Music Violins Quotes & Sayings

All music is what awakes from you when you are reminded by the instruments. It is not the violins and the cornets-it is not the oboe nor the beating drums, nor the score of the baritone singer singing his sweet romanza-nor that of the women's chorus; it is nearer and farther than they. — Walt Whitman

A thousand violins cloy very rapidly without percussion. — John Fowles

This is why Sonja Lyubomirsky, a leader in the scientific study of well-being, has written that she prefers the phrase "creation or construction of happiness" to the more popular "pursuit," since "research shows that it's in our power to fashion it for ourselves."13 — Shawn Achor

He loves white cables. And white telephones. And white computer monitors with fruit on the back. — Fredrik Backman

I don't know what I'd like to do. That's what hurts the most. That's why I can't quit the job. I really don't know what talents I may have. And I don't know where to go to find out. I've been fostered so long by school and didn't have time to think about it. My father's in watch repair. That's always interested me, working with my hands, and independent. I don't think I'd mind going back and learning something, taking a piece of furniture and refinishing it. The type of thing where you know what you're doing and you can create and you can fix something to make it function. At the switchboard you don't do much of anything. — Studs Terkel

A guitar is a piece of wood, and if this piece is resonating in a period of 40 or 60 years, it kind of gets to know what it is after awhile ... the reason violinists play violins that are hundreds of years old. The wood learns to sing. — Dave Genn

Music and dance. What I have written must surely suggest a people cursed by Heaven,... No people on earth, I am persuaded, loves music so well, nor dance, nor oratory, though the music falls strangely on my ears... More than once I have been at Mr. Treacy's when at close of dinner, some traveling harper would be called in, blind as often as not, his fingernails kept long and the mysteries of his art hidden in their horny ridges. The music would come to us with the sadness of a lost world, each note a messenger sent wandering among the Waterford goblets. Riding home late at night, past tavern or alehouse, I would hear harps and violins, thudding feet rising to a frenzy. I have seen them dancing at evening on fairdays, in meadows decreed by custom for such purposes, their bodies swift-moving, and their faces impassive but bright-eyed, intent. I have watched them in silence, reins held loosely in my hand, and have marveled at the stillness of my own body, my shoulders rigid and heavy. — Thomas Flanagan

There were pauses in the music for the rushing, calling, halting piano. Everything would stop except the climbing of the soloist; he would reach a height and everything would join him, the violins first and then the horns; and then the deep blue bass and the flute and the bitter trampling drums; beating, beating and mounting together and stopping with a crash like daybreak. When I first heard the Messiah I was alone; my blood bubbled like fire and wine; I cried; like an infant crying for its mother's milk; or a sinner running to meet Jesus. — James Baldwin

When it comes to orchestral music, whenever I see a concert with orchestra and strings, and I arrive and there are speakers up, my heart always sinks a little bit, and I think, 'It's going to be down to some sound guy's ideas.' Contact microphones on the violins. I'm a purist, I suppose. — Jonny Greenwood

He can hum the music in his old man's quivering voice, but he prefers it in his head, where it lives on in violins and reedy winds. If he imagines it in rehearsal he can remember every step of his three-minute solo as if he had danced it only yesterday, but he knows, too, that one time, onstage in Berlin, he had not danced it as he had learned it; this much he knows but cannot recreate, could no recreate it even a moment after he had finished dancing it. While dancing he had felt blind to the stage and audience, deaf to the music. He had let his body do what it needed to do, free to expand and contract in space, to soar and spin. So, accordingly, when he tries to remember the way he danced it on stage, he cannot hear the music or feel his feet or get a sense of the audience. He is embryonic, momentarily cut off from the world around him. The three most important minutes of his life, the ones that determined his fate and future, are the three to which he cannot gain access, ever. — Evan Fallenberg

We are like violins. We can be used as doorstops, or we can make music. — Barbara Sher

Lakes, carillonst,
Pools and bells,
Fifes and freshets,
Harps and wells;
Flutes and rivers,
Streams, bassoons,
Geysers, trumpets,
Chimes lagoons,
Hear the music,
Drink the water,
As we poor lambs
All go to slaughter.
I love you Eliot.
Good-bye. I cry.
Tears and violins.
Hearts and flowers,
Flowers and tears.
Rosewater, good-bye. — Kurt Vonnegut

And then as the knives and forks began to clank softly above the white tablecloths, the violins would rise alone, now suddenly mature although tentative and unsure just a short while before; slim and narrow-waisted, they eloquently proceeded with their task, took up again the lost human cause, and pleaded before the indifferent tribunal of stars, now set in a sky on which the shapes of the instruments floated like water signs or fragments of keys, unfinished lyres or swans, an imitatory, thoughtless starry commentary on the margin of music. — Bruno Schulz

It's funny how there can be something special about that one person isn't it? — Marisa Calin

It is as absurd to say that a man can't love one woman all the time as it is to say that a violinist needs several violins to play the same piece of music. — Honore De Balzac

It is absurd to pretend that one cannot love the same woman always, as to pretend that a good artist needs several violins to execute a piece of music. — Honore De Balzac

Coram Deo means that while we are always at God's disposal, God is never at ours. "To believe in such a God," Luther said, "is to go down on your knees."23 — Timothy George

And then once in the music storage room. It was cold. The room was small with thin gray carpet and I cried after in my bed thinking of how sad the violins looked alone in the corner. It was embarrassing to have sex in front of the wrong things, especially a violin, which was so dignified at every angle — Alison Espach

Liberty of thought is the life of the soul. — Voltaire

I pictured a rainbow
You held it in your hands
I had flashes
But you saw the plan
I wandered out in the world for years
While you just stayed in your room
I saw the crescent
You saw the whole of the moon — Mike Scott

