Pipe Organ Quotes & Sayings

I've often wished that I had some suave and socially acceptable hobby that I could fall back on in times like this. You know, play the violin (or was it the viola) like Sherlock Holmes, or maybe twiddle away on the pipe organ like the Disney version of Captain Nemo. But I don't. I'm sort of the arcane equivalent of a classic computer geek. I do magic, in one form or another, and that's pretty much it. I really need to get a life, one of these days — Jim Butcher

A violin?" I echoed, making a face. "Really? You're calling in a favor for that? What, you don't want to wait until you've lost a pipe organ or something?" - Puck — Julie Kagawa

The soul can never be corrupted with the corruption of the body, but it is like the wind which causes the sound of the organ, and which ceases to produce a good effect when a pipe is spoilt. — Leonardo Da Vinci

Many scholars have felt that the Heronian passage [on a pipe-organ moved by an anemourion-like wheel] can be disregarded because it is not confirmed by other writings. Heron presumably mentioned the anemourion in a moment of distraction, forgetting that it had not been invented yet. We know that he was given to such lapses. — Lucio Russo

For what is man without desires, without free will, and without the power of choice but a stop in an organ pipe? — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

An associate of mine named William Congreve once wrote a very sad play that begins with the line 'Music has charms to sooth a savage beast,' a sentence which here means that if you are nervous or upset, you might listen to some music to calm you down or cheer you up. For instance, as I crouch here behind the alter of the Cathedral of the Alleged Virgin, a friend of mine is playing a sonata on the pipe organ, to calm me down and so that the sounds of my typewriter will not be heard by the worshipers sitting in the pews. The mournful melody of the sonata reminds me of a tune my father used to sing when he did the dishes, and as I listen to it I can temporarily forget six or seven of my troubles. — Lemony Snicket

Oh, dear God, you don't actually have a brain, do you, it's more a filigreed spiderweb, with little chambers in it where trained monkeys play the pipe organ. — Glen David Gold

I needed a space suit the way a pig needs a pipe organ. — Robert A. Heinlein

When Rosencrantz asks Hamlet, "Good my lord, what is your cause of distemper? You do surely bar the door upon your own liberty, if you deny your grief to your friends"(III, ii, 844-846), Hamlet responds, "Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck from my lowest note to the top of my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. 'Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me." (III,ii, 371-380) — William Shakespeare

Our times seem to be so much about redefining where we are physical and where we're not. For me, it is really exciting to take the cutting edge technology and take it as far as it can get virtually, use it to describe/control the musicology or the behavior of raw natural elements, and then plug it with a sound source which is the most acoustic one there is - like gamelan and pipe organ. So you get the extremes: very virtual and very physical. In that way you shift the physicality. — Bjork

This organ lacked what he considered the most basic of facilities, such as the Thunder pedal, a 128-foot Earthquake pipe and a complete keyboard of animal noises, but he was certain there was something exciting that could be done in the bass register. — Terry Pratchett

You're playing the creepy vibe a little hard," I said. "Might as well go for broke, put on a black top hat and pipe in some organ music. — Jim Butcher

I played the organ when I went to military school, when I was 10. They had a huge organ, the second-largest pipe organ in New York State. I loved all the buttons and the gadgets. I've always been a gadget man. — Stephen Sondheim

I played a couple of ideas and then had this unusual texture underneath which was like this little granulated kind of pipe organ almost like a scratchy record which he started [inaudible] brilliantly. "Oh I love that song." And when things go fine, it's good. So he started loving that song and that song was used quite a lot in the movie which is very granulated stuff on the guitar. — A.R. Rahman