Top 100 Quotes About Chopin
#1. Talking to Lee Child and discovering, from his chapter in The Chopin Manuscript, that he's even more of an audio geek than I am (as his chapter in Chopin proves).
David Hewson
#2. I loved Debussy, Stravinsky, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, anything with romantic melodies, especially the nocturnes. Nietzsche was a hero, especially with 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra.' He gets a bad rap; he's very misunderstood. He's a maker of individuals, and he was a teacher of teachers.
Joni Mitchell
#3. I used to get into the government car and switch on Chopin or someone I liked to hear at the end of a parliamentary day.
Joan Kirner
#4. But there was escape, too, even in those days, for there was Whistler living in the grey mists with a faded orange moon. The nocturne transformed itself into dreamy rooms with Chopin's music creating a mood that softened the hard core of self.
Mark Tobey
#5. Trying to capture the physicists' precise mathematical description of the quantum world with our crude words and mental images is like playing Chopin with a boxing glove on one hand and a catcher's mitt on the other.
George Johnson
#6. Just as surely as every new language mastered opens up a new world, so knowledge of a Beethoven, a Chopin, or a Schumann opens up a new world in spiritual beauty and thought.
Ignacy Jan Paderewski
#7. Hats off, gentlemen - a genius! If the mighty autocrat of the north knew what a dangerous enemy threatened him in Chopin's works in the simple tunes of his mazurkas, he would forbid this music. Chopin's works are canons buried in flowers.
Frederic Chopin
#8. You [Chopin] have in your fingers an orchestra of butterflies.
Adam Mickiewicz
#9. Nostalgia, more than anything, gives us the shudder of our own imperfection. This is why with Chopin we feel so little like gods.
Emil Cioran
#10. It's important to play the pieces that you feel you can play well. It was always my dream to play Bach - my first love and fascination - Chopin, and Szymanowski.
Rafal Blechacz
#11. I tell you a secret about Chopin, piano is his best friend. More. He tells piano all his secrets." - piano teacher Eleanora Sivan.
Anna Goldsworthy
#12. My mother was a very talented pianist, and she was a music teacher who hated to teach music, actually, but she loved to play, so I was brought up with Chopin, Debussy and Mozart.
Peter C. Doherty
#13. Descendants of pigeons once fed by Keats, Byron, George Sand, Chopin and many other famous lovers are still being fed, and the sudden sound when they all rise together, frightened away, is like the sound of giant sails flapping.
Anais Nin
#14. The Awakening, by Kate Chopin, and The Optimist's Daughter, by Eudora Welty.
Cheryl Strayed
#15. I used to play the piano by listening to it - like Chopin pieces, when I was, like, a little kid - and then the minute my parents got me lessons to read music, I couldn't do it anymore.
Eliza Coupe
#16. Sometimes I think, not so much am I a pianist, but a vampire. All my life I have lived off the blood of Chopin.
Arthur Rubinstein
#17. Ruth puts in all the tiddley bits and the expression and doesn't mind how many wrong notes she strikes, but with Jane it is accuracy or nothing. I don't know which Chopin would have hated more, Eleanor said, folding bread and butter into a thickness that would match her appetite.
Josephine Tey
#18. Something flickered in the distance, dressing the darkness in a soft veil of blue. Out of the blue came an explosion of sounds followed by the seamlessly expressed melancholy of Chopin's "Ballade no. 1.
Ella Leya
#19. I have owned and played a Steinway all my life. It's the best Beethoven piano. The best Chopin piano. And the best Ray Charles piano. I like it, too.
Randy Newman
#20. I really don't think I have that much of the gift; I have a little bit, but I wish I were Schubert or Chopin or Beethoven, though Beethoven had a very difficult time writing melody, too.
Gian Carlo Menotti
#21. My mother Elizabeth Ivey Brubeck was a pianist who studied with Dame Myra Hess and Tobias Matthey. As a child in California I used to listen to her play Chopin.
