Music In Life Quotes & Sayings

Didn't know anyone could see it," Samuel said. "You know, Lee, I think of my life as a kind of music, not always good music but still having form and melody. And my life has not been a full orchestra for a long time now. A single note only - and that note unchanging sorrow. I'm not alone in my attitude, Lee. It seems to me that too many of us conceive of a life as ending in defeat. — John Steinbeck

I'm sure we all have dreams of leaving at some time in our lives, but when we reach the bottom, most of us go running home. — Deborah Curtis

People clutch onto each other, but the orchestra plays on, because when everything else in life fails, there still has to be music — Anonymous

Sri Chinmoy was a once in a lifetime spiritual leader who touched the lives of millions of people through his teachings, art, athletics, and music. He was a student of peace and he embodied peace. Sri Chinmoy was a great man and his life's work significantly helped to build world harmony and will continue to do so. — Al Gore

Another important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy. In the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, hearkening to its deepest rhythms, so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience, whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, examining an idea. That self-connection shared is a measure of the joy which I know myself to be capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for feeling. And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible, and does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife. — Audre Lorde

Making a record is a lot like surgery without an anesthetic. You first have to cut yourself up the middle. Then you have to rip out every single organ, every single part and lay them on a table. You then need to examine the parts, and the reality of the situation hits you. You find yourself saying things like "I didn't know that part was so ugly." Or "I better get a professional opinion about that." You go to bed hollow and then back into the operating room the next day ... facing every fear, every disgusting thing you hate about yourself. Then you pop it all back in, sew yourself shut and perform ... you perform like your life depended on it
and in those perfect moments you find beauty you never knew existed. You find yourself and you friends all over again, you find something to fight for, something to love. Something to show the world. — Gerard Way

It is in the face of all this visual chaos, so opposed to order and simplicity, that I suddenly, perhaps a little guiltily, recall my vow to simplify my life. When I made that promise I had in mind the image of the ancient Greek subsisting on a fragment of pungent cheese, coarse bread, a handful of sun-warmed olives, a little watered wine; a man who discussed the Good, the True, the Beautiful with grave delight, and piped clear music in a sylvan glade. But I feel the absence of hills clothed in myrtle and thyme; of the Great Mother, Homer's wine-dark sea. Good resolutions, it seems, require good scenery. — Guy Vanderhaeghe

I want to continue to produce film, television, and theater, and to make the most amazing music that I've made in my life. — Alicia Keys

And me, I've got to start all over. Not only build a new life, but construct a new person. I call my old self "that other guy," for I share nothing but his memories, and everything he ever liked I've had to discover all over again, one by one, so that I've held on to, for example, reading, motorcycling, and birdwatching, but I'm not yet sure about art or music (I can look at it or listen to it, but not with the same "engagement" I used to), and I have no interest in work, charity, world events, or anybody I don't know. In my present gypsy life, I encounter a lot of people every day, and some of them I instinctively like and respond to in a brief encounter at a gas station or small-town diner, but for the most part I look around at ugly and mean-spirited people and think, "Why are you alive? — Neil Peart

I started producing in 1992 at the age of 15, when I found out music could be made with the help of a computer. I come from a musical family, but was always the family member not as good as the others. So once I found out I could release the music that was stuck inside my head through a computer, I knew I found what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. — Laidback Luke

A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one's neighbor - such is my idea of happiness. — Leo Tolstoy

Music is where I feel loved. Past, present. Music is where I give love. Why do I continue to enter rooms of strangers who are suffering, dying, cursing, diminished, unwashed? Because of love. I don't see hollow faces, blank stares, decaying bodies. I see the faces of God in these human beings. Precious people with stories, contributions, presence. Music pays tribute to their lives, often coaxes out their life stories, gives them worth, but most of all loves them when they are lost, weak, vulnerable. — Robin Russell Gaiser

Oh, the world needs those standing on the Bridge, For they know how Eternity reaches to earth In the wind that brings music to the leaves Of the forest: in the drops of rain that caress The sleeping life of the desert: in the sunbeams Of the first spring day in an alpine meadow. Only they can blow the dust from the seeing eyes Of those who are blind. — Jane Goodall

