Symphony's Quotes

#1. Elgar's first symphony is the musical equivalent of St Pancras Railway Station.

Thomas Beecham

#2. A cap of good acid costs five dollars and for that you can hear the Universal Symphony with God singing solo and Holy Ghost on drums.

Hunter S. Thompson

#3. So here we are. The two of us. Me and this geezer I gotta kill. Sittin here in a car showroom office, lookin at each other, lettin Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony take us to places too beautiful and too fuckin sad for words.

Ian Ayris

#4. Be the song in someone's heart; be the symphony in someone's soul.

Matshona Dhliwayo

#5. At breakfast, I might pass a Brahms symphony in my head. Then I am called to the phone, and half an hour later I find it's been going on all the time and I'm in the third movement.

Arthur Rubinstein

#6. The writer's silent mind is a period of intermission before orchestrating a symphony of words.

Khaled Talib

#7. Tamsen lay listening to the crashing of the waves on the beach, the symphony of the ocean competing with the orchestral maneuvers of the first birds singing in the dawn.

Toni Kenyon

#8. It's a physical challenge. It's a spiritual challenge. I'm studying almost every day a different symphony, not returning to any one for a week.

Gustavo Dudamel

#9. I'm fine. It's a lie. I am not fine. My head is a symphony of pain, a sadistic master maestro conducting an opus of excruciating, devastating perfecting.

Kiersten White

#10. If there is chemistry, and the mind and body are working as one, it's nirvana. It's like a well-written symphony or, better yet, perfect... sheet music."
"Sheet music?"
"Yeah, music between the sheets.

Ann Lister

#11. The music critic, Huneber, could never quite make up his mind about a new symphony until he had seen the composer's mistress.

H.L. Mencken

#12. 4091 East Olympic Boulevard proved to be a nondescript one-storey sandstone building of the sort you drive blithely by every day, knowing it's full of paper-pushers and clock-watchers, and nobody's in there writing a symphony or taming a lion or having an orgasm.

James K. Morrow

#13. Yoga is like music: the rhythm of the body, the melody of the mind, and the harmony of the soul create the symphony of life.

B.K.S. Iyengar

#14. God comes to us in theater in the way we communicate with each other, whether it be a symphony orchestra, or a wonderful ballet, or a beautiful painting, or a play. It's a way of expressing our humanity.

Julie Harris

#15. The director is a bit analogous to the conductor of a symphony orchestra. It's a collaborative adventure.

Nicholas Meyer

#16. I think there's a poet who wrote once a tragedy by Shakespeare, a symphony by Beethoven and a thunderstorm are based on the same elements. I think that's a beautiful line.

Maximilian Schell

#17. Every time I open the paper, there's some symphony orchestra collapsing somewhere in the United States. What the hell is going on? And then you find out that the board members try to run these things as businesses.

Brice Marden

#18. A visible shiver ran through Arthur. "Can you imagine letting him touch you? Be like kissing a snake that'd been dipped in snot."
"Oh, now there's a mental image." Eric wrinkled his nose. "You have such a talent for description.

Cecilia Ryan

#19. I don't know. How did Beethoven hear the Ninth Symphony in his head before he wrote it down? The brain's a pretty good computer, too, isn't it?

Isaac Asimov

#20. It is the tuning of the universe ... It's as if at the beginning of the symphony God turns up the volume just a tiny bit.

Benjamin Zander

#21. To be part of Kevin's [Drew] world, "Who Came First" is just kind of a magical symphony. If you're asking me what that emotional timbre what is my favorite, my favorite "why" is the question. The other songs also have a revealing quality, but it started with "Sister OK".

Andy Kim

#22. I tried to resist his overtures, but he plied me with symphonies, quartets, chamber music, and cantatas.

S.J Perelman

#23. Kahn once said, The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.

Robert Hughes

#24. Proportion ... You can't help thinking about it in these London streets, where it doesn't exist ... It's like listening to a symphony of cats to walk along them. Senseless discords and a horrible disorder all the way ... We need no barbarians from outside; they're on the premises, all the time.

Aldous Huxley

#25. Every couple weeks I'll listen to Sibelius's Seventh Symphony, just to check in, to see how it's doing. It's doing OK.

