Quotes & Sayings About Pianos

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone. Silence the pianos and with muffled drum Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come. — W. H. Auden

The pioneers and their new Indian partners amply displayed the American penchant for technological prowess, developing shore-to-shore windlasses and flatboat ferries to cross the rivers, innovations as vital to the country's progress as the steam engine and the telegraph. America's default toward massive waste and environmental havoc was also, and hilariously, perfected along the trail. Scammed by the merchants of Independence and St. Joe into overloading their wagons, the pioneers jettisoned thousands of tons of excess gear, food, and even pianos along the ruts, turning vast riverfront regions of the West into America's first and largest Superfund sites. On issue after issue - disease, religious strife, the fierce competition for water - the trail served as an incubator for conflicts that would continue to reverberate through American culture until our own day. — Rinker Buck

The very first hit factory was T.B. Harms, a Tin Pan Alley publishing company overseen by Max Dreyfus. With staff writers like Jerome Kern, George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Richard Rodgers, T.B. Harms was the dominant publisher of popular music in the early twentieth century. Dreyfus called his writers "the boys" and installed pianos for them to compose on around the office on West Twenty-Eighth, the street that gave Tin Pan Alley its name, allegedly for the tinny-sounding pianos passersby heard from the upper-story windows of the row houses. The sheet-music sellers also employed piano players in their street-level stores, who would perform the Top 40 of the 1920s for browsing customers. — John Seabrook

Meanwhile, in the expansiveness of her joy, the Moon filled all of the room like a phosphoric atmosphere, like a luminous poison; and all of that living light thought and said: You will be eternally subject to the influence of my kiss. You will be beautiful in my manner. You will love what I love and who loves me: water, the clouds, silence, and the night; the immense, green sea; formless and multiform water; the place where you will not be; the lover you will not know; monstrous flowers; perfumes that make you delirious; cats who swoon on pianos, and who moan like women, with a hoarse, gentle voice! — Charles Baudelaire

The Gedalists were nearly run down by a Dodge truck on which two grand pianos had been loaded: two uniformed officers were playing, in unison, with gravity and commitment, the 1812 Overture of Tchaikowsky, while the driver wove among the wagons with brusque swerves, pressing the siren at full volume, heedless of the pedestrians in his way. — Primo Levi

Do broken pianos play broken songs? Do they have busted melodies for busted hearts? Is there a song living inside it that's waiting to get out? Her keys are shattered and her notes long since silent but I can still hear her song. Just listen, just listen. — Tyler Knott Gregson

Marriages are like pianos. They go in and out of tune. — Sarah Waters

My piano has not yet arrived. How did you send it? By Marseilles or by Perpignan? I dream music but I cannot make any because here there are not any pianos ... in this respect this is a savage country. — Frederic Chopin

Pianos should never go out of tune. The true sin is something different than what we've been taught; the true sin is living so far removed from absolute harmony. That is more powerful than the truths and lies we tell every day. I — Paulo Coelho

To: Christian Grey
Dear Completely & Utterly Smitten
I love waking up to you, too. But I love being in bed with you and in elevators and on pianos and billiard tables and boats and desks and showers and bathtubs and strange wooden crosses with shackels and four-poster beds with red satin sheets and boathouses and childhood bedrooms. — E.L. James

From 1936 on, I have taken more falls than any other 20 comedians put together. From the time I was 21, I've taken them on everything from clay courts to cement to wood floors, coming off pianos, going out a two-story window, landing on Dean, falling into the rough. You do that and you're gonna have problems. — Jerry Lewis

A trumpet sounds pretty much like a trumpet, and that's true of a lot instruments; pianos sound like pianos, but there's something about the guitar - the range of possibilities is much broader. — The Edge

A strange thing has happened - while all the other arts were born naked, this, the youngest, has been born fully-clothed. It can say everything before it has anything to say. It is as if the savage tribe, instead of finding two bars of iron to play with, had found scattering the seashore fiddles, flutes, saxophones, trumpets, grand pianos by Erhard and Bechstein, and had begun with incredible energy, but without knowing a note of music, to hammer and thump upon them all at the same time. — Virginia Woolf