Dave Brubeck
#22. The cause of freedom, in music as elsewhere, is now very nearly triumphant; but at a time when its adversaries were many and powerful, we can hardly imagine the sacred bridge of liberty kept by a more stalwart trio than Schubert the Armorer, Chopin the Refiner, and Liszt the Thunderer.
Hugh Reginald Haweis
#23. You can't go home and listen to Chopin, and just use it.
Mick Farren
#24. The only work that can be compared to Chopin's Etudes, innovatively, where every note is essential and one becomes completely exposed, is the Brahms-Paganini variations. These are etudes - not as interesting musically as, say, the Brahms-Handel - but they are incredible.
Carlo Grante
#25. I think Bach is equally a romantic composer because he laid the seeds harmonically for people like Chopin and the great Romantics, Brahms, so it's difficult to you know all this like labelling and putting - I think Bach is attractive to musicians because he supersedes the labels.
Nigel Kennedy
#26. We may be sure that a genius like Mozart, were he born today, would write concertos like Chopin and not like Mozart.
Robert Schumann
#27. I play the piano and have been playing since I was 7, mainly classical Chopin, Beethoven, Mozart.
Kiana Tom
#28. Chopin has done for the piano what Schubert has done for the voice.
Frederic Chopin
#29. On Saturday afternoons when all the things are done in the house and there's no real work to be done, I play Bach and Chopin and turn it up real loudly and get a good bottle of chardonnay and sit out on my deck and look out at the garden.
Maya Angelou
#30. I love music. I have a fondness for Chopin, and I very much like his 'Raindrop Prelude.'
Daniel Tammet
#31. When you play Bach like Chopin, and Chopin like Bach, something good happens.
Pablo Casals
#32. Yeah. I like Chopin. I feel like Chopin is 'emo.' Do you like Chopin?
Tao Lin
#33. We need more bodies, 'cause it's not looking enough like the last scene in Hamlet already.
Chopper Jim Chopin
Dana Stabenow
#34. Chopin's rubato possessed an unshakeable emotional logic. It always justified itself by a strengthening or weakening melodic line, by exaggeration or affectation.
Karol Mikuli
#35. I cannot listen to Beethoven or Mahler or Chopin or Bach when I write because those composers require you stop what you are doing and listen.
Antonio Damasio
#36. Beethoven for listening; Liszt, Chopin, and Beethoven for playing as well as Bach and Prokofiev and so on. If I kept going, this list would spiral. It's as wide as literature; in fact, it is probably wider.
William Golding
#37. I love Arthur Rubinstein, especially his live recordings. I think his Chopin Mazurkas, his interpretation of the Polonaises, and the Concertos of Chopin are just incredible. When I was a child, I wanted to play more and more Chopin because of his recordings.
Rafal Blechacz
#38. If you think you're going to have an eternity in which you can talk to Mozart and Chopin and Schopenhauer on a cloud and learn stuff and you know really get to grips with knowledge and understanding and so you won't bother now, I think it's a terrible, a terrible mistake.
Stephen Fry
#39. It's all magic to me. Country to punk rock, all of it. Chopin to Kurt Cobain. But it always all comes back to punk for me, because that was the last time, punk rock or grunge rock, was the last time that passion ruled the airwaves.
James Marsters
#40. I've not been an admirer of contemporary music since punk rock went off the boil in 1977, but once a year I'll listen to 'Spiral Scratch' by the Buzzcocks, or 'Hippy Hippy Shake' by the Swinging Blue Jeans. Otherwise, I can put up with Chopin or shakuhachi flute in the background.
Billy Childish
#41. After Chopin's death, Polish patriots cut up his body to take out his heart. They nationalized this poor muscle and buried it in Poland.
A dead person is treated either as trash or as a symbol. Either way, it's the same disrespect to his vanished individuality.
Milan Kundera
#42. Discs of umbrellas poured over suburban terraces with the smooth round ebullience of a Chopin waltz. They sat in the distance under the lugubrious dripping elms, elms like maps of Europe, elms frayed at the end like bits of chartreuse wool, elms heavy and bunchy as sour grapes.
