kicked into, at least when compared to 'Believe' by Cher, which would rank pretty high on the list of numbers I'd least like to be listening to as my eye's gouged out and I fall into a coma, although it would be a merciful release. — Mark Steyn

Like the Society for Creative Anachronism, The Ballad of the White Horse depicted "the Middle Ages as they should have been." Chesterton's ballad made a lasting impression on Robert E. Howard, who praised it in letters to his friend Clyde Smith. — Joseph Laycock

The pulse of India throbs in the music and the dance-drama. It is in the realm of living that India exposes herself, without consciousness. The poetry, the stoicism in the face of aching tragedy...the languishing air of over-rich beauty, the heaviness of joss-stick perfume...all these are India. The plaintive shepherd's flute surging across forbidding Himalayan valleys; a wandering Rajasthani minstrel intoning an hour-long ballad, carrying with him the breath of middle ages... — Peggy Holroyde

My dad [Johnny Cash] went to the [Richard] Nixon White House and refused to sing "Welfare Cadillac" (instead performing the anti-war songs "The Ballad of Ira Hayes" and "Man in Black"). He protested the Vietnam War, but he went to perform for the troops with bombs dropping all around him. He had that kind of genius: a true artist's capacity for holding two opposing thoughts at once while being large enough to encompass all realities. — Rosanne Cash

The fact was, I didn't know if I was built for happy endings. — Maggie Stiefvater

'The Ballad of Black Tom' was written, in part, during the latest round of arguments about H. P. Lovecraft's legacy as both a great writer and a prejudiced man. I grew up worshipping the guy, so this issue felt quite personal to me. — Victor LaValle

Every generation wants to be the last. Every generation hates the next trend in music they can't understand. We hate to give up those reins of our culture. To find our own music playing in elevators. The ballad for our revolution, turned into background music for a television commercial. To find our generation's clothes and hair suddenly retro. — Chuck Palahniuk

I wrote a song with Kara DioGuardi called 'What If,' and it's a really beautiful song. It's kind of like a rock ballad. There's a lot of guitars and drums in it. — Ashley Tisdale

The people who live happily ever after - they don't appear in the history books. They just fade away. I reckon that's what happiness is.
Pauline Foster - " The Ballad of Tom Dooley ", Sharyn McCrumb, p. 271 — Sharyn McCrumb

An important dimension of Tess of the d'Urbervilles is its debt to the oral tradition; to stories about wronged milkmaids, tales of superstition, and stories of love, betrayal and revenge, involving stock figures. This gives Tess of the d'Urbervilles an anti-realistic inflection. From the world of ballad and folktale Hardy draws such fateful coincidences as the failure of Angel to encounter Tess at the 'Club-walking' on which he intrudes with his brothers, the letter to Angel that she accidentally slips under the carpet, the loss of her shoes when she tries to visit his family, and the family portraits on the wall of their honeymoon dwelling, as well as several omens. This chimes effectively with a world in which the rural folk have a superstitious and fatalistic attitude to life. — Geoffrey Harvey

So I did 'Something Happened on the Way to Heaven' and the original version is a ballad. The original Phil record is uptempo but we slowed it down and made it a ballad. — Deborah Cox

PEASEBLOSSOM
A gloaming peace this evening with it brings
In the countryside where we lay our scene
Toad-ballad accompan'd, crickets sing,
and cupcake crumbs make fairy hands unclean.
An indignant Moth squeaked, There were cupcakes?! — Lisa Mantchev

Probably your biggest mistake was doing funk-dance to Unchained Melody," the dog offered earnestly. "It's a ballad, Alf, and to be honest, it's one of the slowest songs I can think of. You'd have been better off doing a slow waltz to something with that tempo. The other factor may have been the large amount of beer you consumed beforehand. — Mark Jackman

Then a soft air, a simple melody, rose to the ears of the suddenly hushed court; and for me, it was May Day again, and I was no longer cold, for the sun burned bright and the grass smelled of its sour-sweet bruisings and an old man fashioned a ballad for the Nut-Brown maid, who would ever be true to her lover. I leaned towards the brightness and, in an abandonment of joy and because there was none to see, tore off my henin and let my nut-brown hair fall to my knees. For I would be a child again, for five minutes, and remember the time when men stopped to gaze at me, with my chaplet of flowers crowning that at which they all marvelled, and longed to touch and stroke and possess. — Rosemary Hawley Jarman

The subconscious leaves its fingerprints, but there's a stranger down there, too. A hell of a weird guy who knows a hell of a lot. (Ballad of the Flexible Bullet) — Stephen King

That innate love of melody, which she had inherited from her ballad-singing mother, gave the simplest music a power which could well-nigh drag her heart out of her bosom at times. — Thomas Hardy

I'm a huge fan of 'Heart On My Sleeve' - I think it has a 'Take That' feel to it! John Shanks and James Morrison wrote the track, and we spoke to Sony and asked if we could reference a 'Greatest Day'/'Rule The World' sound to make that epic ballad. I think it does the job. — Olly Murs

