Quotes & Sayings About Hearing Music

When I started making my own music, I was more about recreating what I was hearing. I noticed that I had some control over what I was saying, and the effects that it's going to have on people. I wanted to focus more on the positive side of things, which are more in tune with my morals and ethics. — Lupe Fiasco

HERE
It's-
Can I say?
It's like the song of a family where everything's always all right, it's a song of belonging that makes you belong just by hearing it, it's a song that'll always take care of you and never leave you. If you have a heart, it breaks, if you have a heart that's broken, it fixes. — Patrick Ness

They went forth to battle, but they always fell;
Their eyes were fixed above the sullen shields;
Nobly they fought and bravely, but not well,
And sank heart-wounded by a subtle spell.
They knew not fear that to the foeman yields,
They were not weak, as one who vainly wields
A futile weapon; yet the sad scrolls tell
How on the hard-fought field they always fell.
It was a secret music that they heard,
A sad sweet plea for pity and for peace;
And that which pierced the heart was but a word,
Though the white breast was red-lipped where the sword
Pressed a fierce cruel kiss, to put surcease
On its hot thirst, but drank a hot increase.
Ah, they by some strange troubling doubt were stirred,
And died for hearing what no foeman heard. — Shaemus O'Sheel

I didn't really hear any other music other than what my dad was working on until I was 12. My recollection of hearing other music was that I liked some things that I heard but I always thought, 'Where's the rest of it?' It didn't have the same amount of detail or instrumentation or imagination in the arrangements. — Dweezil Zappa

I never liked hearing anyone say I was the new George Gershwin, because I knew I could have never even carried that man's music case. If George Gershwin hadn't died when he was thirty-nine years old, there is no knowing how much more great music he would have written. — Burt Bacharach

Music may be called the sister of painting, for she is dependent upon hearing, the sense which comes second and her harmony is composed of the union of proportional parts sounded simultaneously, rising and falling in one or more harmonic rhythms. — Leonardo Da Vinci

That was my way, and I also use the music after five years, I started hearing opera, opera, it was very good instrument to keep the spirit very strong because you feel like you are yourself singing opera, and I used to hear a lot of opera, they send me tapes. — Mordechai Vanunu

The Indians long ago knew that music was going on permanently and that hearing it was like looking out a window at a landscape which didn't stop when one turned away. — John Cage

No cowboy songs, no hoedowns. It's a more serious piece. Yet every bar of 'Appalachian Spring' is clear, clean, tonal, intelligible - great music that anyone can grasp at first hearing. — Terry Teachout

I love hearing my music, I love hearing it by other people. I hope it will always be played. — Smokey Robinson

You can't quite believe what you are hearing - and it's not necessarily something that you can listen to all the time because it's too intense - but it changes the way you go about making music. — Daughn Gibson

Everybody comments that I'm white. I'm surprised I haven't gotten more criticism for it. I'm always expecting any day now it's gonna come. I guess I just attribute the lack of hate to people hearing the music and hearing how much I genuinely love it. — Mayer Hawthorne

I used to listen to music from the frosting down. As a word nerd, lyrics are really important to me, and then the melody. Playing in the Rock*A*Teens was the first time I ever heard music from the bottom up. I was hearing songs I'd heard a million times on oldies radio, and I'd be like, "Wow, listen to what the bass is doing!" When I was first singing in bands, I'd just get out there with my machete, wildly whacking away at the foliage. But you learn how to listen. When I feel I'm doing it right, it's 90% listening and 10% output. It's not "look what I can do!" — Kelly Hogan

I love hearing strong, confident beats in music because I love to dance. At the same time, melody is really important to me because I love singing. — Manika

I want to set the record straight for everybody who's been waiting to hear my music. The song that's on the internet is an incomplete song that I'm still working on. When it's ready, you'll be hearing it from me. — Dr. Dre

Both the Beatles and The Rolling Stones broke on the music scene the summer I was in England. I can vividly remember hearing She Loves You in August 1963. — Gordon Lightfoot

I made the big turnaround in the early Nineties when I started hearing all the tenth generation punk bands like Green Day and Offspring and all those people. It just made me fall in love with punk again and remember my roots, and since that time I've always wanted to do more of that kind of music again. — Jane Wiedlin

