Quotes & Sayings About Quartets

And if, as all philosophers on the subject have noted, art is a human activity that relies on the senses to reach the soul, did it not also stand to reason that dogs
at least dogs of Mr. Bones' caliber
would have it in them to feel a similar aesthetic impulse? Would they not, in other words, be able to appreciate art? As far as Willy knew, no one had ever thought of this before. Did that make him the first man in recorded history to believe such a thing was possible? No matter. It was an idea whose time had come. If dogs were beyond the pull of oil paintings and string quartets, who was to say they wouldn't respond to an art based on the sense of smell? Why not an olfactory art? Why not an art for dogs that dealt with the world as dogs knew it? — Paul Auster

I realized very early that I was never going to make by living by writing string quartets. But I wanted to write music and I didn't want to have to do anything else. — Richard Rodney Bennett

These stories at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationary store, when almost everybody wore a hat. Here is the last of that generation of chain smokers who woke to the world in the morning with their coughing, who used to get stoned at cocktail parties and perform obsolete dance steps like 'the Cleveland Chicken,' sail for Europe on ships, who were nostalgic for love and happiness, and whose gods were as ancient as yours and mine, whoever you are. — John Cheever

Why should a novelist not also be a historian? To force unnatural divisions within the English language is to work against its capacious and accommodating nature. To expect a writer to produce only novels, or only histories, is equivalent to demanding from a composer that he or she write only string quartets or piano sonatas. — Peter Ackroyd

T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets, William Blake's "Proverbs of Hell," and Walt Whitman's Song of Myself. I — Robin Rinaldi

Why, I thought sadly, as he returned with his topcoat over his arm, why hadn't my mother married someone like him - ? Or Mr. Bracegirdle? somebody she actually had something in common with - older maybe but personable, someone who enjoyed galleries and string quartets and poking around used book stores, someone attentive, cultivated, kind? Who would have appreciated her, and bought her pretty clothes and taken her to Paris for her birthday, and given her the life she deserved? It wouldn't have been hard for her to find someone like that, if she'd tried. — Donna Tartt

As an improviser I'm now pretty comfortable with trios, so I'm thinking of working up to quartets. — Fred Frith

[Art] would have helped us survive in the Pleistocene - in the period, say, 1.6 million years ago until fairly recently. The kind of imaginative abilities that artists have and that we all have in the appreciation of art - to appreciate Jane Austen, the late quartets of Beethoven. — Denis Dutton

I grew up listening to the quartets and I loved that so much that I wanted to see if I could make music and make it happen. It was just a series of events ... me going to concerts and saying "I think I can do that". — Bill Gaither

I would give my best quartet for a good razor, — Joseph Haydn

These stories seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat. — John Cheever

Part of me is probably more conservative than people realise. I like my old string quartets, I don't like music that's trippy for trippy's sake. — Bjork

The playwright Edward Albee has characterized [the suddenness of the appearance of fruits and flowers in evolutionary history] as 'that heartbreaking second when it all got together: the sugars and the acids and the ultraviolets, and the next thing you knew there were tangerines and string quartets. — Adam Leith Gollner

The past and future / Are conquered, and reconciled. — T. S. Eliot

There was one thing Beethoven didn't do. When one of his string quartets was played, you can believe the second violin wasn't improvising. — Wynton Marsalis

We spend most of the day together at school, but not in a way that limits our interactions with other people. If anything, we incorporate our friends into what we have between us. We exist as individuals. We exist as a pair. We exist as parts of trios, quartets, and so on. And it all feels right. — David Levithan

Shostakovich's final pieces, his quartets, are scratching the surface of another world. — Simon McBurney

They were always nice to Jess when he went over, but then they would suddenly begin talking about French politics or string quartets (which he at first thought was a square box made out of string), or how to save the timber wolves or redwoods or singing whales, and he was scared to open his mouth and show once and for all how dumb he was. — Katherine Paterson

The Quartets have been a major part of my work. — Elliott Carter

It seems to me the structure of the Quartets is too imposed. — Paul Muldoon

I love to write quartets. One could say that this is a mania. — Heitor Villa-Lobos

I tried to resist his overtures, but he plied me with symphonies, quartets, chamber music, and cantatas. — S.J Perelman

In his late quartets, Beethoven introduces an element that shouldn't be there, that should be left for meditation, though I love them. I can see that through them came Wagner and Mahler and Schoenberg and Berg. And then came Tracey Emin. And I can see it all as one downward path. — John Tavener

