Quotes About Words And Music

“Okay. Scrabble, donuts, flowers, corndogs, pre-pubescent British wizards and indie music. Am I missing anything important?"
She's still blushing and it's like the heat in her face is trapping all the words inside of her. "What is it?" I ask, an involuntary grin tugging on my mouth. I love it when she blushes like this.
Amy sighs, looks up toward the chandelier, "You, Cole. I like you.”

— Autumn Doughton

“I did not know then that words and music are more deadly than any spear.”

— India Edghill

“I am telling you what I know-words have music and if you are a musician you will write to hear them.”

— E.L. Doctorow

“He slid inside her, his body moving over hers as she lay stretched out on her sofa, his kiss worshipping her mouth, his length embedded deep in her heat. He slid inside her, moved inside her, and there were no words. There were no words, no music, nothing but the rhythm of their hearts beating, the moans of their pleasure, the sound of their lovemaking. It was the most haunting, beautiful song Lauren had ever heard.
And it was enough. It was all she needed. For now, it was all she needed.”

— Lexxie Couper

“He wishes he were a skilled poet, it would fit his chosen image perfectly; the poor, tragic, tortured artiste. But he has no talent for words, neither for paints nor music; his uselessness is tremendously total.”

— Curtis Ackie

“We try to explain how we feel, but there aren't always the right words or the words we have fail. But with music, you can hear a piece and say, Yeah, that's it. That's exactly how I feel.”

— Carrie Arcos

“The main reason I became a teacher is that I like being the first one to introduce kids to words and music and people and numbers and concepts and idea that they have never heard about or thought about before. I like being the first one to tell them about Long John Silver and negative numbers and Beethoven and alliteration and "Oh, What a Beautiful Morning" and similes and right angles and Ebenezer Scrooge ... Just think about what you know today. You read. You write. You work with numbers. You solve problems. We take all these things for granted. But of course you haven't always read. You haven't always known how to write. You weren't born knowing how to subtract 199 from 600. Someone showed you. There was a moment when you moved from not knowing to knowing, from not understanding to understanding. That's why I became a teacher.”

— Phillip Done

“If you do not hear music in your words, you have put too much thought into your writing and not enough heart.”

— Terry Brooks

“The music lets me see the story but the story doesn't let me write the words.”

— Elizabeth J. Kolodziej

“Music overwhelmed me, soaked into my skin like water. I didn't have words for the squiggles and dashes across the pages, or the way his fingers stretched across the keys to make my heart race. If I could hear only one thing for the rest of my life, this was what I wanted.”

— Jodi Meadows

“If only my whole life could be words and music, if only everything else could slip away.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

“The words (she was looking at the window) sounded as if they were floating like flowers on water out there, cut off from them all, as if no one had said them, but they had come into existence of themselves. "And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves." She did not know what they meant, but, like music, the words seemed to be spoken by her own voice, outside her self, saying quite easily and naturally what had been in her mind the whole evening while she said different things.”

— Virginia Woolf

“Words cannot always do the work we need them to. Music is there for when words fail us.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

“If you can't prove it in words, it ain't gospel. Soul music is just an expression of the mind, but your spirit has to be made alive - that's the real part, the part that God speaks to.”

— Andrae Crouch

“A lot of the hip hop artists don't write music. They write words.”

— Roy Ayers

“When I was younger, I had a much better connection between words and music. Somewhere along the way, I had kind of an aspiration to disconnect them, to just kind of go into a totally musical world.”

— Edgar Meyer

“There was something about words and music together that allowed people to get nearest to honest truth about what was most difficult to say. Paradoxically, only through the essential instantaneity of music could you approach its eternal pertinence.”

— Gregory Maguire

“An album is a whole universe, and the recording studio is a three-dimensional kind of art space that I can fill with sound. Just as the album art and videos are ways of adding more dimensions to the words and music. I like to be involved in all of it because it's all of a piece.”

— Bat For Lashes

“When you're dealing with music without words, titles are more a means of identification than anything else. What's the point of getting lofty?”

— Branford Marsalis

“I cross things out more than I write them. And if I try to sing a line, and I know that it's written incorrectly, I get this weird sort of physical nausea, and my mouth curls up all strange. I guess that's why I always write the words first: because, if everything feels okay, I'm ready to put it to music.”

— Bill Callahan

“Opera is the original marriage of words and music, and there's a theatre element, a dramatic element. It's right up my alley.”

— Shane Koyczan

“His prayer, addressed neither to God nor saint, began with a shiver, as the chilly morning breeze crept through the chink of the carriage door to his feet, and ended in a trail of foolish words which he made to fit the insistent rhythm of the train; and silently, at intervals of four seconds, the telegraph-poles held the galloping notes of the music between punctual bars.”