Steinway grand pianos are the best in the world. — Maurizio Pollini

It is a privilege and an honor to perform on Steinway pianos. — Diana Krall

He should have known it was all wrong the moment they started hanging grand pianos over the sea-monster pool in the atrium. — Douglas Adams

It's dark. You exhale a fist of memory. I love you like weathering wood in a room of empty pianos. When you return to something you love, it's already beyond repair. You wear it broken. — James L. White

Writing had to take the form of journalism. Not for me the Shangri-la of fiction. The rewards, if any, would have been too little and too late, the bailiffs were at the door ... Two large bailiffs, they were, who visited frequently and smiled like grand pianos, the only really reliable men in my life. They told me what they were going to do and if they did it, woe was me. — Jill Tweedie

In one of our concert grand pianos, 243 taut strings exert a pull of 40,000 pounds on an iron frame. It is proof that out of great tension may come great harmony. — Theodore E. Steinway

The Steinway pianos of today are the finest I have ever played. — James Levine

Did you know that Mozart had no arms and no legs? I've seen statues of him on people's pianos. — Victor Borge

If the souls of lives were voiced in music, there are some that none but a great organ could express, others the clash of a full orchestra, a few to which nought but the refined and exquisite sadness of a violin could do justice. Many might be likened unto common pianos, jangling and out of tune, and some to the feeble piping of a penny whistle, and mine could be told with a couple of nails in a rusty tin-pot. — Miles Franklin

My mother, who is a pianist and a fine artist, purchased a piano for me. Twice. This was back when I was a small girl. Pianos, of course, came complete with the quintessential piano teacher who whacked my hand with a stick each time I struck the wrong key. I learned a few pieces, yes, but eventually my pen compelled me to write too much and the sound of the leaves rustling in the wind compelled me to climb trees too often. Sorry mom. Coincidentally, books come from trees and flipping the pages sounds like wind through leaves ... hhhmmmm ... I guess I'm still just climbing trees now, but in a different way! — C. JoyBell C.

So I always liked to sing, and apparently when I was about four or five I also started to be attracted to pianos and musical instruments. Whenever we went to a friend's house, I vaguely recall climbing up on the piano, plunking on it, and trying to figure it out. So my parents figured I was interested and asked me if I wanted to take piano lessons. I said sure. — Vienna Teng

I can sit down and vomit on the
keys
but it's my
vomit.
it's better than sitting in a room
with 3 or 4 people and
their pianos.
this is my piano
and it is better than theirs. — Charles Bukowski

I have long admired Steinway pianos for their qualities of tone, clarity, pitch consistency, touch responsiveness, and superior craftsmanship. — Billy Joel

Funeral Blues

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message 'He is Dead'.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good. — W. H. Auden

Many people have asked me why there are three pedals in these grand pianos. Well the pedal in the middle is there to separate the two other pedals. — Victor Borge

(Referring to the piano's natural shape) Isn't it a shame when those big fat opera singers lean against the pianos and bend them? — Victor Borge

In Canada pianos needed water. You opened up the back and left a full glass of water, and a month later the glass would be empty. Her father had told her about the dwarfs who drank only at pianos, never in bars. — Michael Ondaatje

Both my grandmothers had upright pianos, and I just knew how to play since I was a child. Nobody taught me. I sounded like a grown-up, and then I learned how to read music. I played so well by ear I could fool the teacher to believe I could play the notes. She'd make the mistake of playing the song once, and I could play it. — Valerie Simpson

For the piano and me it is always a blind date! I meet different pianos every single day. I can't take my piano with me like a bassist can take his instrument. So whenever I arrive I am a bit nervous to see what kind of piano is waiting for me. — Hiromi