How great musicians demonstrate a mutual respect and trust on the bandstand can alter your outlook on the world and enrich every aspect of your life, understanding what it means to be a global citizen in the most modern sense. — Wynton Marsalis

Because ... most of us think that the point is something to do with work, or kids, or family, or whatever. But you don't have any of that. There's nothing between you and despair, and you don't seem a very desperate person.'
'Too stupid.'
'You're not stupid. So why don't you ever put your head in the oven?'
'I don't know. There's always a new Nirvana album to look forward to, or something happening in NYPD Blue to make you want to watch the next episode.'
'Exactly.'
'That's the point? NYPD Blue? Jesus.' It was worse than he thought.
'No, no. The point is you keep going. You want to. So all the things that make you want to are the point. I don't know if you even realize it, but on the quiet you don't think life's too bad. You love things. Telly. Music. Food. — Nick Hornby

I think people are complacent about sound, because we're so limited by the textures and timbres we hear in music, but in our everyday life we hear the most incredible things. — Herbert

For the virtuoso, musical works are in fact nothing but tragic and moving materializations of his emotions; he is called upon to make them speak, weep, sing and sigh, to recreate them in accordance with his own consciousness. In this way he, like the composer, is a creator, for he must have within himself those passions that he wishes to bring so intensely to life. — Franz Liszt

Pain is a part of life. Sometimes it's a big part, and sometimes it isn't, but either way, it's part of the big puzzle, the deep music, the great game. Pain does two things: it teaches you, tells you that you're alive. Then it passes away and leaves you changed. It leaves you wiser, sometimes. Sometimes it leaves you stronger. Either way, pain leaves its mark, and everything important that will ever happen to you in life is going to involve it to one degree or another.
(Harry Dresden's internal monologue in White Knight) — Jim Butcher

We need music the most when we're feeling things really intensely. I think the most intense times in your life are when you're either falling in love or losing it — Taylor Swift

For me life is an inn where I must stay until the carriage from the abyss calls to collect me [ ... ] I could consider this inn to be a prison, since I'm compelled to stay here; I could consider it a kind of club, because I meet other people here. However, unlike others, I am neither impatient nor sociable. I leave those who chatter in the living room, from where the cosy sound of music and voices reaches me. I sit at the door and fill my eyes and ears with the colours and sounds of the landscape and slowly, just for myself, I sing vague songs that I compose while I wait.
Night will fall on all of us and the carriage will arrive. I enjoy the breeze given to me and the soul given to me to enjoy it and I ask no more questions, look no further. If what I leave written in the visitors' book is one day read by others and entertains them on their journey, that's fine. If no one reads it or is entertained by it, that's fine too. — Fernando Pessoa

Singing is just another outlet to express what I feel and to show everyone who I really am. I really don't talk about my personal life that much in interviews because that's my life, but with music, the way I write explains who I am. — Raven-Symone

Music is like medicine. It can bring relief to the aches and stressful situations that life brings. We live in a world of music. There is sound and rhythm everywhere we go! — Ellen J. Barrier

I know that Dad was an idol to millions who grew up loving his music and his ideals. But to me he wasn't a musician or a peace icon, he was the father I loved and who let me down in so many ways. After the age of five, when my parents separated, I saw him only a handful of times, and when I did he was often remote and intimidating. I grew up longing for more contact with him but felt rejected and unimportant in his life.
... While Dad was fast becoming one of the wealthiest men in his field, Mum and I had very little and she was going out to work to support us. — Julian Lennon

Sometimes it's difficult because you like some regularity in your life, but never knowing who's gonna pop up at what show, what person you might see that you don't expect to see in that city, what problem you're gonna have that night, even the problems at some of these venues, if you look at them the right way, it's an adventure. You're like a cowboy. That's the best part about being in the music industry. You get your gun and you ride your horse. — Colin Munroe

Music, to me, was - is - representative of everything I like most in life. It's beautiful and fun, but very rigorous. If you wanted to be good you had to work like crazy. It was a real relationship between effort and reward. My musical life experiences were just as important to me, in terms of forming my development, as my political experiences or my academic life. — William J. Clinton

Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river?
Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air -
An armful of white blossoms,
A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,
Biting the air with its black beak?
Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
A shrill dark music - like the rain pelting the trees - like a waterfall
Knifing down the black ledges?
And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds -
A white cross Streaming across the sky, its feet
Like black leaves, its wings Like the stretching light of the river?
And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life? — Mary Oliver

One might be tempted to think that the many slights and rejections we scientists must suffer are somehow a necessary part of our education. But I don't think that way anymore. My experience with the music business has taught me to cherish every bit of feedback I can get, and not to think of the hundreds of unreturned phone calls or ignored pitches I must face as signs of personal failings. It was this change of perspective,
and the pressure it removed from my life, that first made me want to try systematically applying what I learned in the music business to the world of science. — Marc J. Kuchner

If arts and music, precious gifts in themselves, were akin to memory, literature was the self-knowing of the species; the human mind accumulated, a manifest of wisdom and knowledge, self-doubt and awareness, folly and foible, all transmitted through the generations. Books amplified the light of mind, reinforced the soul. — Mark Cantrell

I would be a huge hypocrite if I didn't tell you that at one time in my life I thought the way that you made music was you got on a major label and you got famous. — Neko Case

Music lives within thy lips Like a nightingale in roses. — Philip James Bailey

The only reward the musician receives is music: The privilege of standing in the presence of music when it leans over and takes unto its confidence. As it is for the audience. In this moment everything else is irrelevant and without power. For those in music, this is the moment when life becomes unreal. — Robert Fripp

Many people learn how to talk, but they don't learn how to listen. Listening to one another is an important thing in life. And music tells us how to do that. — Claudio Abbado

To hear people saying, 'The music you are doing has really touched my life and it's moved me in a lot of ways. It's helped me get through some tough times.' That's the best compliment that you could get. — Kip Moore

My heart lies in music and acting, however, my inspiration comes from adrenaline rush I get from sports ... and life. — Alexander Ludwig

I dabbled in things like Howlin' Wolf, Cream and Led Zeppelin, but when I heard Son House and Robert Johnson, it blew my mind. It was something I'd been missing my whole life. That music made me discard everything else and just get down to the soul and honesty of the blues. — Jack White

Rhode Island has become a second home to me after being involved in its cultural life for over 61 years. I look upon it as a privilege to be inducted into the Rhode Island Music Hall of Fame. — George Wein

And they spoke of their Antigonie, who they called Go, as if she were a friend.
Leo hadn't yet written any music, but he had made drawings on butcher paper stolen from the kitchen. They curled around his walls, intricate doodles, extensions of the boy's own lean, slight body. The shape of Leo's jaw in profile, devestating. The way he gnawed his fingernails to the crescents, the fine shining hairs down the center of his nape, the smell of him, up close, pure and clean, bleaching.
The ones made for music are the most beloved of all. Their bodies a container for the spirit within; the best of them is music, the rest only instrument of flesh and bone.
The weather conspired. Snow fell softly in the windows. It was too cold to be out for long. The world colorless, a dreamscape, a blank page, the linger of woodsmoke on the back of the tongue. — Lauren Groff

Music is one of the most essential things in life. It is what teaches us. — Ziggy Marley

I enjoy being happy every day, and hopefully you can hear my happiness in my music. Life is beautiful. — Christina Milian

In my music and my life, I'm honest with my feelings, and people appreciate that. That's just the way I am. — La India

If literature or music can make you think or become aware, then it's done something. That's what we've always wanted to do, just ignite sparks in people's minds. We can't offer a manifesto of how to make your life better. — Nicky Wire

Music and songs are written at different periods of time, at different times in your life. They reflect the feelings you have and to be honest, I quite like having positive emotions. — Scott Ian

My music touches on things I am concerned with in my own life - the idea of a woman's role in society, sexuality, desire, monogamy, fantasy and glamour. That's what keeps me alive, and if I couldn't keep creating that, I'd fall into a bit of heap. — Jane Badler