DEAFNESS DOESN'T PREVENT COMPOSERS HEARING THE MUSIC. IT PREVENTS THEM HEARING THE DISTRACTIONS. — Terry Pratchett

Those slight words and looks and touches are part of the soul's language; and the finest language, I believe, is chiefly made up of unimposing words, such as "light," "sound," "stars," "music" - words really not worth looking at, or hearing, in themselves, any more than "chips" or "sawdust." It is only that they happen to be the signs of something unspeakably great and beautiful. I am of opinion that love is a great and beautiful thing too, and if you agree with me, the smallest signs of it will not be chips and sawdust to you: they will rather be like those little words, "light" and "music," stirring the long-winding fibres of your memory and enriching your present with your most precious past. — George Eliot

The wonders of the music of the future will be of a higher & wider scale and will introduce many sounds that the human ear is now incapable of hearing. Among these new sounds will be the glorious music of angelic chorales. As men hear these they will cease to consider Angels as figments of their imagination. — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

I think in Baroque music, especially in the case of Bach, what really transformed Bach's musical language, what changed it for him was hearing Vivaldi, hearing the sort of manipulation of small cells of information and patterns in order to generate sort of huge blocks of harmony. — Mahan Esfahani

I probably won't be able to hear it until five years from now anyway. That's when I always hear my own music. It takes five years to sit down with it after not hearing it for a couple of years. — Alan Vega

There's still a lot of misogynist pop music out there, and I think that hearing something that's so explicitly feminist and so angry - when we're still growing up in a culture where girls and women are not supposed to be angry - is a real revelation for young women. — Kathleen Hanna

I was deeply impressed and moved by his masterful playing. He was highly polished, profound, subtle, and intense. He was extremely fluent in a great combination of the traditional vernacular with his own. Hearing it unfold and being in a position to participate was a great pleasure. Part of being an accompanist is that the stronger the soloist, the more I can do all that I know to do. So, Joe was as good as it gets. — Pete La Roca

Of course, I grew up hearing Latin music but, to be honest, aside from my personal circumstances, like most kids I wanted to rebel against what I considered to be such old fashioned fare. — Oscar Hijuelos

The same piece of music alters at each hearing. But oh, the need to repeat and repeat and repeat unchanged the sexual experience. — Ned Rorem

Then the voices of the Ainur, like unto harps and lutes, and pipes and trumpets, and viols and organs, and like unto countless choirs singing with words, began to fashipn the theme of Iluvatar to a great music; and a sound arose of endless interchanging melodies woven in harmony that passed beyond hearing into the depths and into the heights, and the places of the dwelling of Iluvatar were filled to overflowing, and the music and the echo of the music went out into the Void, and it was not void. — J.R.R. Tolkien

Private listening really took off in 1979, with the popularity of the Walkman portable cassette player. Listening to music on a Walkman is a variation of the "sitting very still in a concert hall" experience (there are no acoustic distractions), combined with the virtual space (achieved by adding reverb and echo to the vocals and instruments) that studio recording allows. With headphones on, you can hear and appreciate extreme detail and subtlety, and the lack of uncontrollable reverb inherent in hearing music in a live room means that rhythmic material survives beautifully and completely intact; it doesn't get blurred or turned into sonic mush as it often does in a concert hall. You, and only you, the audience of one, can hear a million tiny details, even with the compression that MP3 technology adds to recordings. You can hear the singer's breath intake, their fingers on a guitar string. That said, extreme and sudden dynamic changes can be painful on a personal music player. As — David Byrne

It was amazing to me that, all of a sudden, I was hearing my music on the radio and coming out of cars. — Lenny Kravitz

Concerts are never real music, you have to give up the idea of hearing in them all the most beautiful things of art. — Frederic Chopin

There is another peculiar satisfaction in really hearing someone: It is like listening to the music of the spheres, because beyond the immediate message of the person, no matter what that might be, there is the universal. Hidden in all of the personal communications which I really hear there seem to be orderly psychological laws, aspects of the same order we find in the universe as a whole. So there is both the satisfaction of hearing this person and also the satisfaction of feeling one's self in touch with what is universally true. — Carl Rogers

The hardest studio music to play is Tom & Jerry - cartoons. The music makes absolutely no sense, as music. You can't get into hearing it. There's nothing to hear-'bleep!, blop! scratch!' and it comes fast; everything's first take. That'll change the way you look at life. — Howard Roberts

I liked 'Z Cars' - just hearing the music got me going! 'Coronation Street' was massive in our house. My mum used to say Ena Sharples reminded her of Gran, which she wouldn't have been happy to hear! — Colin Salmon