In the run-up to the election, Stephen Harper had rolled out the rhetoric on the need for clean and transparent government, expressing frustration with Paul Martin's Liberals over their alleged secrecy and obstructionism. "When a government starts trying to cancel dissent or avoid dissent," Harper declared in a statement to be later viewed as notable for ironic content, "Is frankly when it is rapidly losing its moral authority to govern. — Lawrence Martin

Every single one of us can do things that no one else can do - can love things that no one else can love. We are like violins. We can be used for doorstops, or we can make music. You know what to do. — Barbara Sher

We should not decide how to pray based on the experiences and feelings we want. Instead, we should do everything possible to behold our God as he is, and prayer will follow. — Timothy Keller

Evening Concert, Sainte-Chapelle
The celebrated windows flamed with light
directly pouring north across the Seine;
we rustled into place. Then violins
vaunting Vivaldi's strident strength, then Brahms,
seemed to suck with their passionate sweetness,
bit by bit, the vigor from the red,
the blazing blue, so that the listening eye
saw suddenly the thick black lines, in shapes
of shield and cross and strut and brace, that held
the holy glowing fantasy together.
The music surged; the glow became a milk,
a whisper to the eye, a glimmer ebbed
until our beating hearts, our violins
were cased in thin but solid sheets of lead. — John Updike

Appearances matter - and remember to smile. — Nelson Mandela

There were sharp little blows in the music, and waves of quick, fine notes that burst and rolled like the thin, clear ringing of broken glass. There were slow notes, as if the cords of the violins trembled in hesitation, tense with the fullness of sound, taking a few measured steps before the leap into the explosion of laughter. — Ayn Rand

Anyways, the guys try to be cool. They just lie there and groove, but after a while they start hearing - you won't believe this - they hear chamber music. They hear violins and cellos. They hear this terrific mama-san soprano. Then after a while they hear gook opera and and a glee club and the Haiphong Boys Choir and a barbershop quartet and and all kinds of wierd chanting and Buddha-Buddha stuff. All the whole time, in the background, there's stil that cocktail party going on. All these different voices. Not human voices, though. Because it's the mountains. Follow me? The rock, it's TALKING. And the fog, too, and the grass and the goddamn mongooses. Everything talks. The trees talk politics, the monnkeys talk religion. The whole country. Vietnam. The place talks. It talks. Understand? Nam - it truly TALKS. — Tim O'Brien

Second violins can play a concerto perfectly if they're in their own home and nobody's there. — Garrison Keillor

The streets of Prague were a fantasia scarcely touched by the twenty-first century - or the twentieth or nineteenth, for that matter. It was a city of alchemists and dreamers, its medieval cobbles once trod by golems, mystics, invading armies. Tall houses glowed goldenrod and carmine and eggshell blue, embellished with Rococo plasterwork and capped in roofs of uniform red. Baroque cupolas were the soft green of antique copper, and Gothic steeples stood ready to impale fallen angels. The wind carried the memory of magic, revolution, violins, and the cobbled lanes meandered like creeks. Thugs wore Motzart wigs and pushed chamber music on street corners, and marionettes hung in windows, making the whole city seem like a theater with unseen puppeteers crouched behind velvet. — Laini Taylor

Evil Hall had been transformed into a magnificent ballroom, glittering with green tinsel, black balloons, thousands of green-flamed candles, and a spinning chandelier streaking wall murals with emerald bursts of light. Around a towering ice sculpture of two entwined snakes, Hort and Dot stumbled through a waltz, Anadil wrapped her arms around Vex, Brone tried not to step on Mona's green feet, and Hester and Ravan swayed and whispered as more villainous couples waltzed around them. Ravan's bunk mates picked up the music on reed violins as more pairs flooded onto the floor, clumsy, bashful, but aglow with happiness, dancing beneath a spangled banner:
THE 1ST ANNUAL VILLAINS NO BALL — Soman Chainani

Cinderella
The prince leans to the girl in scarlet heels,
Her green eyes slant, hair flaring in a fan
Of silver as the rondo slows; now reels
Begin on tilted violins to span
The whole revolving tall glass palace hall
Where guests slide gliding into light like wine;
Rose candles flicker on the lilac wall
Reflecting in a million flagons' shine,
And glided couples all in whirling trance
Follow holiday revel begun long since,
Until near twelve the strange girl all at once
Guilt-stricken halts, pales, clings to the prince
As amid the hectic music and cocktail talk
She hears the caustic ticking of the clock. — Sylvia Plath

There's no reason why everyone has to listen to records in hi-fi. Having the violins on the left and the bass on the right doesn't make the music more profound. It's just a more complex way of stimulating a bored imagination. — Haruki Murakami

Meditation is not meant to help us avoid problems or run away from difficulties. It is meant to allow positive healing to take place. To meditate is to learn how to stop - to stop being carried away by our regrets about the past, our anger or despair in the present, or our worries about the future. — Nhat Hanh

Walter turned on the radio: electric violins wailing, twisted romance, the four-square beat of heartbreak. Trite suffering, but suffering nonetheless. The entertainment business. What voyeurs we have all become. — Margaret Atwood

Oh my God! I shouted, smacking at myself to get it off. The chanting abruptly stopped as I danced about the interior of the circle, beating the chunky dust off me. It only made things worse, and I began coughing on someone's dead grandmother. My eyes watered, and I finally gave up, glaring at them from around my hair, now all over the place. Damn it, I was covered in strawberries and human remains. — Kim Harrison

Usually bands with violins - it's this little, poorly amplified looking kind of futile on stage, and that's not the way that my music is put together. — Andrew Bird