Hatred. Something almost as physical as walls, pianos, or nurses. She could almost touch the destructive energy leaking out of her body. She allowed the feeling to emerge, regardless of whether it was good or bad; she was sick of self-control, of masks, of appropriate behavior. Veronika wanted to spend her remaining two or three days of life behaving as inappropriately as she could. — Paulo Coelho

My mother told stories - of their life in the war and how she'd played the accordion in the air-raid shelter and it had got rid of the rats. Apparently rats like violins and pianos but they can't stand the accordion ... — Jeanette Winterson

For the most part, pianos are female to me. Sometimes they're dykes, and they're always good fun. — Tori Amos

If you play the very subtle jazz tunes with acoustic pianos, acoustic bass and it's a dead standard, you are going to play very differently. It depends on the music. — Lee Ritenour

He had approached the villa on that night of the storm not out of curiosity about the music but because of a danger to the piano player. The retreating army often left pencil mines within musical instruments. Returning owners opened up pianos and lost their hands. — Michael Ondaatje

I worship pianos like they are prize diamonds, and I never willfully do damage to them. But I grew up playing guitars, and you treat a guitar like a best friend or a little brother or a lover you have a tempestuous relationship with. — Jamie Cullum

The family story tells, and it was told true,
of my great-grandfather who begat eight
genius children and bought twelve almost new
grand pianos. He left a considerable estate
when he died. — Anne Sexton

So the avenues we walk down,
full of bodies wearing faces,
are full of hidden talent:
enough to make pianos moan,
sidewalks split,
streetlights deliriously flicker. — Tony Hoagland

You know that, according to quantum theory, if two particles collide with enough energy you can, in principle, with an infinitesimal probability, produce two grand pianos. — Isidor Isaac Rabi

I wish to thank Steinway for its wonderful pianos which I've been privileged to play in all my concerts. There is no piano like it in the world. — Evgeny Kissin

Girls are like pianos. When they're not upright, they're grand. — Benny Hill

Because, what does it mean, to say that things aren't going well? Compared to what? You can say: compared to how things were going a couple of hours ago, or a couple of years ago. But that's not the point. If two cars are speeding towards a brick wall with no brakes, and one car hits the wall moments before the other, you can't spend those moments saying that the second car is much better off than the first.
Death and disaster are at our shoulders every second of our lives, trying to get at us. Missing, a lot of the time. A lot of miles on the motorway without a front wheel blow-out. A lot of viruses that slither through our bodies without snagging. A lot of pianos that fall a minute after we've passed. Or a month, it makes no difference.
So unless we're going to get down on our knees and give thanks every time disaster misses, it makes no sense to moan when it strikes. Us, or anyone else. Because we're not comparing it with anything. — Hugh Laurie

Sometimes not talking is effortless, and other times it's more exhausting than lifting pianos. — Steve Toltz

In prayer, something like an echo takes place. When you strike a note on the piano, corresponding strings in all the other pianos in the room start to vibrate. It is just the same when we express a pure wish in our ardent prayers: all around us we mobilize angels who are inspired by the same wish. — Richard Wurmbrand

People aren't pianos. You don't hit a certain note and know what you're going to get. — Gwendolyn Heasley

When I was at school, I wanted to play a piano, and they said, 'No, that's for the classical students.' There's always been this air around pianos, which can very often discourage a young person from having a go. — Jamie Cullum

Has it ever occurred to you that one hundred pianos all tuned to the same fork are automatically tuned to each other? They are of one accord by being tuned, not to each other, but to another standard to which each one must individually bow. So one hundred worshipers met together, each one looking away to Christ, are in heart nearer to each other than they could possibly be, were they to become 'unity' conscious and turn their eyes away from God to strive for closer fellowship. — A.W. Tozer

I used to play pianos in bars. You know in hotels, you'd see guys playing piano with a snifter? That was me, with a painted-on mustache. I was about 15. — Brian McKnight