What a lot of people don't understand is that the music that they're hearing is usually months, and in some cases, years old. So I'm a lot better than whatever material people have been hearing. — JD Era

I have terrible hearing trouble. I have unwittingly helped to invent and refine a type of music that makes its principal proponents deaf. — Pete Townshend

I don't get to listen to music for fun very often; a lot of what I'm hearing is for work and isn't released yet. — John Legend

The first choral music I remember hearing was Handel's 'Messiah' when the Mormon Tabernacle Choir broadcast it over the radio. — Dave Brubeck

Then they, too, lay down on mattresses stuffed with straw, hearing the music of the flies to buzz them to sleep, holding each other's hands as they dozed, thinking of the miracles by which love works its will in the world. — Orson Scott Card

The music was more than music- at least what we are used to hearing. The music was feeling itself. The sound connected instantly with something deep and joyous. Those powerful moments of true knowledge that we have to paper over with daily life. The music tapped the back of our terrors, too. Things we'd lived through and didn't want to ever repeat. Shredded imaginings, unadmitted longings, fear and also surprisingly pleasures. No, we can't live at that pitch. But every so often something shatters like ice and we are in the river of our existence. We are aware. And this realization was in the music, somehow, or in the way Shamengwa played it. — Louise Erdrich

I've been changed watching films or reading books or hearing music, and that helps you to live your life. — Juliette Binoche

Hearing things like 'Wake Up' by Lora Logic, or the Raincoats' 'In Love' - that was something I wasn't prepared for. I couldn't hear anything that came before it in the music, and I didn't want to. I was absolutely in love with its out-of-nowhereness. — Greil Marcus

He dialed the number that Health Partners had listed in their contact information. A pleasant southern voice answered, but Baldwin quickly realized it was voice mail. Damn, he was hoping to get a secretary. The voice gave him the option of hitting zero to speak to a live person, and he did just that. Muzak drifted out from his earpiece and he rolled his eyes. There was just something so wrong about hearing synthesized Aerosmith. "Dude (Looks Like A Lady)" just didn't work in the dulcet tones of elevator music. After — J.T. Ellison

There's nothing better than making music and hearing 3,000 people chant, 'Afrojack! Afrojack!' — Afrojack

I have this image in my head of me in the house I grew up in, and hearing this incredible music on the television show, going over to it, and there's Jon Hendricks, Dave Lambert, and Annie Ross. It knocked me out of my socks, and I'm still in flight. — Al Jarreau

Hendrix was back there with a few of the others who were like my training wheels ... hearing him as a teenager taught me to look at the guitar in a different way - and how to tap into that thing inside of me that was already leaning toward improvisation. You learn other players' licks at first; then you take off the training wheels and start using the licks as building blocks to make your own thing. That's how influences work. somewhere in whatever I do, there's a little bit of Hendrix - plus about a hundred others — Junior Brown

Dante Alighieri is a universal poet, and great creators, they are writing for everybody always. Every single verse is very moving, and the beauty - if we don't understand, we just stay listening to the sound and it's like hearing music. — Roberto Benigni

This guy! I plead the fifth. This guy is nuts."
- Eminem
"Dope questions, man. Very insightful, very thoughtful."
- Guru (Gang Starr)
"You like a Psychiatrist or some shit? This shit is just coming out but go ahead."
- Mary J. Blige
"Definitely a real interview! Digging deep up in there, man. Not afraid to ask questions!"
- K-Ci Hailey (Jodeci)
"The Wizard asked me for a copy of your magazine."
- Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo (Daft Punk)
"You didn't wear your glasses and you haven't carried your hearing aid. What else is wrong with you?"
- Bushwick Bill
"Peace and blessing, Brother Harris. Thank you for inspiring my words. Keep 'yo balance."
- Erykah Badu
"Can I see that pen?"
- Bobby Brown
"What else do you want to know? Talk to me."
- Aaliyah — Harris Rosen

If you play "I Don't Want To Know" by Fleetwood Mac loud enough
you can hear Lindsey Buckingham's fingers sliding down the strings of his acoustic guitar ... And we were convinced that this was the definitive illustration of what we both loved about music; we loved hearing the INSIDE of a song. — Chuck Klosterman