The summer lasted a long long time, like verse after verse of a ballad, but when it ended, it ended like a man falling dead in the street of heart trouble. One night, all in one night, severe winter came, a white horse of snow rolling over Bountiful, snorting and rolling in its meadows, its fields. — Ardyth Kennelly

With the poetry of plain speaking, Shannon Hitchcock recreates the daily drama of a vanished world. — Richard Peck

Who claims Truth, Truth abandons. History is hir'd, or coerc'd, only in Interests that must ever prove base. She is too innocent, to be left within the reach of anyone in Power,- who need but touch her, and all her Credit is in the instant vanish'd, as if it had never been. She needs rather to be tended lovingly and honorably by fabulists and counterfeiters, Ballad-Mongers and Cranks of ev'ry Radius, Masters of Disguise to provide her the Costume, Toilette, and Bearing, and Speech nimble enough to keep her beyond the Desires, or even the Curiosity, of Government. — Thomas Pynchon

First is a poem, a ballad, out of Scotland. You may say there is no king in it, and of course there isn't, which is what makes it so sad. The last line of the third verse, 'O he might hae been a king' is so sad that I don't like to look at it with both eyes at once. — William Mayne

[of Nan Goldin] In an afterword to Ballad written in 2012, she declared: 'I decided as a young girl I was going to leave a record of my life and experience that no one could rewrite or deny. — Olivia Laing

that is Nature's way: she will allow a gentleman of splendid physiognomy and poetic aspirations to sing woefully out of tune, and not give him the slightest hint of it; and takes care that some narrow-browed fellow, trolling a ballad in the corner of a pot-house, shall be as true to his intervals as a bird. — George Eliot

A famous man is Robin Hood, The English ballad-singer's joy. — William Wordsworth

Light - both physical and moral - was a central concern to the men and women living in the medieval age. They attempted to explore its properties in the colors of a stained glass canopy, in the tenor of a brisk saltarello, in the lilt of a Jongleur's ballad, in the sweet savor of a banqueting table, in the rhapsody of a well planned garden, indeed, in every arena and discipline of life. — Douglas Wilson Douglas Jones

You, my dear ... have been wondering why she stuck with him. Although you haven't said as much, it's been on your mind. Am I right?'
She nodded.
'Yes. And I'm not going to offer a long motivational thesis - the convenient thing about stories that are true is that you need only say this is what happened and let people worry for themselves about why. Generally, nobody ever knows why things happen anyway ... particularly the ones who say they do. (Ballad of the Flexible Bullet) — Stephen King

And while thou
livest, dear Kate, take a fellow of plain and
uncoined constancy; for he perforce must do thee
right, because he hath not the gift to woo in other
places: for these fellows of infinite tongue, that
can rhyme themselves into ladies' favours, they do
always reason themselves out again. What! a
speaker is but a prater; a rhyme is but a ballad. A
good leg will fall; a straight back will stoop; a
black beard will turn white; a curled pate will grow
bald; a fair face will wither; a full eye will wax
hollow: but a good heart, Kate, is the sun and the
moon; or, rather, the sun, and not the moon; for it
shines bright and never changes, but keeps his
course truly. If thou would have such a one, take
me; and take me, take a soldier; take a soldier,
take a king. And what sayest thou then to my love?
speak, my fair, and fairly, I pray thee — William Shakespeare

Away in the distance, a train appeared behind the trees, all its compartments were lit, the windows were sure to be open. One of us started singing a ballad, but we all wanted to sing. We sang far quicker than the speed of the train, we swung our arms because our voices weren't enough, our voices got into a tangle where we felt happy. If you mix your voice with others' voices, you feel as though you're caught on a hook. (trans. Michael Hofmann) — Franz Kafka

Oh, I'm a ballad queen for sure ... I don't dig dance stuff very much but I seem to hit the charts with it. Go figure ... — Phyllis Hyman

When I first heard that song, it was a ballad but it had a lot more. It felt like a gospel song when I first heard it and it just moved me. — Deborah Cox

Wild steep mountains floating in a haze of cloud...a sea of green trees swallowing the hills and valleys, and curling around the trails and rivers, with the wind in the leaves as its tide. — Sharyn McCrumb

Hearing may make shorter intuitive leaps than sight, but it too is subject to illusions. The most pleasant of these are 'mondegreens,' named by the author Sylvia Wright from her youthful mishearing of the Scottish ballad that actually says, 'They hae slain the Earl o' Moray / and they layd him on the green'--not, alas, 'the Lady Mondegreen.' Children, with their relaxed expectations for logic, are a rich source of these (pledging allegiance to 'one Asian in the vestibule, with little tea and just rice for all'), but everyone has the talent to infer the ridiculous from the inaudible--and, what's more, to believe in it. Here, at least, we do behave like computers, in that our voice-recognition software has little regard for probability but boldly assumes we live in a world of surrealist poets. We are certain that Mick Jagger will never leave our pizza burning and that the Shadow knows what evil lurks in the hot cement. — Michael Kaplan