Zelda Fitzgerald
#43. 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
#44. I always try to avoid looking at the section where my books would be shelved, but I do know that my most reliable neighbor to the right is Kate Chopin's 'The Awakening', which is dispiriting. That's a book I don't want to re-read.
Susan Choi
#45. I've always been a fan of the melancholy, like Morrissey. I grew up playing classical nocturnes like Chopin and Debussy on piano, so I write really melancholy lyrics and melodies
Blake Lewis
#46. Feeling is chocolate plus the
dry texture of a wolfskin
on which we sparawled by cosy gas
while mother unravelled
ivory knots of Chopin.
Chris Wallace-Crabbe
#47. I got obsessed with classical music, I got obsessed with Chopin, with playing the piano.
Gary Oldman
#48. True originality has its foundations in the soul, not in the mind, and when there is an effort to create something different it is usually a failure. Beethoven or Schumann or Chopin did not try to be original. They were original.
Ignacy Jan Paderewski
#49. I've got great joy from rediscovering Western music. I love Schumann and Chopin, and those amazing symphonies of Bruckner.
John Tavener
#51. The music teacher came twice a week to bridge the awful gap between Dorothy and Chopin.
George Ade
#52. Chopin
Two embalmers at work upon a minor poetthe scent of tuberosesAutumn rain.
H.L. Mencken
#53. I do not sing nor play, but I adore music, particularly Chopin. I like him because I cannot understand him.
Mary MacLane
#54. When I was a kid, I'd practise Chopin on piano - and I love Chopin! He's my dawg! Then I'd go out on the stoop and blast the radio. I'm from New York, the concrete jungle. Hip-hop influenced me from day one.
Alicia Keys
#56. A great artist can really enter the logic of any particular mazurka and fully understand the language of Chopin's music.
Rafal Blechacz
#57. Liszt's so-called piano music is nothing but Chopin and brandy.
James Huneker
#58. I liked Bach played the way people expect Chopin to be played, and vice versa.
Eleanor Bron
#59. And you have eyes the colour of beech leaves in October. Yet no one is ever allowed to look into them.
Kate Chopin
#60. He reproached his wife with her inattention, her habitual neglect of the children. If it was not a mother's place to look after children, whose on earth was it? He himself had his hands full with his brokerage business.
Kate Chopin
#61. Mrs. Pontellier gave over being astonished, and concluded that wonders would never cease.
Kate Chopin
#62. What shall we do there?" "Climb up the hill to the old fort and look at the little wriggling gold snakes, and watch the lizards sun themselves.
Kate Chopin
#63. She felt like a chess player who, by the clever handling of his pieces, sees the game taking the course intended. Her eyes were bright and tender with a smile as they glanced up into his; and her lips looked hungry for the kiss which they invited.
Kate Chopin
#64. Some people are born with a vital and responsive energy. It not only enables them to keep abreast of the times; it qualifies them to furnish in their own personality a good bit of the motive power to the mad pace.
Kate Chopin
#65. She felt moved to read the book in secret and solitude, though none of the others had done so, - to hide it from view at the sound of approaching footsteps.
Kate Chopin
#66. The bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings. It is a sad spectacle to see the weaklings bruised, exhausted, fluttering back to earth.
Kate Chopin
#67. Sometimes I feel this summer as if I were walking through the green meadow again, idly, aimlessly, unthinking and unguided.
Kate Chopin
#68. Concerts are never real music, you have to give up the idea of hearing in them all the most beautiful things of art.
Frederic Chopin
#69. If the newspapers cut me up so much that I shall not venture before the world again, I have resolved to become a house painter; that would be as easy as anything else, and I should, at any rate, still be an artist!
Frederic Chopin
#70. There are periods of despondency and suffering which take possession of me. But I don't want anything but my own way. That is wanting a good deal, of course, when you have to trample upon the lives, the hearts, the prejudices of others-
Kate Chopin
#71. Her marriage to Leonce Pontellier was purely an accident, in this respect resembling many other marriages which masquerade as the decrees of Fate.
Kate Chopin
#72. The peace and beauty of a spring day had descended upon the earth like a benediction.