And now above and beyond the birds' song, Andy hears a more distant singing, whether of voices or instruments, sounds or words, he cannot tell. It is at first faint, and then stronger, filling the sky and touching the ground, and the birds answer it. He understands presently that he is hearing the light; he is hearing the sun, which now has risen, though from the valley it is not yet visible. The light's music resounds and shines in the air and over the countryside, drawing everything into the infinite, sensed but mysterious pattern of its harmony. From every tree and leaf, grass blade, stone, bird, and beast, it is answered and again answers. The creatures sing back their names. But more than their names. They sing their being. The world sings. The sky sings back. It is one song, the song of the many members of one love, the whole song sung and to be sung, resounding, in each of its moments. And it is light. — Wendell Berry

I suppose you are not musical,' said Fanny, 'as I see no piano.'
'I am fond of hearing good music; I cannot play well myself; and papa and mamma don't care much about it; so we sold our old piano when we came here.'
'I wonder how you can exist without one. It almost seems to me a necessary of life. — Elizabeth Gaskell

Unlike seeing, where one can look away, one cannot 'hear away' but must listen ... hearing implies already belonging together in such a manner that one is claimed by what is being said. — Hans-Georg Gadamer

Listening to them make music together was like hearing long-lost lovers find one another. — Emigh Cannaday

It grabs me, but not as much as it grabs some of the other people that rave about them. With the Black Keys, I'm missing crescendos with the sax, keyboard or guitar solo. It never comes to me. All my favorite music is rife with crescendo and I'm not hearing enough with them. If you can get the Black Keys to hear this, tell them I offer my crescendo guitar anytime they desire it. — Ted Nugent

Music could do that, create a magical oasis where nothing else mattered except hearing the next line of the score. — Elizabeth Camden

It is my hope that during my brief passage through this universe, that I may share with you the joy of hearing the music of the stars ... knowing that the composer was from a distant place and the songs were written eons ago, which now fall gently on this place for all to hear. — Richard H. Baker

Formalism is music that people don't understand at first hearing. — Sergei Prokofiev

I was sure the old man knew nothing about the beatitudes, ecstasies, dazzling reverberations of sexual encounters. Cut out the poetry was his message. Clinical sex, deprived of all the warmth of love - the orchestration of all the senses, touch, hearing, sight, palate; all the euphoric accompaniments, back-ground music, moods, atmosphere, variations - forced him to resort to literary aphrodisiacs. — Anais Nin

Without silence there is no music. Not simply because the faculty of hearing deteriorates from constant exposure to noise, but because silence is both the majestic frame and the stable solution for musical (and poetic) ideas. Silence is the soda water, the bracing ether, the bridge and mode of respect for receiving instructions from the angel. — Russell Sherman

Hip hop music is important precisely because it sheds light on contemporary politics, history, and race. At its best, hip hop gives voice to marginal black youth we are not used to hearing from on such topics. — Michael Eric Dyson

Alice thought, No. It wasn't the War and the disgruntled veterans; it wasn't the droves and droves of colored people flocking to paychecks and streets full of themselves. It was the music. The dirty, get-on-down music the women sang and the men played and both danced to, close and shamelesss or apart and wild ... It made you do unwise disorderly things. Just hearing it was like violating the law. — Toni Morrison

Tate always loved the rain. She came alive in it, and I hadn't been able to enjoy seeing her like this in years. Part of me always wondered what magic she saw in thunderstorms, and part of me didn't need to know. Just watching her was like hearing music in my head. — Penelope Douglas

To listen fully means to pay close attention to what is being said beneath the words. You listen not only to the 'music,' but to the essence of the person speaking. You listen not only for what someone knows, but for what he or she is. Ears operate at the speed of sound, which is far slower than the speed of light the eyes take in. Generative listening is the art of developing deeper silences in yourself, so you can slow our mind's hearing to your ears' natural speed, and hear beneath the words to their meaning. — Peter Senge

You see, to me, the art of music is listening to it, not playing it. The real art of it is hearing it. — Keith Richards

My ears hear colors and my eyes see sounds. — Suzy Kassem

For some young people, their first experience ever hearing punk rock music was playing the Green Bay Packers on 'Madden'. — Billie Joe Armstrong

I never get enough of the adrenaline rush of hearing good music played live and played loud like this. Hearing these songs again snatches me out of the day-to-day and helps me forget all the things I usually waste my time worrying about. As long as the music's playing I don't have to do anything except listen, relax, and enjoy myself. — David Moody

On my hike my brain was left to wander. That was often maddening because it was tedious and monotonous sometimes, but then my the mind would take over, and that's when I'd start hearing the music in my head or thinking deeply about people I know or things that I didn't even know I remembered anymore. Those thoughts would be there. I wouldn't have had them otherwise. — Cheryl Strayed

