Top 80 Ballad Quotes
#1. It's the subtleties of a ballad that truly make it beautiful - and it's all in the way you present it to the listener.
Natalie Cole
#2. Would you believe that Sammy Davis, Jr. taught me how to sing a ballad? 'You can be in an arena,' he said, 'and you should be able to hold their attention.'
Gladys Knight
#3. Celebrated in the Bob Dylan ballad 'Joey,' Crazy Joe Gallo was a charismatic beatnik gangster whose forays into Greenwich Village in the 1960s inspired his bloody revolution against the Mafia.
Tom Folsom
#4. THE BALLAD OF READING GOAL: The vilest deeds, like poison weeds, Bloom well in prison air; It is only what is good in Man That wastes and withers there. Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate, And the Warder is Despair.
Emma Goldman
#5. Like the Society for Creative Anachronism, The Ballad of the White Horse depicted "the Middle Ages as they should have been." Chesterton's ballad made a lasting impression on Robert E. Howard, who praised it in letters to his friend Clyde Smith.
Joseph Laycock
#6. So I did 'Something Happened on the Way to Heaven' and the original version is a ballad. The original Phil record is uptempo but we slowed it down and made it a ballad.
Deborah Cox
#7. I have a passion for ballad ... They are the gypsy children of song, born under green hedgerows in the leafy lanes and bypaths of literature,
in the genial Summertime.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#8. And like the old soldier in that ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away, an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the sight to see that duty.
Douglas MacArthur
#9. I admire the ballad form most of all. Stories are irresistible. I've always had a passion for stories, the endings being of particular importance.
David Massengill
#10. 'The Girls,' by Lori Lansens, is a ballad, a melancholy song of two very strange, enchanted girls who live out their peculiar, ordinary lives in a rural corner of Canada.
Stacey D'Erasmo
#11. To sing the ballad with a knowingness about what you are talking about. If it's somebody else's lyric, and the message is a little unusual for you, it requires that you learn that new message.
Al Jarreau
#12. All night i have been making songs for you in my head. A lay for your eyes, a ballad for your lips, a duet to your breasts. I will ot sing them, through. They were poor things, unworthy of such beauty.
George R R Martin
#13. It's all heartbreak, death, and unrequited love." "Well, that is what most songs are about," said Will. "Requited love is ideal but doesn't make much of a ballad
Cassandra Clare
#14. The pleasures of love proceed successively from a distich to a quatrain, from a quatrain to a sonnet, from a sonnet to a ballad, from a ballad to an ode, from an ode to a cantata, and from a cantata to a dithyramb. A husband who begins with the dithyramb is a fool.
Honore De Balzac
#15. [of Nan Goldin] In an afterword to Ballad written in 2012, she declared: 'I decided as a young girl I was going to leave a record of my life and experience that no one could rewrite or deny.
Olivia Laing
#16. The subconscious leaves its fingerprints, but there's a stranger down there, too. A hell of a weird guy who knows a hell of a lot. (Ballad of the Flexible Bullet)
Stephen King
#17. You know One Direction do a lot of up tempo songs, but when they did that Ed Sheeran song 'Little Things,' that was probably their biggest song off their last album, so it shows you that a ballad never goes out of fashion.
Shane Filan
#18. During the 'ballad' years for me, the politics was latent; I was just falling in love with the ballads and my boyfriend. And there was the beauty of the songs.
Joan Baez
#19. First is a poem, a ballad, out of Scotland. You may say there is no king in it, and of course there isn't, which is what makes it so sad. The last line of the third verse, 'O he might hae been a king' is so sad that I don't like to look at it with both eyes at once.
William Mayne
#20. The people who live happily ever after - they don't appear in the history books. They just fade away. I reckon that's what happiness is.
Pauline Foster - " The Ballad of Tom Dooley ", Sharyn McCrumb, p. 271
Sharyn McCrumb
#21. I would start off with a lively rag, then would come a ballad, followed by a comedy song and a novelty number, and finally, the hot song. In this way, I left the stage with the audience laughing their heads off.
Sophie Tucker
#22. Too many musicians rush through everything with too many notes. I need time to take the picture. A ballad should be a ballad. It's important to understand what the song is saying, and learn how to tell the story. It takes time. I can't rush it. I really can't rush it.
Shirley Horn
#23. I'm a huge fan of 'Heart On My Sleeve' - I think it has a 'Take That' feel to it! John Shanks and James Morrison wrote the track, and we spoke to Sony and asked if we could reference a 'Greatest Day'/'Rule The World' sound to make that epic ballad. I think it does the job.
Olly Murs
#24. You are enough, you are worth it, Worth every ballad, worth every word, every action.
