Sonata Quotes

#1. I want nothing better, more flexible or more complete than the sonata form, which contains everything necessary for my structural purposes.

Sergei Prokofiev

#2. All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead.

Samuel Beckett

#3. Really important books to me are the classics. I try very hard to read them well - you know, especially once I got serious about writing. So, reading Tolstoy several times - 'War and Peace,' 'The Kreutzer Sonata' - all those were really important to me.

Karl Marlantes

#4. Once, when I remarked that she looked like a disoriented bandicoot, she leapt up from the piano bench and beat me within an inch of my life with a rolled-up piano sonata by Schubert. Ophelia has no sense of humor.

Alan Bradley

#5. He waited, listening with deep enjoyment, for the end of the sonata. In the still, twilit corridor it sounded so lonely and unworldly, and so brave and innocent also, both childlike and superior, as all good music must in the midst of the unredeemed muteness of the world.

Hermann Hesse

#6. The other option we have are medication treatments. So you'll have the treatments such as Ambien, Lunesta, Sonata, and we'll also have Rozerem and for some patients we use Benzodiazopine/Clonazepam. Things like that to help with anxiety.

Shelby Harris

#7. The Unicorn Sonata ... tells us that our true home is often right around the corner, if we'd only open our eyes - and our ears - to find it.

Peter S. Beagle

#8. Poetry translation is like playing a piano sonata on a trombone.

Nataly Kelly

#9. To relate a Beethoven sonata to the testicles is hardly in the style of traditional aesthetics.

Terry Eagleton

#10. The divine spark leaps from the finger of God to the finger of Adam, whether it takes ultimate shape in a law of physics or a law of the land, a poem or a policy, a sonata or a mechanical computer.

Alfred Whitney Griswold

#11. When I sit in Paris in a cafe, surrounded by people, I don't sit casually - I go over a certain sonata in my head and discover new things all the time.

Arthur Rubinstein

#12. No one can get really drunk on a novel or a painting, but who can help getting drunk on Reethoven's Ninth, Rartok's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, or the Reatles' White Album?

Milan Kundera

#13. The individual human is still the creature who can wonder, who can be enchanted by a sonata, who can place symbols together to make poetry to gladden our heart, who can view a sunrise with a sense of majesty and awe.

Rollo May

#14. I really love how the andante from the "A minor Sonata" sounds on the mandolin.

Chris Thile

#15. I think anybody who's willing to really sink their teeth into a work like the Hammerklavier, which is a very interesting, different experience, should look instead at something like the Sonata by Paul Dukas, which, in my opinion, is a real marvel.

Marc-Andre Hamelin

#16. Every symphony, for example, is a sonata for orchestra; every string quartet is a sonata for four strings; every concerto a sonata for a solo instrument and orchestra.

Aaron Copland

#17. The soul, they say, is divine and the flesh is iniquity. But I am a musician and I ask this - without the wood and the strings of the violin, where would the sonata find form?

Kathleen Valentine

#18. You stop belonging to yourself," she said. "I belong to my child, my husband, my home, my work, my babysitter, my cleaning lady. The time that remains, like after-tax dollars, doesn't last longer than a two-minute sonata by Scarlatti."
"And you don't even like Scarlatti," I said.

Andre Aciman

#19. There is a moonlight note in the Moonlight Sonata; there is a thunder note in an angry sky.

Dejan Stojanovic

#20. Sonata," he says, "means 'sounding together.' It is an argument in which one theme is presented in opposition to another and they struggle until one wins, in the resolution. It is a beautiful form, it has endured into this century.

Eula Biss

#21. Be my sonata, my cantata, my love
sing me something sweet
but not too sweet
(or i may grow deaf to our harmony
as we decrescendo into silence)

Nenia Campbell

#22. Abolishing the book is like abolishing the symphony, or sonata form, or the sonnet, or the wall painting.

David Gelernter

#23. You do not play a sonata in order to reach the final chord, and if the meanings of things were simply in ends, composers would write nothing but finales.

Alan W. Watts

#24. Toccata by Pietro Domenico Paradisi - the one from his Sonata in A Major - come tripping out to meet me. The Toccata was my favorite composition; to my mind it was the greatest musical accomplishment in the entire history of the world, but I knew that if Ophelia found that out,

Alan Bradley

#25. Sonata for Thunderstorm, Trapdoors and Young Women in Skimpy Clothing.

Terry Pratchett

#26. When people ask me for playlists, I always put in 'Moonlight Sonata' because it is my favorite song. I play it all the time.

Albert Hammond Jr.

#27. And so, as the mob backs away to give them space ... as the riot police holster their weapons, standing down, and as Risa takes the podium, calming the crowd with a voice as soothing as a sonata, Connor Lassiter holds his family like he'll never let them go.

Neal Shusterman

#28. The perfection of conversation is not to play a regular sonata, but, like the AEolian harp, to await the inspiration of the passing breeze.

Edmund Burke

#29. For me, even my break time I like to pull out the bow and just go over a Vivaldi sonata and keep my head sharp, keep everything sharp.

Chris Wyse

#30. He launched into the color-tsunami of Prokofiev's fourth piano sonata. It soon carried him onto a distant shore where the only thing broken was the silence.

B.V. Lawson

#31. They both loved piano music and were convinced that Beethoven's Sonata No. 32 was the absolute pinnacle in the history of music. And that Wilhelm Backhaus's unparalleled performance of the sonata for Decca set the interpretive standard.

Haruki Murakami

#32. My 10th Sonata is a sonata of insects. Insects are born from the sun ... they are the sun's kisses.

Alexander Scriabin

#33. Right at the end of the war I wrote a piano sonata, which was written at a time when Sam Barber used to come down here and we used to have lunch together in a very nice old hotel that's now not there.

Elliott Carter

#34. Tokyo Sonata speaks to us, with feeling and passion, as one of the most eloquent statements on the world today that we are likely to see in this moviegoing year.

Andrew Sarris

#35. It is music that speaks to the deepest reaches of your soul, and you are lifted higher, ever higher, by the adagio, in my opinion more so even than in any of the masses that Beethoven composed.

Dean Koontz

#36. It seemed to her as if it had been an unpleasant day. She went over the actual events in her mind, and was astonished to find that, after all, the day had been like many hundreds before it and many, many more that were yet to come.

Arthur Schnitzler