My musical life started with hearing and being fascinated by contemporary music. — Elliott Carter

When you hear the elephant music you're hearing what they mean to make. — Dave Soldier

I really enjoy writing lyrics, I enjoy harmonies and I enjoy hearing the organic side of production because I have to do so much non- organic for a living for other artists, it's just a break for me, for my ears and it confuses people that think my music is supposed to sound like the stuff I do for my day job, but that's just people that don't know me. — Butch Walker

Musick is certainly a very agreeable Entertainment, but if it would take the entire Possession of our Ears, if it would make us incapable of hearing Sense, if it would exclude Arts that have a much greater Tendency to the Refinement of human Nature; I must confess I would allow it no better Quarter than Plato has done, who banishes it out of his Common-wealth. — Joseph Addison

Evidently neither cats nor dogs, nor other animals that listen to human music, were constituted for the appreciation of it, for it is not of the slightest use to them in the struggle for existence. Moreover, they and their organs of hearing were much older than man and his music. Their power of appreciating music is therefore an uncontemplated side-faculty of a hearing apparatus which has become on other grounds what we find it to be. So it is, I believe, with man. He has not acquired his musical hearing as such, but has received a highly developed organ of hearing by a process of selection, because it was necessary to him in the selective process ; and this organ of hearing happens also to be adapted to listening to music. — August Weismann

We are taught to think ourselves ugly. Eyes are an assaulted sense. We are taught to behave by spankings and whippings. Touch is an assaulted sense. We are taught we should not smell, or we smell wrong. Smell is an assaulted sense. We listen to songs that call us 'hos and tell us how to give blow jobs. Hearing is an assaulted sense. Taste, not so much. — Alice Randall

I've spent my life hearing people trying to apologize for music. — Mike Figgis

People get to a certain age and success that they stop being curious. I'm still curious because I haven't really had that success. I've never done a record to catch whatever the latest sound is. It's my love of music, eclectic-ness, and the music that I heard my entire life that seeps in. That's what you're hearing. — Jill Sobule

Social media has been an incredible tool to connect to my fan base, and collaborate with people around the world. Some of my biggest breaks have come through people hearing my music on the Internet and then contacting me through social media. — Wendy Starland

Because wanton or venal lips has murmured the same words to him, he only half believed in the sincerity of those he was hearing now; to a large extent they should be disregarded, he believed, because such exaggerated language must surely mask commonplace feelings: as if the soul in its fullness did not sometimes overflow into the most barren metaphors, since no one can ever tell the precise measures of his own needs, of his own ideas, of his own pain, and human language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when what we long to do is make music that will move the stars to pity. — Gustave Flaubert

Beethoven was just music, and it didn't matter if he could hear it or not - he could feel it. He could hear it in his mind. He could write it down hearing it in his mind. He was just music. Yeah, he's one of my favorite writers of all times. — Smokey Robinson

What motivates it is life. Life is everything. Life influences my music and brings it forth. Life is always changing, so I'm always hearing new music. — Lenny Kravitz

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

Nothing is accomplished by writing a piece of music
nothing is accomplished by hearing a piece of music
nothing is accomplished by playing a piece of music
our ears are now in excellent condition. — John Cage

I is sometimes hearing faraway music coming from the stars in the sky.' A — Roald Dahl

There was a lot that was tricky about playing with [Thelonious Monk]. It's a musical language where there's really no lyrics. It's something you feel and you're hearing. It's like an ongoing conversation. You really had to listen to this guy. Cause he could play the strangest tempos, and they could be very in-between tempos on some of those compositions. You really had to listen to his arrangements and the way he would play them. On his solos, you'd really have to listen good in there. You'd have to concentrate on what you were doing as well. — Roy Haynes

We should get into the habit of reading inspirational books, looking at inspirational pictures, hearing inspirational music, associating with inspirational friends. — Alfred Armand Montapert

Mary's Song

Blue homespun and the bend of my breast
keep warm this small hot naked star
fallen to my arms. (Rest...
you who have had so far
to come.) Now nearness satisfies
the body of God sweetly. Quiet he lies
whose vigor hurled
a universe. He sleeps
whose eyelids have not closed before.
His breath (so slight it seems
no breath at all) once ruffled the dark deeps
to sprout a world.
Charmed by doves' voices, the whisper of straw,
he dreams,
hearing no music from his other spheres.
Breath, mouth, ears, eyes
he is curtailed
who overflowed all skies,
all years.
Older than eternity, now he
is new. Now native to earth as I am, nailed
to my poor planet, caught that I might be free,
blind in my womb to know my darkness ended,
brought to this birth
for me to be new-born,
and for him to see me mended
I must seen him torn. — Luci Shaw