But, on the other hand, the study of music is one of the best ways to learn about human nature. This is why I am so sad about music education being practically nonexistent today in schools. Education means preparing children for adult life; teaching them how to behave and what kinds of human beings they want to be. Everything else is information and can be learned in a very simple way. To play music well you need to strike a balance between your head, your heart, and your stomach. And if one of the three is not there or is there in too strong a dose, you cannot use it. What better way than music to show a child how to be human? — Edward W. Said

What will happen when my heart stops beating?" Momo asked.
When that moment comes," said the professor, "time will stop for you as well. Or rather, you will retrace your steps through time, through all the days and nights, myths and years of your life, until you go out through the great, round, silver gate you entered by."
What will I find on the other side?"
The home of the music you've sometimes faintly heard in the distance, but by then you'll be part of it. You yourself will be a note in its mighty harmonies. — Michael Ende

Life in New Orleans is all about making the present--this moment, right now--as pleasant as possible. So New Orleanians, by and large, aren't tortured by the frenzy to achieve, acquire, and manage the unmanageable future. Their days are built around the things that other Americans have pushed out of their lives by incessant work: art, music, elaborate cooking, and--most of all--plenty of relaxed time with family and friends. Their jobs are really just the things they do to earn a little money; they're not the organiing principle of life. While this isn't a worldview particularly conducive to getting things done, getting things done isn't the most important thing in New Orleans. Living life is. Once you've tasted that, and especially if it's how you grew up, life everywhere else feels thin indeed. — Dan Baum

If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape. — Ray Bradbury

People need heroes, in music and every aspect of life. — Vittorio Grigolo

Usually horror in your personal life can translate into some good music. Sometimes. Sometimes it can be really maudlin and boring, and kind of personal. — Bob Schneider

Music is either sacred or profane. What is sacred accords completely with its nobility, and this is where music most immediately influences life; such influence remains unchanged at all times and in every epoch. Profane music should be altogether cheerful.
Music of a kind that mixes the sacred with the profane is godless and shoddy music wich goes in for expressing feeble, wretched, deplorable feelings, and is just insipid. For it is not serious enough to be sacred and it lacks the chief quality of the opposite kind: cheerfulness. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

I pass for a hypersensitive, reclusive neurotic, which I may well be, but I hope the year won't come when my anxieties and fatigue will destroy my love of this life, of all the things that inspire me
a line of music, a face in a Vermeer portrait, a character in an opera, or a model born in Harlem. — Yves Saint-Laurent

You take a deep breath and you walk through the doors. It's the morning of your very first day. You say hi to your friends you ain't seen in a while, try and stay out of everybody's way. It's your freshman year and your gonna be here for the next four years in this town. Hopin' one of those senior boys will wink at you and say, "You know I haven't seen you around before." 'Cause when you're fifteen and somebody tells you they love you, you're gonna believe them. And when you're fifteen, feelin' like there's nothin' to figure out, but, count to ten, take it in. This is life before you know who you're gonna be. Fifteen. — Taylor Swift

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

Another guitar player who had a tremendous influence on my life was Howard Roberts ... I'd listened to a lot of Tal Farlow, Johnny Smith and Kenny Burrell, and I was certainly into those guys, but I was awestruck at the intensity and fire in Howards' guitar playing ... for me, it became a roadmap ... — Jeff Baxter

But I couldn't block out the sound of his voice. "Hayden wasn't the son I expected to have," he said. "I'd imagined playing catch in the yard, watching football on the weekends, going fishing. The things I'd done with my dad; the things I do with Ryan. It was the only kind of relationship I knew how to have with a son." His voice cracked. "But my second son didn't enjoy any of those things. He loved music and video games and computers. I didn't know how to talk to him. And now I'll spend the rest of my life wishing I'd learned how." He lowered his head, as if he were trying to hide the fact that he was crying. — Michelle Falkoff

I grew up with music very much in my life. I achieved success by combining my training as an accountant with my family upbringing and love of music. — Zarin Mehta

My passion in life, besides my family, was always music. From the time I was a kid, I was obsessed. I'm like the ultimate fan. — John Varvatos