Nico Muhly

#26. When a group of people sing together, we make up a chorus. When birds do, it's more like a whole symphony orchestra.

Laura Erickson

#27. The alarm in the morning? Well, I have an old tape of Carlo Maria Giulini conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in a perfectly transcendent version in Shubert's seventh symphony. And I've rigged it up so that at exactly 7:30 every morning it falls from the ceiling onto my face.

Stephen Fry

#28. Perhaps the experience had been so complete that repetition would be vulgarity - like asking to hear the same symphony twice in a day.

C.S. Lewis

#29. Mahler wrote it as the third movement of his Fourth Symphony. I mean the fourth movement of his First Symphony. We play it third. The trumpet solo will be played by our solo trumpet player. It's named 'Blumine,' which has something to do with flowers.

Eugene Ormandy

#30. I had a jazz trio, a rock n' roll band, and I played drums in junior high, high school, college, big bands, and I played timpani in the symphony. I am a drummer. It's the one instrument I actually play pretty well. It's just hard to carry on your back.

J. D. Souther

#31. At a certain place in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, for example, he might feel that he is floating above the earth in a starry dome, with the dream of immortality in his heart; all the stars seem to glimmer around him, and the earth seems to sink ever deeper downwards.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#32. When I do an operation, it's half a dozen people. When it goes beautifully, it's like a symphony, with everybody playing their part.

Atul Gawande

#33. As a young composer I had a particular fondness for Liszt's Beethoven Symphony arrangements for the piano, and to this day I enjoy playing non-piano music at the piano.

Michael Hersch

#34. She ran straight into Leo's open arms, unable to stop the tears from falling, feeling at last defended, like a single musical note that had finally found the symphony to which it belonged.

Natasha Lester

#35. Anything of a serious nature isn't "instant" - you can't "do" the Sistine Chapel in one hour. And who has time to listen to a Mahler symphony, for God's sake?

Jonathan Cott

#36. If anybody is interested in listening to good modern music, I would recommend Jim Fassett, 'Symphony of the Birds.' It's really beautiful ... with real birds.

Gael Garcia Bernal

#37. To have everything written for you ... It's not really creating. That's why I think symphony drummers are so limited. They 're limited to exactly what was played a hundred years before them by a thousand other drummers.

Buddy Rich

#38. Love is the soul's symphony.

Matshona Dhliwayo

#39. The contemporary music of Tina Turner might make you feel powerful and energized. South African music provides a mind-boggling choice of styles from folk tunes to jive. Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony has the magical ability to transport you to a country scene and trap you in a driving rain storm.

Jason Harvey

#40. New Year's Eve, we're going to be doing a concert with the Philadelphia Orchestra in Symphony Hall. It makes me feel good, because of all the people they could have had, they wanted me! We do have to do a little work with the rhythm section.

Barbara Cook

#41. The critics say that Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony has no form. They are wrong; it has the form of Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony.

Edward Abbey

#42. For him, that's what battle is. A Symphony.

Sarah J. Maas

#43. You have to find your own shtick. A Picasso always looks like Picasso painted it. Hemingway always sounds like Hemingway. A Beethoven symphony always sounds like a Beethoven symphony. Part of being a master is learning how to sing in nobody else's voice but your own.

Hugh MacLeod

#44. If all experienced God in the same way and returned Him an identical worship, the song of the Church triumphant would have no symphony, it would be played like an orchestra in which all instruments played the same note.

C.S. Lewis

#45. Movies are a medium of expression like a symphony orchestra ... or a painter's brush and canvas.

Walt Disney

#46. Writing a play, you start with less, so more is demanded of you. It's as if you have to not only write a symphony, but invent the instruments as well.

David Ives

#47. The perfect orchestration of the symphony of life is one of the Creator's greatest and most beautiful miracles.

Suzy Kassem

#48. For me to rehearse with a children's orchestra a Mahler symphony was to really work. We had three or four weeks of rehearsal with the orchestra, every day eight or nine hours, putting the First together. I had been conducting Tchaikovsky a lot and Beethoven, but Mahler was different.

Gustavo Dudamel

#49. My name on his lips is a symphony. How can two simple beats of basic human language engulf me so completely? We stare at each other for a mini infinity. I'm terrified of speaking and breaking the spell that's fallen over us.