I felt like hip-hop was my music, it was like my outsider music ... but then my mom started answering our phone, 'Yo, what's up.' She was hearing me talk to my friends. I was like, 'No, mom, don't cop the hip-hop talk.' — Jenny Lewis

If you're not hearing the music of the gospel in your home, please remember these two words: keep practicing. — Wilford W. Andersen

I'm always hearing music in terms of what I can take out of it, and I think I've always listened like that. I have a hard time just listening for pleasure. I'm much less about instinct, and more of a utilitarian listener. — Sufjan Stevens

Gina was beautiful like a sunset. You see it and you think of how beautiful it is, and then it's over and you move on. But Trista was beautiful like a song. The kind of song you play over and over and never get sick of hearing. The kind of song he wanted to write for her, but he knew he would never be able to string together the right combination of notes to show her how he really felt. — Christopher Stocking

Hearing Andres Segovia in person was quite a revelation ... It was a knockout ... — Julian Bream

If you look at a dancer in silence, his or her body will be the music. If you turn the music on, that body will become an extension of what you're hearing. — Judith Jamison

Do not underestimate the human being, who sometimes appears so simple. Even with sight as sharp as an eagle, a mind as sharp as a razor, senses more powerful than gods, hearing that can catch the music and the lamentations of life, your knowledge of humanity will never be total. — Pramoedya Ananta Toer

I start really missing London when I go away. I have a little flat, but very central. I live above a pub and you'd think it'd be a nightmare, but I like hearing the music and it's quite comforting. — Ellie Goulding

Music is the one art we all have inside. We may not be able to play an instrument, but we can sing along or clap or tap our feet. Have you ever seen a baby bouncing up and down in the crib in time to some music? When you think of it, some of that baby's first messages from his or her parents may have been lullabies, or at least the music of their speaking voices. All of us have had the experience of hearing a tune from childhood and having that melody evoke a memory or a feeling. The music we hear early on tends to stay with us all our lives. — Fred Rogers

Technology has altered the way music sounds, how it's composed and how we experience it. It has also flooded the world with music. The world is awash with (mostly) recorded sounds. We used to have to pay for music or make it ourselves; playing, hearing and experiencing it was exceptional, a rare and special experience. Now hearing it is ubiquitous, and silence is the rarity that we pay for and savor. — David Byrne

I love playing out. I love dance music, I love minimal electro. Especially hearing that in clubs, it's a nod to that really. — Andy Bell

I realized a lot of my friends were going to nightclubs and listening to house music. I was hanging out with them and going to clubs as well but I didn't really understand that kind of music. I was listening to country music and was heavily into Hank Williams, bluegrass, and Bob Dylan. So I just decided I really needed to understand what this music I was hearing in the clubs was all about. — Hans-Peter Lindstrom

Life isn't so much that we are seeking God (whether earnestly, sporadically, desperately, or not at all), but rather that God is already here with a steady lamp in the dark, searching for us. Life isn't how we stumble about trying to do no harm while we make occasional, feeble lurches at loving one another. Life is what God is doing within us and among us, nonstop-and it's not a death march, it's a dance. Life is about hearing this music and getting in step. — Marilyn Lacey

Everything freezes. The blood stops flowing in my veins. My breath stops coming. For a second even the music falls aways and all I hear is something steady and quiet and pretty, like the distant beat of a drum, and I think, i'm hearing my heart, except I know that's impossible, because my heart has stopped too. — Lauren Oliver

At Bob Dylan's induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988, Bruce Springsteen described hearing Dylan's music for the very first time. Springsteen was fifteen, he said, riding in the car with his mother, idly listening to the radio, when "Like a Rolling Stone" came on. It was as though, Springsteen recalled, "somebody took his boot and kicked open the door to your mind." His mother's verdict: "That man can't sing." Mrs. Springsteen's response reminds us that we don't all react the same way to the same experience - and her son's reminds us that life holds moments when our perspective dramatically shifts, when our assumptions are deeply challenged, when we see new possibilities or sense for the first time that whatever has been holding us back from freedom or creativity or new ventures might actually be overcome. There — Sharon Salzberg