Of course, if Saint Peter could come out today upon these streets below he would find all he could wish, voices from nowhere, music from unpopulated boxes, men ascending divine distances in gas balloons, and traveling at the speed of sound, apparitions from nowhere appear on the screen; the sick are raised from the dead, life is prolonged so that every detail of pain may be relished, the blind are given eyes and the cripples forced to walk, and there is an item which can blow a city of the beloved enemy into a place where their sins will be brought home to them, with of course as much noise as the trumpets on the walls of Jericho — William Gaddis

I played a lot of music all throughout my life, actually, but in high school I was in marching band and all the bands. So, I was big into music, I was big into drawing and sculpture, and all these different things. — Kirsten Lepore

Being a working mother is not easy, but I think it helps you choose what's important in your life. If I think about starting a new project
whether it be music, a movie or a fragrance
I always stop and think: Is this something I feel really passionate about? That way, if I'm not at home at least it's for something I really love, and my son can look up to that. — Christina Aguilera

In my life, looking at other women who have been pregnant while writing, I always feel like it's kind of their most musical or the closest to themselves. I think for me it's such a validating moment, you know. I always knew I wanted to have kids, and I've been making music all my life. — Kelis

I don't live in as much fear as I used to. I'm not afraid of the music business. Life is too damn short. I know what's important, and the tasks are very clear. — Kathy Mattea

It's very strange what happens when I start working for a film. In my life I've done a lot of stuff - I did a lot of dance music, a lot of TV shows and lots of different types of films - and every time it is a new experience. — Claudio Simonetti

A true believer may worship Jehovah, Allah, or Brahma, the supernatural beings who allegedly created all life; a true believer may slavishly adhere to a dogma designed theoretically to improve life; yet for life itself - its pleasures, wonders, and delights - he or she holds minimal regard. Music, chess, wine, card games, attractive clothing, dancing, meditation, kites, perfume, marijuana, flirting, soccer, cheeseburgers, any expression of beauty, and any recognition of genius or individual excellence: each of those things has been severely condemned and even outlawed by one cadre of true believers or another in modern times. — Tom Robbins

Ambition is a dream with a V8 engine. Ain't nowhere else in the world where you can go from driving a truck to cadillac overnight — Elvis Presley

Strange, how such a small realization can affect everyone's life forever. In movies there is always a carefully staged moment - a big crescendo of music, close- ups of the actors' faces, the camera slowly pulling away to let all this sink in for the viewer ... but, in real life, most all of the extraordinary things happen with no more loudness than a whisper. — Silas House

I've worked since I was 11 years old, playing music and following the dream, and shaking and moving and doing it. And then, you have cancer and it was like 'Ooooohh.' It was like a big eraser. It was the only thing in my life that had ever made me just stop. — Melissa Etheridge

He never understood why she chose him. She loved abstract things like music and books and strange words. Ove was a man filled entirely with tangible things. He liked screwdrivers and oil filters. He went through life with his hands firmly shoved in his pockets. She danced. — Fredrik Backman

I think that creative work, music in particular, is a conveyor of inner emotional life. I don't feel one way all the time, so I don't want my music to feel the same way all the time. — Kyp Malone

Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first - the story of our quest for sexual love - is well known and well charted, its vagaries form the staple of music and literature, it is socially accepted and celebrated. The second - the story of our quest for love from the world - is a more secret and shameful tale. If mentioned, it tends to be in caustic, mocking terms, as something of interest chiefly to envious or deficient souls, or else the drive for status is interpreted in an economic sense alone. And yet this second love story is no less intense than the first, it is no less complicated, important or universal, and its setbacks are no less painful. There is heartbreak here too. — Alain De Botton

I love music/sounds that have a passion, a fire, an energy I can connect with. I love angry sounding beat tracks, dark sounds for sure but I also love delicate sounds, they both connect I think. Discharge back in 1980 was a big explosion in sound for me to hear the anger and the energy, still an influence on me. Miles Davis has been an influence, as much as John Coltrane, Brian Eno, John Hassel. So much around me has influenced me: my everyday life, everything around me, the family, etc ... It has an impact. — Mick Harris

To be creative means to be in love with life. You can be creative only if you love life enough that you want to enhance its beauty, you want to bring a little more music to it, a little more poetry to it, a little more dance to it. — Osho