I loved grand pianos and small pianos, too. — Alicia Keys

I've paid for more pianos in hotel lobbies than you can imagine. — Kid Rock

Baldwin is sort of getting to be a bit funny. I don't know what happened, but a few years ago they suddenly went bankrupt and Gibson bought the whole outfit. Since then they haven't seemed to be doing an awfully good job of providing pianos. — Marian McPartland

The piano is just a different animal. It's expensive, it's big, it's heavy, and it doesn't fit in the mix easily. Everyone grew up with a piano in their living room, so rocking out on the piano was accessible - it wasn't an upper-class thing. Now pianos have become very much a piece of furniture. — Ben Folds

Pianos, unlike people, sing when you give them your every growl. They know how to dive into the pit of your stomach and harmonize with your roars when you've split yourself open. And when they see you, guts shining, brain pulsing, heart right there exposed in a rhythm that beats need need, need need, need need, pianos do not run. And so she plays. — Francesca Lia Block

What's the deal with putting animal feet on tubs? It's like insisting that all pianos should have tails, or dinner tables should have scrotal sacs. One of the things we like about tubs is their immobility, their general disinclination to bolt out of the room, scramble down the stairs, and make for the woods in a blind feral panic. — James Lileks

I'm a guitarist by background. That's what I used to do for sessions when I was younger and that sort of thing. We have several pianos in the house and I tend to just sit and fiddle around. — Steven Price

No one can get reall drunk on a novle or a painting, but who can help getting drunk on Beethoven's night, Bartok's Sonata for two Pianos and percussion or the Beatles' White Album? He loved mozart as much as rock.
He considered music a liberating force, it liberated him from lonliness, introversion, the dust of the library; it opened the door of hi body and allowed his soul to step out into the world to make friends, He loved to dance an regretted that Sabina did not share his passion
pg 92-93 — Milan Kundera

Well, my piano's really beautiful. I actually have two pianos. I have a Yamaha upright from the '60s that's blond, wood, and black, and I also have one from the '20s from Chicago - not a well-known brand or anything. — Zooey Deschanel

I've had grand pianos that are more expensive than, like, a year's worth of rent. — Lady Gaga

Many nights, Ai-ming said, ignoring my question, her father's music pulled her from sleep. Sparrow, she slowly pieced together, had been one of Shanghai's most renowned composers. But after the Conservatory was shut down in 1966 and all five hundred of its pianos destroyed, Sparrow worked in a factory making wooden crates, then wire, and then radios, for two decades. Ai-ming heard him humming fragments of music when he thought no one was listening. Eventually she came to understand that these fragments were all that remained of his own symphonies, quartets and other musical works. The written copies had been destroyed. — Madeleine Thien

Death and disaster are at our shoulders every second of our lives, trying to get at us. Missing, a lot of the time. A lot of miles on the motorway without a front wheel blow-out. A lot of viruses that slither through our bodies without snagging. A lot of pianos that fall a minute after we've passed. Or a month, it makes no difference. So unless were going to get down on our knees and give thanks every time disaster misses, it makes no sense to moan when it strikes. — Hugh Laurie

England is a country of pianos, they are everywhere. — Frederic Chopin

I heard what I'd learned against my will to identify as new age music. Aimless and spacey, it meandered from unresolved keyboard chord to unresolved keyboard chord with some somnolent noodling in place of melody. Drooling pianos, music to sleepwalk by. — Timothy Hallinan

I guess you go too far when pianos try to be guitars. — Tori Amos

Our daily life is filled with electronic pianos, ring tones, the disembodied voice giving you your bank balance over the telephone. Even silence can be electronic, courtesy of sound-canceling headphones. — Serge Schmemann

No one can get really drunk on a novel or a painting, but who can help getting drunk on Reethoven's Ninth, Rartok's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, or the Reatles' White Album? — Milan Kundera

I play only classical music. My pianos are my only big indulgence, but they're a necessity. When I'm playing the piano is literally the only time I can be completely abstract and disconnected from the regular world and yet be connected - to my music. — Rafael Vinoly

