Quotes & Sayings About Fugue

One really ought to be afraid of self-torture. But it tempted me. It begged. The dark place that my mind was fast becoming blends, in my memory, with the dark womb of church: the chant, the fugue of prayer, the strange erotic energy that carving a very small cross into my thigh with a nail had brought. — Marya Hornbacher

All human beings have always aspired to an idyll, to that garden where nightingales sing, to that realm of harmony where the world does not rise up as a stranger against man and man against other men, but rather where the world and all men are shaped from one and the same matter. There, everyone is a note in a sublime Bach fugue, and anyone who refuses to be one is a mere useless and meaningless black dot that need only be caught and crushed between thumb and finger like a flea. — Milan Kundera

Bach's Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor — Neal Stephenson

After about three billion years of this sometimes zany, frequently tedious fugue of carnality and carnage, — Neal Stephenson

No pain was permanent, and no loss was real. That even though people treated each other abominably, even though they left, even though you let them go, even though you never laid eyes on them again, this fugue that linked you continued, whether you liked it or not. — Lisa Alther

The building, it so happened, was a music college of the kind she herself had left two years before, abandoning her lifelong hopes of becoming a professional musician; she recognised the piece as the D minor fugue from Bach's *French Suites*, a piece she had always loved and that caused her, hearing it so unexpectedly, to feel there on the pavement the most extraordinary sense of loss. It was though the music had once belonged to her and now no longer did; as though she had been excluded from its beauty, was being forced to see it in the possession of someone else, and to revisit in its entirety her own sadness at her inability, for a number of reasons, to remain in that world. — Rachel Cusk

The final, unfinished fugue from The Art of Fugue is the greatest piece of music ever composed. — Glenn Gould

Then you wake up in Barstow California. Another dissociative fugue. It's like time traveling. It's late November now. What ever happened at teresa is a mystery to you. In Godforsaken Barstow, where the golden state shits itself into the desert, people are eatting each other. Has it always been this way? — Lost Zombies

What I so like about Poussin and Cezanne is their sense of organization. Ilike the way in which they develop space and shape in architecturalcontinuity - the rhythm across their paintings. When I paint a landscape, Iget the greatest pleasure out of composing it. As I paint, I try to work outa visual sonata form or a fugue, with realistic images. — Ian Hornak

Holmes," I asked as we stepped into the street, "I realise the question sounds sophomoric, but do you find that there are aspects of yourself with which you feel most comfortable? I only ask out of curiosity; you needn't feel obliged to answer." He offered me his arm and, formally, I took it. "'Who am I?' you mean." He smiled at the question and gave what was at first glance a most oblique answer. "Do you know what a fugue is?" "Are you changing the subject?" "No." I thought in silence for some distance before his answer arranged itself sensibly in my mind. "I see. Two discrete sections of a fugue may not appear related, unless the listener has received the entire work, at which time the music's internal logic makes clear the relationship. — Laurie R. King

In this world, this life, "flow" [the times when our work or play so absorbs and attunes our energies that we lose track of time] comes to an end. The canvas is dry, the fugue is complete, the band plays the tag one more time and then resolves on the final chord. And, too, the book is finished, the service is over, the lights go up in the darkened theater and we emerge blinking into the bright lights of the "real world." But what if the timeless, creative world we had glimpsed is really the real world -- and it is precisely its reality that gave it such power to captivate us for a while? What if our ultimate destiny is that moment of enjoyment and engagement we glimpse in the artist's studio? — Andy Crouch

The dark organ music filled the Department of Post-Mortem Communications. Moist assumed it was all part of the ambience, although the mood would have been more precisely obtained if the tune it was playing did not appear to be Cantate and Fugue for someone Who Has Trouble with the Pedals. — Terry Pratchett

And he wrote the single most famous poem about the death camps, "Todesfuge" (Death Fugue). — Clive James

He sat in the chapel for hours picking his way through fugues. A dozen notes, hardly music. But then those few notes spoke to each other, subject and answer, by repetition, by diminution, by augmentation, even looping backwards on themselves in a course like the retrograde motion of Mars. He listened as if he had as many ears as fingertips, and, like a blind man, could feel textures that were barely there. At the end of two or three pages of music he would hear all the voices twining together in a construction of such dizzying power that the walls of the chapel could barely contain it. — Kate Grenville

The Besicovitch style is architectural. He builds out of simply elements a delicate and complicated architectural structure, usually with a hierarchical plan, and then, when the building is finished, the completed structure leads by simple arguments to an unexpected conclusion. Every Besicovitch proof is a work of art, as carefully constructed as a Bach fugue. — Freeman Dyson