People are already finding ways to make their music and play it in front of people and have a life in music, I guess, and I think that's pretty much all you can ask. — David Byrne

Who sings of all of Love's eternity
Who shines so bright
In all the songs of Love's unending spells?
Holy lightning strikes all that's evil
Teaching us to love for goodness sake.
Hear the music of Love Eternal
Teaching us to reach for goodness sake. — Jon Anderson

I had given myself a sort of early retirement when I left the scene in 1985. All of the people in my family worked until they dropped, including my father. I decided to take a little time to enjoy life. I traveled, built my dream house, rescued a few dogs. My return to music, and acting, was deliberate, part of my musical arc. — J. D. Souther

Two people, two hands, and two songs, in this case "Big Shot" and "Bette Davis Eyes." The lyrics of the two songs provided no commentary, honest or ironic, on the proceedings. They were merely there and always underfoot, the insistent gray muck that was pop culture. It stuck to our shoes and we tracked it through our lives. — Colson Whitehead

Perhaps, after all, romance did not come into one's life with pomp and blare, like a gay knight riding down; perhaps it crept to one's side like an old friend through quiet ways; perhaps it revealed itself in seeming prose, until some sudden shaft of illumination flung athwart its pages betrayed the rhythm and the music, perhaps ... perhaps ... love unfolded naturally out of a beautiful friendship, as a golden-hearted rose slipping from its green sheath. — L.M. Montgomery

The one prudence in life is concentration; the one evil is dissipation: and it makes no difference whether our dissipations are coarse or fine; property and its cares, friends and a social habit, or politics, or music, or feasting. Everything is good which takes away one plaything and delusion more, and drives us home to add one stroke of faithful work. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is no music in a "rest" that I know of, but there's the making of music in it. And people are always missing that part of the life melody. — John Ruskin

Joel Lane documents a life we don't quite live, in a city we can't quite find: half glimpsed and half imagined, we know it's out there somewhere. Waiting, maybe. Mixing fear with desire, reputation with regret. Touching the blood-beat of our secret hunger with the rhythms of a music that never felt alien till now. Wasted lives, with never a wasted word. It's an extraordinary achievement: vivid as neon, real as rain. Devastating. — Chaz Brenchley

The music
the making of music and the performing of music
produced memories, many good, some bad, some difficult. But he knew for sure that he'd spent too much of that time living not in the present moment of creating or playing music but in the expectation or hope of some reward, some success. He had always been waiting for his life to start when that happened, when the recognition came. It had taken him twenty years to realize how utterly wrongheaded that was.
It was as if the twenty years didn't amount to much, that he hadn't actually been present for so much of his life. — Graham Joyce

I originally had opened the studio in New York to combine my two loves, music and design. And we created videos and packaging for many musicians that you know, and for even more that you've never heard of. As I realized, just like with many, many things in my life that I actually love, I adapt to it. And I get, over time, bored by them. — Stefan Sagmeister

Why don't you find out for yourself?
Then you'll see the glass, hidden in the grass. — Morrissey

The worst part is wondering how you'll find the strength tomorrow
to go on doing what you did today and have been doing for much
too long, where you'll find the strength for all that stupid running around, those projects that come to nothing, those attempts to escape from crushing necessity, which always founder and serve only to convince you one more time that destiny is implacable, that every night will find you down and out, crushed by the dread of more and more sordid and insecure tomorrows. And maybe it's treacherous old age coming on, threatening the worst. Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn't enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I've never been able to kill myself. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

This is real, this is your life in a song ... this is country music. — Brad Paisley

Music plays a huge role in my life. It is music that helps me to endure ... well ... everything there is to endure. — Muriel Barbery

They sat in the little diningroom and ate. She'd put on music, a violin concerto. The phone didnt ring.
Did you take it off the hook?
No, she said.
Wires must be down.
She smiled. I think it's just the snow. I think it makes people stop and think.
Bell nodded. I hope it comes a blizzard then.
Do you remember the last time it snowed here?
No, I cant say as I do. Do you?
Yes I do.
When was it.
It'll come to you.
Oh.
She smiled. They ate. — Cormac McCarthy

