Quotes about music

134 quotes · 92 authors

Quotes

  1. When you listen to music, you can transcend your own pain and turn towards another and feel bonded with the whole of humanity because you know that they have felt that grief and love. By expressing it, by communing with that song or picture, you realize you are not alone.

  2. We listen to sad music for the same reason we go to church or synagogue or the mosque. We long for the Garden of Eden, we long for Mecca, we long for Zion because we come into this world with the sense that there is a more perfect and beautiful world to which we belong, where we are no longer.

  3. These songs were the true names of things, spoken by the soul, so easily buried under the little busynesses of everyman everyday.

    p. 111

  4. That was how I came to understand, how I came to know why all these brothers wrote and talked so big. Even the Knowledged feared the streets. But the rhyme pad was a spell book—it summoned asphalt elementals, elder gods, and weeping ancestors, all of whom had your back. That summer, I knew what Fruitie was trying to say, that when under the aegis of , you never lived alone, you never walked alone.

    p. 111

  5. For the first time, he heard something that he knew to be music. He heard people singing. Behind him, across vast distances of space and time, from the place he had left, he thought he heard music too. But perhaps, it was only an echo.

    p. 180

  6. The times you lived through, the people you shared those times with — nothing brings it all to life like an old mix tape. It does a better job of storing up memories than actual brain tissue can do. Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they can add up to the story of a life.

  7. It's always that one song that gets to you. You can hide, but the song comes to find you.

  8. When we die, we will turn into songs, and we will hear each other and remember each other.

  9. “Music is a fine thing, but metal lasts.” He struck the table with two huge fingers to emphasize his point....

    As I left, I thought about what Kilvin had said. It was the first thing he had said to me that I did not agree with wholeheartedly. Metal rusts, I thought, music lasts forever.

    Time will eventually prove one of us right.

    p. 443

  10. Remember this son, if you forget everything else. A poet is a musician who can’t sing. Words have to find a man’s mind before they can touch his heart. And, some men’s minds are woeful small targets. Music touches their hearts directly, no matter how small or stubborn the mind of the man who listens.

    p. 113

  11. Mathematics thought that there were numbers associated with tones—frequencies, wavelengths. Music, at its most fundamental level, was math.

    p. 1040

  12. “I am a soldier, not a musician,” Kaladin said. “Besides, music is for women.”

    “All people are musicians,” Wit countered. “The question is whether or not they share their songs. As for music being feminine, it’s interesting that the woman who wrote that treatise—the one you all practically worship in Alethkar—decided that all of the feminine tasks involve sitting around having fun while all the masculine ones involve finding someone to stick a spear in you. Telling, eh?”

    p. 638