No one ever talks about issues like dissociative identity disorder, fugue, or psychotic breaks in anything but the most negative light. No one ever talks about how the personality does this type of thing to protect itself, to save itself, or how powerful and effective it is." I — Lisa Unger

Yes, her childlessness was a fugue in itself, a flight- this was the habitual theme she was trying now to resist- a flight from her proper destiny. Her failure to become a woman, as her mother understood the term. — Ian McEwan

There is nothing like a Bach fugue to remove me from a discordant moment ... only Bach hold up fresh and strong after repeated playing. I can always return to Bach when the other records weary me. — Edward Weston

Who rant by note, and through the gamut rage; in songs and airs express their martial fire; combat in trills, and in a fugue expire. — Joseph Addison

[ ... ] he played me the Fourth Prelude and Fugue (C-sharp minor). Now, I knew what to expect from Liszt at the pianoforte; but from Bach himself, much as I had studied him, I never expected what I learnt that day. For then I saw the difference between study and revelation; through his rendering of this single fugue Liszt revealed the whole of Bach to me, so that I now know of a surety where I am with him, can take his every bearing from this point, and conquer all perplexity and every doubt by power of strong faith. — Richard Wagner

Time will scar my wound and I'll emerge from my fugue tougher, if not healed. — Karen Marie Moning

I want Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D played at my funeral. If it isn't I shall jolly well want to know why. — Sybil Thorndike

I enjoy practicing law too much to even contemplate retiring, but I often think about engaging in serious study of the history of art, of the intricacies of classical music. I could write a fugue, or perhaps learn to play the cello. — Karen DeCrow

In every question and every remark tossed back and forth between lovers who have not played out the last fugue, there is one question and it is this: 'Is there someone new?' — Edna O'Brien

They might be drugs that alter the states of consciousness, or they might be states of transcendence reached in meditation. They might be moments of orgasm, or fugue states, or day-dreams that take you momentarily to a rewarding fantasy and escape from responsibility. All of these are treasures of the spirit or psyche that allow exploration along paths which are undefined and completely individual. — Alexander Shulgin

In the static mode an observer may unify the pieces of a puzzle, but only as a blueprint - kinetics add the third dimention of depth, and the fourth of history. The motion, however, must be on the human scale, which happens also to be that of birds, waves, and clouds. Were a bullet to be made sentient, it still would see or hear or smell or feel nothing in land or water or air except its target. So, too, with a passenger in any machine that goes faster than a Model A. As speed increases, reality thins and becomes at the pace of a jet airplane no more substantial than a computer readout.
Running suits a person who seeks to look inward, through a fugue of pain, to study the dark self. A person afraid of the dark had better walk - strenuous enough for the rhythm of the feet to pace those of heart and lungs, relaxed enough to let him look outward, through joy, to a bright creation. — Harvey Manning

Economic man and the Calvinist Christian sing to each other like voices in a fugue. The Calvinist stands alone before an almost merciless God ; no human agency can help him; his church is a means to political and social organization rather than a bridge to deity , for no priest can have greater knowledge of the divine way than he himself; no friend can console him in fact , he should distrust all men; in the same fashion, Economic Man faces a merciless world alone and unaided, his hand against every other's. — Lionel Trilling

Dude, you didn't fugue, you were just berserk. That's like comparing a lunatic to a pissed guy with goals. — Chris Onstad

Back to what? A guy who bails on you when you need him? What's Dane doing now that's more important than helping you? Fighting for the rights of endangered ferns?"
I stiffened and pushed away from him, irritation jolting me out of my fugue-state. "You have no right to judge Dane or my relationship with him."
Jack made a scoffing sound. "That half-assed excuse for a relationship was over the moment Dane told you not to bring the baby to Austin. You know what he should have said? ... 'Hell, yes, Ella, I'll stand by you no matter what you do. Shit happens. We'll make it work. Come home now and get in bed. — Lisa Kleypas

The blues are like the fugue in 18th century. It's probably the music that belongs most to our time. — Michael Tippett

The most uninteresting part of the biography of a composer is his childhood. All those preludes are the same and the reader hurries on to the fugue. — Dmitri Shostakovich

It is folly alone that stays the fugue of Youth and beats off touring Old Age. — Desiderius Erasmus

The history of knowledge is a great fugue in which the voices of the nations one after the other emerge. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

I can find something between sight and hearing and I can produce a fugue in colors as Bach has done in music. — Frantisek Kupka