R. YS Perez
#26. Oh, I'm a ballad queen for sure ... I don't dig dance stuff very much but I seem to hit the charts with it. Go figure ...
Phyllis Hyman
#27. I love a ballad but even too well if it be doleful matter merrily set down, or a very pleasant thing indeed and sung lamentably.
William Shakespeare
#28. To me, ballads are special, because you can have a pop song that'll be know for three weeks and then you'll hear nothing else about it. Nobody else will record it and it'll just be gone. But if you do a good ballad, it'll be in the world forever.
Michael Jackson
#29. I wanted to bring back that big, ballad type of music that we used to love so much. Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, when they first came out, that's what I grew up singing.
LaToya London
#31. Her ballad did nothing to make the serpants lovely. Her ballad hid nothing of their dread. But the music itself spoke of faith and certainty; the melody announced the presence of God.
Walter Wangerin Jr.
#32. In the future, I see me as being my own artist and definitely not a ballad singer!
Thia Megia
#33. The beauty of science fiction is its open canvas. You can hypothesize about any element of the world. It doesn't have to be laser battles and things exploding, you can be JG Ballad and maybe just change one little thing about the real world and that becomes science fiction.
Duncan Jones
#34. I was kind of known as a ballad singer. People would send ballads. Some of them would go over my shoulder and float off the top of my head, and I just didn't feel anything. Then I would hear a song that would absolutely shake me.
Rita Coolidge
#35. There is no real way to categorize McLean's 'American Pie' for its hybrid of modern poetry and folk ballad, beer-hall chant and high-art rock.
Douglas Brinkley
#36. Like the old soldier of the ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away, an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Goodbye.
Douglas MacArthur
#37. I think I've heard that ballad," I said. "It's beautiful but it ends sadly.
Rachel Hartman
#38. Write to me your most perfect epitaph, or I shall compare a poet to a lecturer. Thou art more Spartan than a ballad monger who makes his living as a Wal-Mart greeter;
Scott Jonathan Nixon
#39. In eternity this world will be like Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets.
Marilynne Robinson
#40. 'The Ballad of Black Tom' was written, in part, during the latest round of arguments about H. P. Lovecraft's legacy as both a great writer and a prejudiced man. I grew up worshipping the guy, so this issue felt quite personal to me.
Victor LaValle
#41. I wrote a song with Kara DioGuardi called 'What If,' and it's a really beautiful song. It's kind of like a rock ballad. There's a lot of guitars and drums in it.
Ashley Tisdale
#42. And all men kill the thing they love,
By all let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!"
Ballad of Reading Gaol, 1898
Oscar Wilde
#43. There's a story behind every old ballad or work song or nonsense song that I ever knew. Sometimes it's a fascinating story. A story of people struggling for freedom, struggling to get along in this old world.
Pete Seeger
#44. One of Mr. [Thomas] Hardy's ancestors must have married a weeping willow. There are pages and pages in his collected poems which are simply plain narratives in ballad form of how an unenjoyable time was had by all.
Rebecca West
#45. Lee Morgan used to stand behind me when I was playing a ballad and he'd be hollering, "Play the pretty notes, man, play the pretty notes." I thought I was playing the pretty notes, but you know, things like that help you to reach a little further.
Gary Bartz
#46. When I have sung my songs to you, I'll sing no more,' goes the old ballad. But for one faithful listener, Nelson Eddy is still singing.
Ruskin Bond
#47. I had rather be a Kitten, and cry mew, Than one of these same Meeter Ballad-mongers: I had rather heare a Brazen Candlestick turn'd, Or a dry Wheele grate on the Axle-tree, And that would set my teeth nothing an edge, Nothing so much, as mincing Poetrie ...
William Shakespeare
#48. But I think beautiful is simple and elegant, like a ballad with simple harmony.
John Fogerty
#49. Although Lewis Carroll thought of The Hunting of the Snark as a nonsense ballad for children, it is hard to imagine - in fact one shudders to imagine - a child of today reading and enjoying it.
Martin Gardner
#50. Being that I am of a high intellect, I find cursing distasteful and ill mannered. If that were not the case, however, I would compose a creative, innovative ballad of cursing and recite it at this moment," Elle announced,
K.M. Shea
#51. That was the ballad of suburbia: give me loud to drown out the silence.
Stephanie Kuehnert
#53. The farmer's daughter hath soft brown hair And I met with a ballad, I can't say where, That wholly consisted of lines like these.
Charles Stuart Calverley
#54. I like "God Give Me the Strength" very much. It's not really a blues and to call it a ballad is absurd. I don't know, its mid-tempo. Mark (St. John) actually wrote it and I think its very telling of our lives in the 60s. Its just a good song, ya know ...
