Quotes About Phrasing

#1. it's about phrasing, and being delicate, and getting just the right feeling from a song, the soul of it, so that something real happens inside you when a man opens his mouth to sing, and don't you want to feel something real rather than just having your poor earholes bashed in?" He

Zadie Smith

#2. I learned by listening to other people sing and doing impressions of them. And there are things no one can ever teach you, like phrasing. By listening to Sinatra, for instance - you felt that everything he sang had happened in his life.

Frankie Valli

#3. You had something. What was it?" he demanded.
"An alcohol-laced kiss," I said tightly. "Two, to be precise."
"From who?"
"From whom,I believe is the correct phrasing."
"All right, from-the-fuck-whom, Ms. Lane?"
Mac and Barrons

Karen Marie Moning

#4. I don't think of poetry as a 'rational' activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases which appeal more because of their sound than their meaning, and the movement and phrasing of a poem are very important to me.

Margaret Atwood

#5. I've tried to write songs for other people and it usually requires them singing it and then changing the phrasing. I can put a lot of words in a song, and one of the reasons is, I'm not that good of a singer, so I don't hold a lot of notes.

Craig Finn

#6. There are tools that help sharpen freestyle skills like having a diverse vernacular, some sense of music theory, being outspoken, phrasing, spacing, cross word puzzles, thesauruses, the ability to expand on an issue and embellish that with more descriptive terminology.

Myka 9

#7. The mistake that people make in stand-up is thinking they're profound or they're deep when there are so many people who have more worthwhile ways of phrasing things.

Colin Quinn

#8. Broadsheets can be scathing. But I have respect for broadsheet journalists because they haven't succumbed to degrading themselves, to writing pidgin English with all these terrible colloquialisms, the phrasing of which is just, like, embarrassing.

Peaches Geldof

#9. Even the king of phrasing, Frank Sinatra, did not do as well as Joe Cocker with his reinterpretation of 'Something' by George Harrison, which Sinatra called the greatest love song ever written.

Andrew Rosenthal

#10. The phrasing didn't work as well.

Paul Simon

#11. I was immediately taken with Geoff Muldaur's rich soulful voice, masterful phrasing and guitar playing when I first heard him.

Lucinda Williams

#12. Few novelists can be more scrupulous than Jane Austen as to the phrasing of the thoughts of their characters.

Mary Lascelles

#13. Though he had spoken of the subject many times, in the silence of his room he added the powerful kind of phrasing that would not have occurred to him as he spoke, because it's origins were in the collaboration of hand and pen.

Mark Helprin

#14. I listen to a lot of singers, because I find phrasing to be one of the most essential elements of playing.

Stefon Harris

#15. My introduction of Whitney was that if there's going to be one performer for the next generation who combined the beauty and lyric phrasing of a Lena Horne with those Gospel fiery roots of an Aretha Franklin, it would be Whitney Houston.

Clive Davis

#16. Going back and forth between Western Arabic and African countries clearly created the various musical backgrounds I could have and obviously influenced my professional attitude, my way of approaching both music composition and singing, particularly phrasing.

Rokia Traore

#17. I just wanted to show people - maybe I'm wrong - that I can still really sing. I can sing better than I ever have before. My intonation is way better, my timing, my phrasing - there's a lot more expression; I feel it's a more lived-in, soulful voice.

Dan Hill

#18. You do realize," he said, "that 'nauseated' actually means that you make other people sick. The correct phrasing would be 'I feel nauseous.

Dana Fredsti

#19. I discovered after going to music festivals that I am a rock fan. I love the guitars, the phrasing, and the abandon of rock fans.

Beyonce Knowles

#20. Wanting to be understood by an audience that didn't know Russian, I tried to paint musical pictures by emphasizing the phrasing, using voice color more boldly, and varying the shade and nuance.

Galina Vishnevskaya

#21. I'm just trying to write a good story, strictly from imagination. People just think it's random, they don't see the rewriting, phrasing of characters, choosing the words, bringing the world to light in which the characters live in. That creates an illusion that this is real.

Eric Jerome Dickey

#22. I talk about it a lot to my students. Musicality never came up in any of own writing education, and I can see why - we don't have the vocabulary for it. Phrasing is intuitive, and its difficult to articulate when it's on and when it's not.

Paul Lisicky

#23. From who?"
"From whom, I believe is the correct phrasing."
"All right, from-the-fuck-whom, Ms. Lane?

Karen Marie Moning

#24. A lot of those little things that I really like doing are just moments of cool articulation, just little moments of phrasing that probably go over everybody's head.

Steve Vai

#25. It is not a mystical thing, however, it is obvious and practical and I think that what the performer does is to try to get to that point with every choice you make from the phrasing in a tune to the choice of tunes.