Kate Chopin
#73. The lovers were just entering the grounds of the pension. They were leaning toward each other as the water oaks bent from the sea. There was not a particle of earth beneath their feet. Their heads might have been turned upside down, so absolutely did they tread upon blue ether.
Kate Chopin
#74. He greatly valued his possessions, chiefly because they were his, and derived genuine pleasure from contemplating a painting, a statuette, a rare lace curtain - no matter what - after he had bought it and placed it among his household gods.
Kate Chopin
#75. Man is never always happy, and very often only a brief period of happiness is granted him in this world; so why escape from this dream which cannot last long?
Frederic Chopin
#76. The children appeared before her like antagonists who had overcome her; who had overpowered and sought to drag her into the soul's slavery for the rest of her days.
Kate Chopin
#77. The past was nothing to her; offered no lesson which she was willing to heed. The future was a mystery which she never attempted to penetrate. The present alone was significant.
Kate Chopin
#78. There was something in her attitude, in her whole appearance when she leaned her head against the high-backed chair and spread her arms, which suggested the regal woman, the one who rules, who looks on, who stands alone.
Kate Chopin
#79. Having nothing to do, I am correcting the Paris edition of Bach; not only the engraver's mistakes, but also the mistakes hallowed by those who are supposed to understand Bach (I have no pretensions to understand better, but I do think that sometimes I can guess).
Frederic Chopin
#80. By all the codes which I am acquainted with, I am a devilishly wicked specimen of the sex.
Kate Chopin
#82. To be a great composer requires immense experience ... One acquires this by listening not only to other men's work, but above all to one's own!
Frederic Chopin
#83. My piano has not yet arrived. How did you send it? By Marseilles or by Perpignan? I dream music but I cannot make any because here there are not any pianos ... in this respect this is a savage country.
Frederic Chopin
#84. Edna had once told Madame Ratignolle that she would never sacrifice herself for her children; or for anyone.
I would give up the unessential; I would give my money, I would give my life for my children; but I wouldn't give myself.
Kate Chopin
#85. There are some people who leave impressions not so lasting as the imprint of an oar upon the water.
Kate Chopin
#88. I don't mind walking. I always feel so sorry for women who don't like to walk; they miss so much
so many rare little glimpses of life; and we women learn so little of life on the whole.
Kate Chopin
#89. I hope you won't completely forget me.
Kate Chopin
#90. I trust it will not be giving away professional secrets to say that many readers would be surprised, perhaps shocked, at the questions which some newspaper editors will put to a defenseless woman under the guise of flattery.
Kate Chopin
#91. The earth is suffocating ... Swear to make them cut me open, so that I won't be buried alive.
Frederic Chopin
#92. So, having dried my tear-swollen eyelids, I take up my pen to inquire of you, are you alive or did you die? If you are dead, please let me know, and I will tell the cook, for ever since she heard about it she has been saying her prayers.
Frederic Chopin
#93. So does he live, seeking, finding, joying and suffering.
Kate Chopin
#94. When one does a thing, it appears good, otherwise one would not write it. Only later comes reflection, and one discards or accepts the thing. Time is the best censor, and patience a most excellent teacher.
Frederic Chopin
#95. She liked then to wander alone into strange and unfamiliar places. She discovered many a sunny, sleepy corner, fashioned to dream in.
Kate Chopin
#96. Oh, how hard it must be to die anywhere but in one's birthplace.
Frederic Chopin
#97. I don't know where there can be so many pianists as in Paris, so many asses and so many virtuosi.
Frederic Chopin
#98. The Ratignolles understood each other perfectly. If ever the fusion of two human beings into one has been accomplished on this sphere it was surely in their union.
Kate Chopin
#99. I wish I could throw off the thoughts which poison my happiness, and yet I take a kind of pleasure in indulging them.
Frederic Chopin
#100. Par exemple! I never had to ask. You were always there under my feet, like a troublesome cat." "You mean like an adoring dog. And just as soon as Ratignolle appeared on the scene, then it WAS like a dog. 'Passez! Adieu! Allez vous-en!
Kate Chopin
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