— James Joyce

“People are amazed to see that I wrote all the words and music myself to 'Stan Freberg Presents The United States Of America.'”

— Stan Freberg

“Composers need words, but they do not necessarily need poetry. The Russian composer, Aleksandr Mossolov, who chose texts from newspaper small ads, had a good point to make. With revolutionary music, any text can be set to work.”

— James Fenton

“Always when I write my music, I take my guitar, and I improvise always with a melody, you know, lyrics in Spanish. But sometimes I use some words in English. I don't know why. Maybe because I listen to a lot of music in English.”

— Juanes

“My husband John Lennon was a very special man. A man of humble origin, he brought light and hope to the whole world with his words and music.”

— Yoko Ono

“It seems like I've been writing since birth! I started writing poems before I got to school. I wrote the class musical in first grade - both words and music. It was about a bunch of vegetables who got together in a salad. I played the chief carrot!”

— Jane Yolen

“'Words and Music' on Radio 3 is always a treat. Actors read passages of poetry and prose interspersed with music, and nobody tells you what it is. Later you can look it up online, but at the time you can't cheat.”

— Claire Tomalin

“Walter Pater said that all the arts aspire to the condition of music, but I've always felt that music aspires to the condition of words.”

— John Ashbery

“We have to make sure the music and the message and the words and all the elements come through in our songs and every time we appear in public.”

— Lauryn Hill

“Words are plastic these days. Small loans made to desperate people at exorbitant interest rates are called payday advances. A cheesy hotel paired with a seedy casino is called a resort. Any assemblage of frenetic images, bad music, and incoherent plot is called a major motion picture.”

— Dean Koontz

“I used to think that words and music could change the world, but look at the people who have made it. You see their faces all over the tabloids talking about their latest stint in rehab”

— Carolee Dean

“Poetry's work is not simply the recording of inner or outer perception; it makes by words and music new possibilities of perceiving”

— Jane Hirshfield

“It's odd to spend your vacation with someone else's music especially when you're alone. You're free to let loose, unobserved, but someone else has chosen the words you belt out in private, the rythms you can dance to like a fool.”

— Julia Glass

“Music must never offend the ear, but must please the listener, or, in other words, must never cease to be music.”

— Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

“A song can be more than words and music ... when sung with soul a song carries you to another world, to a place where no matter how much pain you feel, you are never alone.”

— Clay Aiken

“Words and music together create powerful, powerful things.”

— Craig Finn

“My [singing] style really has no style, because I try to sing each number differently. I've always believed that if style takes precedent over the words and music, the audience get's cheated. It's like when people see a fine play or movie. They imagine themselves in the leading role. I want them to imagine that they're singing - not just listening to someone else.”

— Judy Garland

“Double-check your voice mail message. Listen to your on-hold words and music. Write welcoming scripts for your telephone team. Pay attention to the music in your office and lobby areas. Make sure what your customers hear sounds good.”

— Ron Kaufman

“I gave up language for a while, and I started painting.And then I only listened to Miles Davis and other instrumental music to see how it felt to be without words.”

— Rosanne Cash

“An ecstasy is a thing that will not go into words; it feels like music.”

— Mark Twain

“The best way to get rid of the Devil, if you cannot kill it with the words of Holy Scripture, is to rail at and mock him. Music, too, is very good; music is hateful to him, and drives him far away.”

— Martin Luther

“A literary work can only be received through symbols, through concepts - for that is what words are; but cinema, like music, allows for utterly direct, emotional, sensuous perception of the work.”

— Andrei Tarkovsky

“Words move, music moves Only in time; but that which is only living Can only die. Words, after speech, reach Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern, Can words or music reach The stillness ...”

— T.S. Eliot

“God gave us music, so we play with our words.”

— Talib Kweli

“I'd spent five hours that morning trying to write a song that was meaningful and good, and I finally gave up and lay down. Then, "Nowhere Man" came, words and music, the whole damn thing, as I lay down ... Song writing is about getting the demon out of me. It's like being possessed. You try to go to sleep, but the song won't let you. So you have to get up and make it into something, and then you're allowed sleep.”

— John Lennon

“Every experience deeply felt in life needs to be passed along. Wheather it be through words and music, chiseled in stone, painted with a brush, or sewn with a needle, it is a way of reaching for immortality.”

— Thomas Jefferson

“Words are music, really.”

— Tom Waits

“The songs started as a soundscapes, and then came the words and music; each song took at least a year to make.”

— Justin Vernon

“Books and music saved me as a teenager because it was through them that I realized that I wasn't alone in my obsessive love for words and music.”

— Charles De Lint