Dick Taylor
#55. At four lines, with the quatrain, we reach the basic stanza form familiar from a whole range of English poetic practice. This is the length of the ballad stanza, the verse of a hymn, and innumerable other kinds of verse.
James Fenton
#56. When I first heard that song, it was a ballad but it had a lot more. It felt like a gospel song when I first heard it and it just moved me.
Deborah Cox
#57. Well, bugger me," cried Jonas when he saw Richie with his bow, "is it Robin Hood or Adam Bell come to save us? Nay, it's Richie O'the Bow, hero of ballad and song!
David Pilling
#58. PEASEBLOSSOM
A gloaming peace this evening with it brings
In the countryside where we lay our scene
Toad-ballad accompan'd, crickets sing,
and cupcake crumbs make fairy hands unclean.
An indignant Moth squeaked, There were cupcakes?!
Lisa Mantchev
#59. For a ballad's a thing you expect to find lies in.
Samuel Lover
#60. They trapped the Lion on Shamu's plain; They weighted his limbs with an iron chain; They cried aloud in the trumpet-blast, They cried, "The lion is caged at last!" Woe to the Cities of river and plain If ever the Lion stalks again! - Old Ballad.
Robert E. Howard
#61. I felt like a guy in a cell being stared at longingly by a naked one-hundred-and-ten-kilo lifer. You know, sooner or later, that something unpleasant is going to happen to you.
-The Ballad of the Low Lifes, by Enrico Remmert (2003), P. 20
Enrico Remmert
#62. The summer lasted a long long time, like verse after verse of a ballad, but when it ended, it ended like a man falling dead in the street of heart trouble. One night, all in one night, severe winter came, a white horse of snow rolling over Bountiful, snorting and rolling in its meadows, its fields.
Ardyth Kennelly
#63. Gaga is a gorgeous singer, and when she sings a great ballad, I get goose bumps.
Tony Bennett
#64. Well first of all, I'm a singer. I sing since I talk. So the great ballad singers, the people that sang with so much feeling, jazz, blues, all those singers, they were songs that I listened to, records that my mom played for me, and then later I bought.
Gloria Estefan
#65. I sang my song called "In This Song." David Foster wrote the song for me. I thought that I should sing a ballad song.
Charice Pempengco
#66. Now ballads, I can mess around and get up on somebody on a ballad. People ain't seen it yet, but I can mess around and get up in there. I've had Ruben Studdard up in my house, Brian McKnight, Tank. Every once in a while I throw down with them.
Jamie Foxx
#67. That innate love of melody, which she had inherited from her ballad-singing mother, gave the simplest music a power which could well-nigh drag her heart out of her bosom at times.
Thomas Hardy
#68. Sigh. Here's another fine woman that historians can't believe was real. Of course she was real. Not only is there a splendid Chinese poem called "The Ballad of Mulan", there is also n excellent cartoon by Disney.
Sandi Toksvig
#69. My love was Bob Dylan, but as I got older I realized a good ballad was a good ballad.
Bonnie Raitt
#70. Ah! Happy they whose hearts can break
And peace of pardon win!
How else may man make straight his path
And cleanse his soul from sin?
How else but through a broken heart
May the Lord Christ enter in?
Oscar Wilde
#71. I realize how arrogant it is to claim I can sort what is relevant from what is irrelevant.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#72. I've been waiting for you forever."
"Forever' as in several hundred years, or forever as in since my lesson began?
Maggie Stiefvater
#73. Seasons didn't come behind the nicotine-stained walls of Mountain City's prison, so Harm always imagined it spring--the locust trees clustered with shaggy white blooms, the wet woods flecked with bloodroot, and wild roses and honeysuckle flashing white among the chestnuts on the mountainsides...
Sharyn McCrumb
#74. Climbed that roost, alighted right there.
Made mush of his head for the onlooker bears.
A two-pronger her prize, a meat most rare.
Do-gooders will pay. Do-gooders will fear.
Darrell Drake
#75. With the poetry of plain speaking, Shannon Hitchcock recreates the daily drama of a vanished world.
Richard Peck
#76. As for my feet, the little feet
You used to call so pretty,
There's one, I know, in Bedford Row,
The t'other's in the City.
Thomas Hood
#78. Wild steep mountains floating in a haze of cloud...a sea of green trees swallowing the hills and valleys, and curling around the trails and rivers, with the wind in the leaves as its tide.
Sharyn McCrumb
#80. But neither milk-white rose nor red
May bloom in prison air;
The shard, the pebble, and the flint,
Are what they give us there:
For flowers have been known to heal
A common man's despair.
Oscar Wilde