She played a great deal better than either of the Miss Musgroves; but having no voice, no knowledge of the harp, and no fond parents to sit by and fancy themselves delighted, her performance was little thought of, only out of civility, or to refresh the others, as she was well aware. She knew that when she played she was giving pleasure only to herself; but this was no new sensation: excepting one short period of her life, she had never, since the age of fourteen, never since the loss of her dear mother, know the happiness of being listened to, or encouraged by any just appreciation or real taste. In music she had been always used to feel alone in the world; and Mr. and Mrs. Musgrove's fond partiality for their own daughters' performance, and total indifference to any other person's, gave her much more pleasure for their sakes, than mortification for her own. — Jane Austen

For our ancestors music was something that you sat down to listen to, or which you made for yourself. It was a ceremonial event, in which you participated, either as a passive listener or as an active performer. Either way you were giving and receiving life, sharing in something of great social significance.
With the advent of the gramophone, the radio and now the iPod, music is no longer something that you must make for yourself, nor is it something that you sit down to listen to. It follows you about wherever you go, and you switch it on as a background. It is not so much listened to as overheard. — Roger Scruton

If you think about it, everything we do in life is set to some kind of music. — Peabo Bryson

I would always drink purple drink - syrup. I would just be in a room, screwing and chopping up music. It was like an alter ego - I would turn into another person when I was on a substance. My music would get darker and weirder, and it inspired a lot of people. But I've changed my life and stopped smoking. I like to turn up and have fun when I get the chance, but I don't overdo it now. — SpaceGhostPurrp

I believe in the understanding of difficult situations, difficult music, or any kind of difficulties, through familiarity. Familiarity, in this case, does not breed contempt, but breeds understanding. — Daniel Barenboim, Edward W. Said

In that way Vinteuil's phrase, like some theme, say, in Tristan, which represents to us also a certain acquisition of sentiment, has espoused our mortal state, had endued a vesture of humanity that was affecting enough. Its destiny was linked, for the future, with that of the human soul, of which it was one of the special, the most distinctive ornaments. Perhaps it is not-being that is the true state, and all our dream of life is without existence; but, if so, we feel that it must be that these phrases of music, these conceptions which exist in relation to our dream, are nothing either. We shall perish, but we have for our hostages these divine captives who shall follow and share our fate. And death in their company is something less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps even less certain. — Marcel Proust

I loved county fairs in the South. It was hard to believe that anything could be so consistently cheap and showy and vulgar year after year. each year I thought that at least one class act would force its way into a booth or sideshow, but I was always mistaken. The lure of the fair was the perfect harmony of its joyous decadence, its burned-out dishonored vulgarity, its riot of colors and smells, its jangling, tawdry music, and its wicked glimpse into the outlaw life of hucksters, tattoo parlors, monstrous freaks, and strippers. — Pat Conroy

Often the inspiration to write music comes from the voices in your head. You're not crazy. Just be thankful they are not making you rescue people in 20-degree weather at 2:30 in the morning in the forest. — Shannon L. Alder

An ear for music is very different from a taste for music. I have no ear whatever; I could not sing an air to save my life; but I have the intensest delight in music, and can detect good from bad. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I'm not attached to a certain scene. There was certain music - and techno was a part of it - that really formulated something for me, that really was a direct connection to what I experienced in my life. Going to parties and listening to techno at home helped form my musical identity. And that changed throughout my life. — Pantha Du Prince

If I had not had music in my life, I would be the neurasthenic vision of the playwright. — Marsha Norman

Music is not a fucking soda. It is not a fucking insurance rate. It is not a fucking T-shirt. It is the only real religion that is worth devoting your soul to. It is the last remnant of the primal scream, the funeral dirge, and the wedding march. It is the light that keeps me out of the shadows, and it is the reason my immortal soul is not in dire straits. — Corey Taylor

Just imagine, life to be a dance with different kind of rhythms depending on what music is playing in the background. Sometimes we may dance alone and that's OK, as some songs are simply meant to be danced like that. Practice! Don't stop! It's your dance! — Nico J. Genes