Quotes by British Authors - Page 587

We stood there for a minute or two, with John swaying gently against my arm. 'I'm feeling better,' he announced. Then he looked up at the stars. 'Wow..' he intoned. 'Look at that! Isn't that amazing?".I followed his gaze. The stars did look good but they didn't look that good. It was very unlike John to be over the top in that way. I stared at him. He was wired-pin-sharp and quivering, resonating away like a human tuning fork.No sooner had John uttered his immortal words about the stars than George and Paul came bursting out on the roof. They had come tearing up from the studio as soon as they found out where we were. They knew why John was feeling unwell. Maybe everyone else did, too - everyone except for father-figure George Martin here!It was very simple. John was tripping on LSD. He had taken it by mistake, they said - he had meant to take an amphetamine tablet. That hardly made any difference, frankly; the fact was that John was only too likely to imagine he could fly, and launch himself off the low parapet that ran around the roof. They had been absolutely terrified that he might do so. I spoke to Paul about this night many years later, and he confirmed that he and George had been shaken rigid when they found out we were up on the roof. They knew John was having a what you might call a bad trip. John didn't go back to Weybridge that night; Paul took him home to his place, in nearby Cavendish Road. They were intensely close, remember, and Paul would do almost anything for John. So, once they were safe inside, Paul took a tablet of LSD for the first time, 'So I could get with John' as he put it- be with him in his misery and fear.What about that for friendship?
George Martin
So imagine that the lovely moon is playing just for you - everything makes music if you really want it to.
Giles Andreae
The power of music, whether joyous or cathartic must steal on one unawares, come spontaneously as a blessing or a grace--
Oliver Sacks
There is simply no limit to the tyrannical snobbery that otherwise decent people can descend into when it comes to music.
Stephen Fry
This ain't the heartbreak hotel even though I know it well.Those no shows should you tell in the way you hold yourself.Don't you fret should you get another cancellation, give me a chance and I'll make a permanent reservation.In your heart in your, I can tell you fit one more
The Wanted
The chef who cooks without a song on his lips cannot hope to infuse the right carefree improvisatory note into his art.
James Hamilton-Paterson
Music without the ebb and flow would be like "watching a film with only good guys in it." -attrib Frank Zappa
John Powell
A kiss is a course of procedure cunningly devised, for the mutual stopage of speech at a moment when words are superfluous.
Oliver Herford
The way I choose to show my feelings is through my songs.
Marianne Faithfull
Take the time to make some sense for what you wanna say,And cast your words away upon the waves.Sail them home with acquiesce on a ship of hope today,And as they land upon the shore,Tell them not to fear no more.I'm not saying right is wrong,It's up to us to make the best of all the things that come our way.Cos' everything that's been has past,The answers in the looking glass.There's four and twenty million doorsOn life's endless corridor,So say it loud and sing it proud today.
Noel Gallagher
Music is very personal. It means different things to different people. To you it means belonging. To me it means knowing I exist.
Simon Cheshire
Some girls are bigger than others.
Morrissey
Butterflies, butterfliesThey were meant to flyYou and i, you and iWe were colours in the sky
The Wanted
One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn't, the wolves and blizzards will be at one's throat all the sooner.
David Mitchell
You know, people can't fall in love with me just because I'm good at what I do.
Robert Plant
Music helps us understand where we have come from but, more importantly, what has happened to us.
Simon Van Booy
Music is everything and nothing. It is useless and no limit can be set on its use. Music takes me to places of illimitable sensual and insensate joy, accessing points of ecstasy that no angelic lover could ever locate, or plunging me into gibbering weeping hells of pain that no torturer could devise. Music makes me write this sort of maundering adolescent nonsense without embarrassment. Music is in fact the dog's bollocks. Nothing else comes close.
Stephen Fry
If I were to begin life again, I would devote it to music. It is the only cheap and unpunished rapture upon earth.
Sydney Smith
Why don't you find out for yourself?Then you'll see the glass, hidden in the grass.
Morrissey
Hey Jude, don't make it bad, take a sad song and make it better.
The Beatles
Big fat hairy monkey, hands a couple of octaves wide?
Terry Pratchett
We act out our lives to a soundtrack, thought Isabel, the music that becomes, for a spell, out favourite and is listened to again and again until it stands for the time itself. But that was about all the scripting that we achieved; the rest, for most of us, was extemporising.
Alexander McCall Smith
I wish the government would put a tax on pianos for the incompetent.
Edith Sitwell
A bit of the vagueness of music stops you going completely mad, I imagine.
Sebastian Faulks
I listen'd, motionless and still;And, as I mounted up the hill,The music in my heart I bore,Long after it was heard no more.
William Wordsworth
There's something beautifully friendly and elevating about a bunch of guys playing music together. This wonderful little world that is unassailable. It's really teamwork, one guy supporting the others, and it's all for one purpose, and there's no flies in the ointment, for a while. And nobody conducting, it's all up to you. It's really jazz__that's the big secret. Rock and roll ain't nothing but jazz with a hard backbeat.
Keith Richards
In the world of Big Macks Starbucks coffee and oversized SUVS it was business as usual snort and go
Saira Viola
They say that time Heals everythingBut they dob't know youAnd the scars you bring
The Wanted
There are millions of chords. There are millions of numbers. And everyone forgets the one that is a zero. But without the zero, numbers are just arithmetic. Without the empty chord, music is just noise.