Temporal experience is neither completely recurrent (in which case it would be wholly knowable) nor completely variable (in which case it would be wholly inscrutable). In effect, it is more like a piece of complex music, a Bach fugue heard for the first time. In one sense, we are excited and surprised by the novel disposition of tones and rhythms and by the uncanny variety of the treatment. In another sense, we realize that recurring ideas and cycles are what give the work its native character, and that the variations, however stunning, have significance only in terms of their relationship to these underlying themes. Conversely, the recurrent themes are realizable in their fullest sense only through the variations upon them. The careful student of time is thus as sure that certain things will recur as he is sure that they will recur in dazzling new forms. — Robert Grudin

In my own life I studied music, not creative writing; I see a novel as music - an opening as an overture, themes and subplots as lines in a fugue. The chance to write a novel about a musician boxed in by all kinds of limitations but who plays out his ultimate struggle for freedom at the piano was irresistible. — Nicole Mones

It's like a fugue of evaded responsibility. — David Foster Wallace

There is no kind of music I don't listen to. Everything good is interesting. I am as happy with a Bach fugue as I am with a record by Thelonious Monk. — Maira Kalman

She sank with an enormous sigh that carried all rigidity like a mythical fluid from her, down next to him; so weak she couldn't help him undress her; it took him 20 minutes, rolling, arranging her this way and that, as if she thought, he were some scaled-up, short-haired, poker-faced little girl with a Barbie doll. She may have fallen asleep once or twice. She awoke at last to find herself getting laid; she'd come in on a sexual crescendo in progress, like a cut to a scene where the camera's already moving. Outside a fugue of guitars had begun, and she counted each electronic voice as it came in, till she reached six or so and recalled only three of the Paranoids played guitars; so others must be plugging in. — Thomas Pynchon

And I believe that the Binomial Theorem and a Bach Fugue are, in the long run, more important than all the battles of history. — James Hilton

But music doesn't sum up my approach to literature - even in Vain Art of the Fugue. To 'fugue' I had to invent 'trap-words,' or words that would force the narrator to turn around and start his path anew. — Dumitru Tepeneag

It's one of those unpleasant opioid feverish half-sleep states, more a fugue-state than a sleep-state, less a floating than like being cast adrift on rough seas, tossed mightily in and out of this half-sleep where your mind's
still working and you can ask yourself whether you're asleep even as you dream. And any dreams you do have seem ragged at the edges, gnawed on, incomplete. — David Foster Wallace

Others, tiring of the sound of Buxtehude and Bach for hours on end, would complain there was no tune. That was exactly the thing he liked best about a fugue, the fact that it could not be sung. A fugue was not singular, as a melody was, but plural. It was a conversation. — Kate Grenville

A great piece of music is beautiful regardless of how it is performed. Any prelude or fugue of Bach can be played at any tempo, with or without rhythmic nuances, and it will still be great music. That's how music should be written, so that no-one, no matter how philistine, can ruin it. — Dmitri Shostakovich

Whatever comes under the heading of fugal form partakes in some way of the nature of a fugue. You already know, I feel sure, that in texture all fugues are polyphonic or contrapuntal (the terms are identical in meaning). Therefore, it follows that all fugal forms are polyphonic or contrapuntal in texture. — Aaron Copland

The worst constructed play is a Bach fugue when compared to life. — Helen Hayes

Identity confusion... is as if somebody lost their mental road map and has no appreciation of who they are or what is going on in their life. They may know they know but become blustered or baffled as to why they don't. The information is inaccessible and likely would remind a person about things that have gone on in their life that are simply unacceptable and unknowable, in a given moment, because of the emotional gravity involved. — Richard A Chefetz

It's a kind of fugue state, anyway, early sex. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Like the wild beasts, she lives without a future. She inhabits only the present tense, a fugue of the continuous, a world of sensual immediacy as without hope as it is without despair. — Angela Carter

Pray silence for the soloist. But let him be soon over, that we may hear the great striding fugue again. — Dorothy L. Sayers

No one ever told us we had to study our lives,make of our lives a study, as if learning natural historyor music, that we should beginwith the simple exercises firstand slowly go on tryingthe hard ones, practicing till strengthand accuracy became one with the daringto leap into transcendence, take the chance of breaking down in the wild arpeggioor faulting the full sentence of the fugue. — Adrienne Rich

You on the floor in a fugue state, me not knowing what to do. It's remarkable how high-functioning you are, for an insane person. I'm the only one who gets to see you on the floor. — Jonathan Franzen

My love of water ... is mingled with and almost indistinguishable from a fear of water (I can float in a vertical position - I enter a fugue state - but I cannot bear to bury my face in water). — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

To see the yellow fritillaries burst forth after the deep snows of winter and know that the bears are soon to follow is to be attentive to wild nature's seasonal fugue of infinite composition and succession. The great gray owl sitting on a snag near Sawmill Ponds is not simply a bird but a heightened intelligence with golden eyes behind a mask of feathers. — Terry Tempest Williams