There is always a piano in an hotel drawing-room, on which, of course, some one of the forlorn ladies is generally employed. I do not suppose that these pianos are, in fact, as a rule, louder and harsher, more violent and less musical, than other instruments of the kind. They seem to be so, but that, I take it, arises from the exceptional mental depression of those who have to listen to them. — Anthony Trollope

Usually I can hear the pianos, the saxophone, and usually I can hear Ronnie. But I really need to listen to Keith and Mick. The rest of the band is sort of an embellishment to that. — Charlie Watts

I wish the government would put a tax on pianos for the incompetent. — Edith Sitwell

What do you think of when you think of mourning?' Jenny asks.
The question snaps me back to attention. I answer without really thinking. "I guess 'Funeral Blues' by W.H. Auden. I think it was Auden. I suppose that's not very original.'
'I don't know it.'
'It's a poem.'
'I gathered.'
'I'm just clarifying. It's not a blues album.'
Jenny ignores my swipe at her intelligence.
'Does your response need to be original? Isn't that what poetry is for, for the poet to express something so personal that it ultimately is universal?'
I shrug. Who is Jenny, even new Jenny, to say what poetry is for? Who am I for that matter?
'Why do you thin of that poem in particular?'
"Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, / Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, / Silence the pianos and with muffled drum / Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.'
I learned the poem in college and it stuck. — Steven Rowley

In essence, art lies embedded in the conceptual leap between pieces, not in the pieces themselves. And simply put, there's a greater conceptual jump from one work of art to the next than from one work of craft to the next. The net result is that art is less polished - but more innovative - than craft. The differences between five Steinway grand pianos - demonstrably works of consummate craftsmanship - are small compared to the differences between the five Beethoven Piano concerti you might perform on those instruments. A — David Bayles

I really wanted to find a piano for the farm house. There were so many free pianos on Craigslist, I thought, 'Let's get as many free pianos as we can and stick them all in the barn.' I got eight in a short period of time, only six of which were tunable, but it's still quite funny. — Neko Case

Everybody in my neighborhood in the '40s, they played pianos. That's how people partied. They didn't try the TV, the radio was OK, records was cool, but when people wanted to party, they got around a piano. My mother played piano, my sister played. I've been around a lot of piano all my life. — Dr. John

Subject: Sundown
Date: June 14 2011 09:35
To: Christian Grey
Dear Completely & Utterly Smitten
I love waking up with you, too. But I love being in bed with you and in elevators and on pianos and billiard tables and boats and desks and showers and bathtubs and strange wooden crosses with shackles and four poster beds with red satin sheets and boathouses and childhood bedrooms.
Yours
Sex Mad and Insatiable xx — E.L. James

I was brought up west southwest coast of Scotland and my mother and father had a music shop, and so I was surrounded by pianos and drums and guitars, and music, of course. — Colin Hay

I think it would be better if nobody owned anything, but they didn't starve. Had enough paint and enough pianos and everything else. — Arthur Boyd

After the Second World War, I returned to California to study composition with Darius Milhaud, who wrote wonderful works like 'Le Boeuf sur le Toit' and 'La Cretion du Monde.' I especially enjoy his work for two pianos, 'Scaramouche.' — Dave Brubeck

Are still men, and not keyboards of pianos over which the hands of Nature may play at their own sweet will. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Letters from the Underworld — Eugene H. Peterson

Plus, there were so many pianos in my house, so I couldn't really avoid it. — Vanessa Carlton

Then, you know, the other more-traditional role of the producer in, like, the kind of Quincy Jones sense is kind of part arranger. So you're coming up with, like, these - you hear these songs that are quite bare-bones, and you dream up what's the band doing? What's the rhythm section doing? What's the guitars, strings, pianos - that sort of thing. It's almost like a little toolbox. — Mark Ronson

Pianos tend to get better as they age, the more you play them. They grow into their sound. — Alicia Witt

It was a very odd household, because the grandmothers were so different. Both of them had their own pianos. So it would be duelling pianos by grandmothers. — Diane Cilento