Sarah Nicolas

#50. If he's a true symphony artist, he knows better than that because he knows that the only truly creative musician is the jazz musician.

Buddy Rich

#51. There are only three forms of high art: the symphony, the illustrated children's book and the board game.

Brian K. Vaughan

#52. My musical genius reached its apex thirty years ago when I played the triangle in Haydn's children's symphony, so I could not play unless you needed someone to make one sustained note!

May Sarton

#53. What a director does ... essentially, it's storytelling, but a director also controls the feeling and the sounds and the texture. It's an act of creation, like a symphony or a painting or a story. But with different tools.

John Carpenter

#54. Why we are here: To tremble at the terrible beauty of the stars, to shed a tear at the perfection of Beethoven's symphonies, and to crack a cold one now and then.

David Letterman

#55. You stimulate the neo-cortex, it produces a symphony. But it's not just a symphony of perception. It's a symphony of your universe. Your reality.

Henry Markram

#56. When you hear a large symphony orchestra. for instance, in a concert hall, there's a big, sweeping sound that just doesn't get on to a record.

Teddy Wilson

#57. Remember Haydn's 104 symphonies. Not all of them were great. But there were 104 of them.

Raymond Carver

#58. Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.

E. M. Forster

#59. You've been listening to the adagio from Beethoven's 7th Symphony. I think Ludwig pretty much summed up death in this one. You know, he had lost just about all his hearing when he wrote it, and I've often wondered if that didn't help him tune into the final silence of the great beyond.

Andrew Schneider

#60. While our country has made great strides in breaking down the barriers which for so long denied equal opportunity to all Americans, we are not yet the beautiful symphony of brotherhood of Dr. King's dream.

Adam Schiff

#61. Life's like the piano and the violin, it's about how smart you could play the melodies to make a good harmony.

Lucy 'Aisy

#62. I'm just not arbitrarily choosing to have five guitars play one type of thing. In that way there's a definite similarity between a symphony orchestra and the 100 guitar symphony.

Glenn Branca

#63. I'm like any other composer. If you give me five years to write a symphony, I'm still going to be asking for more time two days before it's due.

Darren Criss

#64. It's Messiaen's Turangalila Symphony I'm really looking forward to. Simon Rattle does it perfectly: he understands its primal rhythmic life force, and he and the wonderful Berliners make it a sheer riot of orchestral colour.

Charles Hazlewood

#65. As a composer and as a musician I'm a true believer - and this is not to be overly diplomatic - I'm a believer that there's artistry in everything from a lawn gnome to a desk chair to a symphony to an Andy Warhol painting. There's art in absolutely everything.

Darren Criss

#66. It's different for people who have not seen a symphony conductor conduct from a chair. I feel very connected to the orchestra in a way that a conductor sometimes does not feel. I think it's more visceral.

Joshua Bell

#67. And this famine was as purely a product of oversize brains as Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

Kurt Vonnegut

#68. Penetrating the walls and rising to the stars, the music continued, the slow movement of the Eroica Symphony, crying out against pain, crying out against the injustice of man's mortality.

Jose Saramago

#69. It was a gentle love, a tactile love. It was all hands and lips and hearts in tandem. There was motion in our bodies and emotion in our discourse. We were a symphony of melody and melancholy. When you find peace in another's presence, there is no mistaken.

Lang Leav

#70. We shall be notes in that great Symphony
Whose cadence circles through the rhythmic spheres,
And all the live World's throbbing heart shall be
Once with our heart

Oscar Wilde

#71. I admire Tom Ades: he's a brilliant conductor, and he gets just the right hard, brilliant sound from the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra for Russian music.

Charles Hazlewood

#72. Cause it's a bittersweet symphony, this life.

The Verve

#73. Life is everywhere. The earth is throbbing with it - it's like music. The plants, the creatures, the ones we see, the ones we don't see, it's like one, big, pulsating symphony.

Diane Frolov

#74. If you observe a really happy man you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his son, growing Double Dahlias in his garden.

David W. Wolfe

#75. Dance is the music of our body, sound is the rhythm of our feeling, silence is the symphony of our soul.

Nelly Mazloum

#76. Oh it's a bitter sweet symphony that's life.