There are no more barbershop quartets wearing boaters, even though I still like them. Life goes on. — Tina Weymouth

Beethoven's string quartets express pain itself; it is not MY pain. — Karen Armstrong

Great works of art in all cultures succeed in capturing within the constraints of their form both the pathos of anguish and a vision of its resolution. Take, for example, the languorous sentences of Proust or the haiku of Basho, the late quartets and sonatas of Beethoven, the tragicomic brushwork of Sengai or the daunting canvases of Rothko, the luminous self-portraits of Rembrandt and Hakuin. Such works achieve their resolution not through consoling or romantic images whereby anguish is transcended. They accept anguish without being overwhelmed by it. They reveal anguish as that which gives beauty its dignity and depth. — Stephen Batchelor

Beethoven's last quartets were written by a deaf man and should only be listened to by a deaf man. — Thomas Beecham

Many consider that Shostakovich is the greatest 20th-century composer. In his 15 symphonies, 15 quartets, and in other works he demonstrated mastery of the largest and most challenging forms with music of great emotional power and technical invention ... All his works are marked by emotional extremes - tragic intensity, grotesque and bizarre wit, humour, parody, and savage sarcasm. — Dmitri Shostakovich

It seems, as one becomes older, / That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence," wrote T. S. Eliot. Four Quartets, which meditates on time, age, and memory, goes on to say, "We had the experience but missed the meaning, / And approach to the meaning restores the experience / In a different form, beyond any meaning. — James Hillman

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

Wind now Sweeping over my Bare Back
I wish I could wrap up the glitter star-green of this moment and hand it to you like an angel gift.
Give you the heat lightning flying in jagged silence over the distant mountains. And the smell of September prairie grass and the even fainter scent of October pine now descending ...
Give you the invisible sage wind whisking past your cheeks. And the cricket quartets and frog symphonies that play near the creek's edge.
To collect these sensations like a scientist of the soul and give them to you in their finest hour of coincidence and destiny. — Carew Papritz

There is, it seems to us, At best, only a limited value In the knowledge derived from experience. — T. S. Eliot

We used to play the underground clubs like the UFO, and Middle Earth, and they were great because they would have on things like a poet, string quartets, and then a rock band! It was kinda cool! — Alvin Lee

My dad used to sing in a quartet. He loved everything: adult contemporary, anything smooth. He'd listen to the quartets. — Keri Hilson

I listen to music when I write. I need the musical background. Classical music. I'm behind the times. I'm still with Baroque music, Gregorian chant, the requiems, and with the quartets of Beethoven and Brahms. That is what I need for the climate, for the surroundings, for the landscape: the music. — Elie Wiesel

In order to possess what you do not possess, you must go by the way of dispossession. — T. S. Eliot

While I'm working, I stick with music that won't distract me - the dub stylings of Scientist and King Tubby, maybe some Beethoven string quartets. — Adam Mansbach

I cannot work and listen to Wagner at the same time, nor Mahler, nor Beethoven's late quartets. I enjoy listening to Chopin's piano music when I work. — I.M. Pei

Or a saint who had spent all his years preparing for his grand entry into heaven, only to discover on his deathbed that heaven was not some blue expanse full of angelic string quartets and opalescent clouds, but an eternity granted for reliving one's happiest moments, and that he had none to remember; — Olga Grushin

The pieces that have survived, the ones that we all love, were not all popular in their time. Just look at Beethoven's late string quartets. The music that the musical community selects, however, is usually the very best. — David Finckel

The great thing about string quartets is the players are kind of like family. They work really well as a unit, so you can write things that let them use those talents of association and intuition-all the things they've developed together as a group. — Terry Riley

I don't know that I make a big distinction between the big pieces and the little pieces, because I don't experience them in that way. I mean, by the same token, you're out touring with a band and then you're writing string quartets, and in a funny way, isn't it all the same, in a way? It's all just music. — Philip Glass

It was the quartets of Beethoven (numbers 12,13,14, and 15) which over fifty years, created and expanded the the audience of listeners to the quartets of Beethoven, thus achieving, as all masterpieces do, progress if not in the quality of artists, at least in the company of minds, which is largely composed these days of what was missing when the work appeared: people capable of liking it. — Marcel Proust

Some people write string quartets, some grow lettuce and tomatoes. There have to be a few who build railroad stations, — Haruki Murakami

My wife and I just started listening to the late Beethoven Quartets together, an activity I recommend for all married couples, but that doesn't really mean that I'm finished reading. — Clive James