Muzak Quotes & Sayings

What have we got here in America that we believe we cannot live without? We have the most varied and imaginative bathrooms in the world, we have kitchens with the most gimmicks, we have houses with every possible electrical gadget to save ourselves all kinds of trouble - all so that we can have leisure. Leisure, leisure, leisure! So that we don't go mad in the leisure, we have color TV. So that there will never, never, be a moment of silence, we have radio and Muzak. We can't stand silence, because silence includes thinking. And if we thought, we would have to face ourselves. — Agnes De Mille

I always thought I was so fit. — Rod Stewart

Not only has the eyes taken over, but we have anaesthetised the ears through all the muzak that we hear all the time. — Daniel Barenboim

Some easy-listening Muzak came onto the phone. I held it away from my ear. If you listened close for long, it gave you cavities. — Robert B. Parker

I know the mall is just a lot of fake plants and fake food and people buying crap for too much money, and at Christmas people pay for their kids to talk to Santa, learning greed the way some kids learn piano. I know all that. I can hear the Muzak, smell the waffle fries. Like everybody else, I walk around stuck inside a cliche, like we're stars of some TV show we plan to watch later, if nothing else is on. But still, there's something hopeful about this place, too, and maybe it takes having a crazy mother to get that. People buy stuff, because they think they are going to need it, because they think their lives are going to keep skipping down the same old path, and I want so much for that to be true for them that it nearly makes me cry. The mall says, Nothing is terrible. The mall says, Life is small and adequate. — Heather Hepler

You shape your perceptions, or someone shapes them for you. You do what you want to do, or you respond to someone else's plan for you. — Tony Robbins

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 is a particular whir of agitation about female hunger, a low-level thrumming of shoulds and shouldn'ts and can'ts and wants that can be so chronic and familiar it becomes a kind of feminine Muzak, easy to dismiss, or to tune out altogether, even if you're actively participating in it. — Caroline Knapp

And then he gave her a kiss that was meant to be the first of its kind, but tasted so familiar there was no denying those undercurrents of love had been there all that time ... just waiting to be recognized. — Mira Lyn Kelly

I worry that the person who thought up Muzak may be thinking up something else. — Lily Tomlin

It's when we say that we don't love something that people get surprised. "I thought you guys liked everything!" The stuff I don't like is the lounge-y muzak in restaurants, elevators and hotels. It really gets me angry, because it's supposed to be in the background. It's not supposed to be something that people listen to. — Stephen Dewaele

The elevator turned out to be slower than the damned train at Disney World. And it played "The Girl from Ipanema" in Muzak. I looked at Paris and saw that he was mouthing the lyrics. That was it. I'd have to plan an intervention for him once we got home. — Leslie Langtry

Music can be used against us as much as it can be used for us. Muzak can put a whole nation to sleep, whereas a lullaby is intended to put a child to sleep in a sweet way. — Holly Near

He sat desiring the girl - a speed-hardened straw-colored junkie stewardess, a spoiled Augustana Lutheran, compounded of airport Muzak and beauty parlor school. Her eyes were fouled with smog and propane spray. — Robert Stone

He walked among the bookstore shelves, hearing Muzak in the air. There were rows of handsome covers, prosperous and assured. He felt a fine excitement, hefting a new book, fitting hand over sleek spine, seeing lines of type jitter past his thumb as he let the pages fall. He was a young man, shrewd in his fervors, who knew there were books he wanted to read and others he absolutely had to own, the ones that gesture in special ways, that have a rareness or daring, a charge of heat that stains the air around them. — Don DeLillo

When the three of them stepped inside, they were greeted by the Muzak version of "Teenagers" by My Chemical Romance. Vlad and Henry exchanged looks of horror, and Vlad sighed. "Is nothing sacred? — Heather Brewer

Phones and soundtracks and Muzak and fountains replace genuine and unpredictable human contact with a seamless soundtrack from a bad movie and a cliche that makes us believe we must all be happy. — Margaret Heffernan

Dullness of hearing is hearing without faith and without the moral fruit of faith. It's hearing the Bible or the preaching of the Bible the way you hear the freeway noise on I-94, or the way you hear Muzak in the dentist's office or the way you hear recorded warnings at the airport that this is a smoke-free facility. You do but you don't. You have grown dull to the sound. It does not awaken or produce anything. — John Piper

I have never loved like I love you. You've got to know this. My silly drunk girl. — Jessica Topper

If I repeated some passages from the homilies of the Church Fathers, in the second or third century, about how we must treat the poor, some would accuse me of giving a Marxist homily. — Pope Francis

Like all right-listening folk, I am an implacable enemy of all muzak. — Will Self

It seems obvious, looking back, that the artists of Weimar Germany and Leninist Russia lived in a much more attenuated landscape of media than ours, and their reward was that they could still believe, in good faith and without bombast, that art could morally influence the world. Today, the idea has largely been dismissed, as it must in a mass media society where art's principal social role is to be investment capital, or, in the simplest way, bullion. We still have political art, but we have no effective political art. An artist must be famous to be heard, but as he acquires fame, so his work accumulates 'value' and becomes, ipso-facto, harmless. As far as today's politics is concerned, most art aspires to the condition of Muzak. It provides the background hum for power. — Robert Hughes

A band played live Muzak. — Don DeLillo

In my box of sound bites there are no jackhammers, no snowmobiles, no Jet Skis, no children wailing. Music but no Muzak.
It's my box. Put what you want in yours. — Joan Oliver Goldsmith

I loved tests because it was another form of competing, a healthy competition. — Suzanne Farrell

A Muzak version of 'Imagine' comes on and John Lennon wakes up in his tomb, appalled. — David Mitchell

It seemed as if Muzak had sucked the soul out of the songs, but in fact they had created something entirely new, something close to what Satie imagined: furniture music, music that was clearly a useful and (to their subscribers) functional part of the environment, there to induce calm and tranquility in their shops and offices. Why is it that Satie's compositions, Brian Eno's ambient music, or the minimal spaced-out — David Byrne

Born in elevators and supermarkets, Muzak has spread to restaurants, hotels, airplanes, telephone hold services, and waiting rooms. The public-relations experts believe that human beings fear silence - that is, the absence of constantly imposed direction. It is further believed that if we can be relieved of our fears, we will gain enough self-confidence to buy, eat, vote, fly, or simply go on living. — John Ralston Saul