The Verve

#77. On Mars, where the air is spare - a hundred times less dense than on Earth - someone could hear you scream. But you'd have to really strain to get anyone's attention. On the Red Planet, where the wind is high-pitched and faint, even a symphony orchestra will sound as thin as cheap gruel.

Seth Shostak

#78. There are moments in a woman's life when her heart flips in her chest, when the world suddenly seems uncommonly pink and perfect, when a symphony can be heard in the tinkle of a doorbell.

Julia Quinn

#79. A witer's mind is NEVER silent. It is always conducting the next symphony of words.

Leslie Austin

#80. Trying to understand her teenage daughter's behavior was like trying to listen to a recording of a symphony whose volume vacillated unpredictably from barely audible to deafening. She couldn't hear the music, and all she wanted to do was leave the room.

Sonja Yoerg

#81. Each day's dawn is a sweet symphony and as long as I hear the music, my dreams will have to die another day.

Eric Vance Walton

#82. I say the same thing about the death of James Wait. Oh, well
he wasn't going to write the Beethoven's Ninth Symphony anyway.

Kurt Vonnegut

#83. When Beethoven's Seventh Symphony was premiered, after the second movement, they clapped so much that they had the repeat the second movement and do it again.

Joshua Bell

#84. The tuning up of an orchestra can be itself delightful, but only to those who can in some measure, however little, anticipate the symphony.

C.S. Lewis

#85. Cleveland has a very bad reputation, but there's a lot of stuff that's left over from when there were very wealthy people - the Art Museum and a world class symphony that's still world class.

Harvey Pekar

#86. There is no reason why a joke should not be appreciated more than once. Imagine how little good music there would be if, for example, a conductor refused to play Beethoven's Fifth Symphony on the ground that his audience might have heard it before.

A.P. Herbert

#87. Why are numbers beautiful? It's like asking why is Beethoven's Ninth Symphony beautiful.
If you don't see why, someone can't tell you. I know numbers are beautiful.
If they aren't beautiful, nothing is.

Paul Erdos

#88. It meant different things to different people, but somehow it meant them all intensely. Shostakovich's words just confuse the issue. His symphony itself is what remains. Listen to it. It is your symphony to write with him.

M T Anderson

#89. I attempt to compose symphonies, although it is clear to me that logically it is pointless.

Alfred Schnittke

#90. The symphony of motherhood, it's about loving with absolute abandon, loving without regard for self, loving with a near totality of being. It's about a passion that could outburn the sun with its brightness. About a depthless hope and a fierce, rending joy.

Cody McFadyen

#91. The deeper men go into life, the deeper is their conviction that this life is not all. It is an unfinished symphony. A day may round out an insect's life, and a bird or a beast needs no tomorrow. Not so with him who knows that he is related to God and has felt the power of an endless life.

Henry Ward Beecher

#92. Why is composing symphonies tough? I don't know. It's just very few people in the world can do it well. And I think that's the case with upfront design. It is very hard to do well.

Martin Fowler

#93. When I was 20, Shostakovich was my favorite composer. I still find his Fifth Symphony wonderful, with its outstanding themes and rhythms. That's the piece that made me want to be a classical composer.

Dave Brubeck

#94. Antarctic symphony has a geometric relationship to the landscape. It's saying that this landscape and the minimal kind of, you know I'm talking like seeing ice, is visually kind of eerily minimal.

DJ Spooky

#95. You can play Bach on the piano, a symphony orchestra or a quartet of saxophones, but let's stop this silly, childish business of knit your own musicology

Paul McCreesh

#96. Jacques wants a pancake shaped like Mozart's Symphony No. 40! In G minor!

Michelle Cuevas

#97. But I have always suspected that one could substitute the Minuet of Haydn's 98th symphony for the Minuet in Haydn's 99th symphony without sensing a serious lack of coherence in either work.

Aaron Copland

#98. It's like a perfect symphony of feeling, of emotion, of a love you thought was impossible; until suddenly the impossible becomes the inevitable.

Beth Michele

#99. The notes of the symphony of lives, desires, and revenge suddenly swelled into a chorus of generations, blasting through Etta's mind.

Alexandra Bracken

#100. Immerse yourself in nature's symphony
and let your senses burst with joy.

Tom Brown Jr.