Leo Kottke

#26. Longing, for everyone, is always there, isn't it? More intense at some times than others. You get closer to less longing - an odd metaphoric phrasing, I realize - then, you are further and longing more than ever again.

Susan Minot

#27. But it's only after you've played it on the road 20 or 30 times that it becomes really finished and polished ... and you realize what it means, and you get the phrasing right.

James Taylor

#28. (where the more distant phrasing can lend a veneer of respectability to the otherwise prurient-seeming habit of a naturalist spying on other creatures' intimate lives).

Marie Brennan

#29. Tragic deaths aren't avoidable. That's what Ezra said outside Sam's wake, and even though--to use Foster's phrasing--I didn't know anything about anything, I felt in this moment that Ezra was wrong. What often makes something tragic is that it can be avoided.

Emma Mills

#30. The happy phrasing of a compliment is one of the rarest of human gifts, and the happy delivery of it another.

Mark Twain

#31. I admire Tebaldi's tone; it's beautiful - also some beautiful phrasing. Sometimes, I actually wish I had her voice.

Maria Callas

#32. Willy DeVille knows the truth of a city street and the courage in a ghetto love song. And the harsh reality in his voice and phrasing is yesterday, today, and tomorrow - timeless in the same way that loneliness, no money, and troubles find each other and never quit for a minute.

Doc Pomus

#33. Nothing had been attempted like that, to lift Dad's voice, literally, off of that track and put it on a brand-new one, and then line it up, match it up, get the phrasing right. I remember listening - everyone listening at the end, and we were just enthralled. It was really wonderful.

Natalie Cole

#34. My favorite singer to this day is Nat King Cole. I've tried to emulate his phrasing. It is so absolutely beautiful to listen to his lovely voice.

Johnny Mathis

#35. I learned my phrasing from Frank. I loved him so much.

Eydie Gorme

#36. House Speaker Thomas Reed could destroy an argument or expose a fallacy in fewer words than anyone else. His language was vivid and picturesque. He had a way of phrasing things which was peculiarly apt and peculiarly his own.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#37. No doubt she would unfold it as soon as she was out of sight, but I felt secure in its odd phrasing. These

Kiera Cass

#38. I don't care if Margot is a Dame of the British Empire or older than myself. For me she represents eternal youth; there is an absolute musical quality in her beautiful body and phrasing. Because we are sincere and gifted, an intense abstract love is born between us every time we dance together.

Rudolf Nureyev

#39. I had great difficulties learning to play initially because I could not think rhythmically properly, although it's an even-paced rhythm, I was not phrasing properly, I was too Western. It took me a while to learn to think in needed form, and the only way I could learn was just by ear.

Richard Meale

#40. Listening to Dad's guitar, halting yet lovely in the search for phrasing, I thought: Fair is whatever God wants to do.

Leif Enger

#41. Happiness is like a genre of music that nearly everyone knows how to dance to. Happiness has a very simple tempo, catchy phrasing, and memorable lyrics. It's the song at the wedding that makes everyone excited to run to the dance floor.

T.K. Coleman

#42. It was nice to call my parents and proudly tell them, "My lady garden is going viral." In hindsight, that may have been a poor choice of phrasing.

Jenny Lawson

#43. If you mess up the tiniest little thing in the Beethoven concerto, or the phrasing isn't just exactly perfectly executed, Beethoven brings out the worst in the best violinist. You almost never hear a satisfying performance, because it doesn't play itself.

Joshua Bell

#44. Q'eeng had just attempted in the third dialect the traditional rightward schism greeting of "I offer you the bread of life," but his phrasing and accent had transmuted the statement into "Let us violate cakes together.

John Scalzi

#45. I just realized he was phrasing all of his questions as statements. Wasn't there a character in Alice in Wonderland who did that? Did Alice punch him in the face?

David Wong

#46. I don't need words. It's all in the phrasing.

Louis Armstrong

#47. Some players, they have all their licks memorized. They think about what they're going to play, but I try to think about what not to play. Tone and phrasing, that's what's important - less is more. The feeling, that's the thing.

Charlie Musselwhite

#48. Not only the words (vocabula) which the Holy Spirit and Scripture use are divine, but also the phrasing

Martin Luther

#49. So Aunt Jillian quit her job and hitched her wagon to Brant. Lived off food stamps and her savings account in a spare bedroom at Brant's house for two years. Then she brokered their first deal and all of the Sharps moved their bank account decimals seven places to the right.

Alessandra Torre

#50. I was a child of wealth, expected to do nothing but everything.

Alessandra Torre

#51. Whenever he gives advice it is always something as startling as an epigram, and yet as practical as the Bank of England.

G.K. Chesterton

#52. When you deserved it, even the mail could rape you.

Wally Lamb

#53. And her skin shone luminous and impossibly pale, as if it drank light from the moon.

Madeline Miller