Sigh. Here's another fine woman that historians can't believe was real. Of course she was real. Not only is there a splendid Chinese poem called "The Ballad of Mulan", there is also n excellent cartoon by Disney. — Sandi Toksvig

I've been waiting for you forever."
"Forever' as in several hundred years, or forever as in since my lesson began? — Maggie Stiefvater

Celebrated in the Bob Dylan ballad 'Joey,' Crazy Joe Gallo was a charismatic beatnik gangster whose forays into Greenwich Village in the 1960s inspired his bloody revolution against the Mafia. — Tom Folsom

THE BALLAD OF READING GOAL: The vilest deeds, like poison weeds, Bloom well in prison air; It is only what is good in Man That wastes and withers there. Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate, And the Warder is Despair. — Emma Goldman

Only a drummer-boy in a ballad or a story could have been so in the thick of the fight. She was taken into the confidence of passions on which she fixed just the stare she might have had for images bounding across the wall in the slide of a magic-lantern. Her little world was phantasmagoric - strange shadows dancing on a sheet. It was as if the whole performance had been given for her - a mite of a half-scared infant in a great dim theatre. She was in short introduced to life with a liberality in which the selfishness of others found its account, and there was nothing to avert the sacrifice but the modesty of her youth. — Henry James

Ah! Happy they whose hearts can break
And peace of pardon win!
How else may man make straight his path
And cleanse his soul from sin?
How else but through a broken heart
May the Lord Christ enter in? — Oscar Wilde

I like "God Give Me the Strength" very much. It's not really a blues and to call it a ballad is absurd. I don't know, its mid-tempo. Mark (St. John) actually wrote it and I think its very telling of our lives in the 60s. Its just a good song, ya know ... — Dick Taylor

Lee Morgan used to stand behind me when I was playing a ballad and he'd be hollering, "Play the pretty notes, man, play the pretty notes." I thought I was playing the pretty notes, but you know, things like that help you to reach a little further. — Gary Bartz

It's all heartbreak, death, and unrequited love." "Well, that is what most songs are about," said Will. "Requited love is ideal but doesn't make much of a ballad — Cassandra Clare

I realize how arrogant it is to claim I can sort what is relevant from what is irrelevant. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

There is no real way to categorize McLean's 'American Pie' for its hybrid of modern poetry and folk ballad, beer-hall chant and high-art rock. — Douglas Brinkley

They think in terms of a sentimental ballad. And that's what terrifies you about them. It isn't their cruelty, it isn't even their shrewdness - it's their extraordinary naivete. Everything in their whole bloody world is a cliche. Everything is born out of a cliche, rests on a cliche, survives by a cliche. And they believe in the cliches - there's no hope — Jean Rhys

Now ballads, I can mess around and get up on somebody on a ballad. People ain't seen it yet, but I can mess around and get up in there. I've had Ruben Studdard up in my house, Brian McKnight, Tank. Every once in a while I throw down with them. — Jamie Foxx

Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up interest wrinkles the soul. You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubt; as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fear; as young as your hope as old as your despair. In the central place of every heart there is a recording chamber. So long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer and courage, so long are you young. When your heart is covered with the snows of pessimism and the ice of cynicism, then, and then only, are you grown old. And then, indeed as the ballad says, you just fade away — Douglas MacArthur

I have been thinking about existence lately. In fact, I have been so full of admiration for existence that I have hardly been able to enjoy it properly ... I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again. I know this is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. There is a human beauty in it. And I can't believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don't imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try. — Marilynne Robinson

I compelled myself all through to write an exercise in verse, in a different form, every day of the year. I turned out my page every day, of some sort
I mean I didn't give a damn about the meaning, I just wanted to master the form
all the way from free verse, Walt Whitman, to the most elaborate of villanelles and ballad forms. Very good training. I've always told everybody who has ever come to me that I thought that was the first thing to do. — Conrad Aiken

That was the ballad of suburbia: give me loud to drown out the silence. — Stephanie Kuehnert

Gaga is a gorgeous singer, and when she sings a great ballad, I get goose bumps. — Tony Bennett

'The Girls,' by Lori Lansens, is a ballad, a melancholy song of two very strange, enchanted girls who live out their peculiar, ordinary lives in a rural corner of Canada. — Stacey D'Erasmo

The pleasures of love proceed successively from a distich to a quatrain, from a quatrain to a sonnet, from a sonnet to a ballad, from a ballad to an ode, from an ode to a cantata, and from a cantata to a dithyramb. A husband who begins with the dithyramb is a fool. — Honore De Balzac

You are enough, you are worth it, Worth every ballad, worth every word, every action. — R. YS Perez

I felt like a guy in a cell being stared at longingly by a naked one-hundred-and-ten-kilo lifer. You know, sooner or later, that something unpleasant is going to happen to you.

-The Ballad of the Low Lifes, by Enrico Remmert (2003), P. 20 — Enrico Remmert