Terry Pratchett
Diazapam (that's valium), temazepam, lithium, ECT, HRT - how long must I stay on this stuff? Don't give me anymore!
Morrissey
Fate, up against your
Echo and the Bunnymen
People spend thousands of dollars on stereos. Sometimes tens of thousands. There is a specialist industry right here in the States which builds stereo gear to a standard you wouldn't believe. Tubed amplifiers which cost more than a house. Speakers taller than me. Cables thicker than a garden hose. Some army guys had that stuff. I'd heard it on bases around the world. Wonderful. But they were wasting their money. Because the best stereo in the world is free. Inside your head. It sounds as good as you want it to. As loud as you want it to be.
Lee Child
This is a book for every fiddler who has realized halfway through playing an ancient Scottish air that the Ramones "I Wanna Be Sedated" is what folk music is really all about, and gone straight into it.
Neil Gaiman
Music that gentlier on the spirit lies,Than tired eyelids upon tired eyes.
Alfred Tennyson
Because there's beauty in the breakdown.
Imogen Heap
Many roads to take some to joy some to heart ache
Kate Winslet
Because ENOUGH is TOO MUCH!And look around ...can you blame us?!
Morrissey
Music originated from God and was created solely for his worship, his glory, and his pleasure.
Pedro Okoro
When she started to play, Steinway came down personally and rubbed his name off the piano.
Bob Hope
Stupid cupid keeps on calling me, but I see nothing in his eyes. I miss my babe
George Michael
Saying you liked all music meant that you didn't love any.
Lindsey Kelk
We hate it when our friends become successful.
Morrissey
If heartache was a physical pain I could face, I could faceBut your hurting me from inside of my headAnd I can't take it, I can't take itI'm going to lose my mind
The Wanted
If I could be who you wanted, all the time
Radiohead
HEREIt’s-Can I say?It’s like the song of a family where everything’s always all right, it’s a song of belonging that makes you belong just by hearing it, it’s a song that’ll always take care of you and never leave you. If you have a heart, it breaks, if you have a heart that’s broken, it fixes.
Patrick Ness
The most exciting rhythms seem unexpected and complex, the most beautiful melodies simple and inevitable.
W.H. Auden
[The Head of Radio Three] had been ensnared by the Music Director of the college and a Professor of Philosophy. These two were busy explaining to the harassed man that the phrase "too much Mozart" was, given any reasonable definition of those three words, an inherently self-contradictory expression, and that any sentence which contained such a phrase would be thereby rendered meaningless and could not, consequently, be advanced as part of an argument in favour of any given programme-scheduling strategy.
Douglas Adams
Strange how potent cheap music is.
Noël Coward
Life is a pigsty.
Morrissey
The finest fury is the most controlled.
Christopher Hitchens
Stephen had been put to sleep in his usual room, far from children and noise, away in that corner of the house which looked down to the orchard and the bowling-green, and in spite of his long absence it was so familiar to him that when he woke at about three he made his way to the window almost as quickly as if dawn had already broken, opened it and walked out onto the balcony. The moon had set: there was barely a star to be seen. The still air was delightfully fresh with falling dew, and a late nightingale, in an indifferent voice, was uttering a routine jug-jug far down in Jack's plantations; closer at hand and more agreeable by far, nightjars churred in the orchard, two of them, or perhaps three, the sound rising and falling, intertwining so that the source could not be made out for sure. There were few birds that he preferred to nightjars, but it was not they that had brought him out of bed: he stood leaning on the balcony rail and presently Jack Aubrey, in a summer-house by the bowling-green, began again, playing very gently in the darkness, improvising wholly for himself, dreaming away on his violin with a mastery that Stephen had never heard equalled, though they had played together for years and years.Like many other sailors Jack Aubrey had long dreamed of lying in his warm bed all night long; yet although he could now do so with a clear conscience he often rose at unChristian hours, particularly if he were moved by strong emotion, and crept from his bedroom in a watch-coat, to walk about the house or into the stables or to pace the bowling-green. Sometimes he took his fiddle with him. He was in fact a better player than Stephen, and now that he was using his precious Guarnieri rather than a robust sea-going fiddle the difference was still more evident: but the Guarnieri did not account for the whole of it, nor anything like. Jack certainly concealed his excellence when they were playing together, keeping to Stephen's mediocre level: this had become perfectly clear when Stephen's hands were at last recovered from the thumb-screws and other implements applied by French counter-intelligence officers in Minorca; but on reflexion Stephen thought it had been the case much earlier, since quite apart from his delicacy at that period, Jack hated showing away.Now, in the warm night, there was no one to be comforted, kept in countenance, no one could scorn him for virtuosity, and he could let himself go entirely; and as the grave and subtle music wound on and on, Stephen once more contemplated on the apparent contradiction between the big, cheerful, florid sea-officer whom most people liked on sight but who would have never been described as subtle or capable of subtlety by any one of them (except perhaps his surviving opponents in battle) and the intricate, reflective music he was now creating. So utterly unlike his limited vocabulary in words, at times verging upon the inarticulate.'My hands have now regained the moderate ability they possessed before I was captured,' observed Maturin, 'but his have gone on to a point I never thought he could reach: his hands and his mind. I am amazed. In his own way he is the secret man of the world.
Patrick O'Brian
They said they respect me, which means, their judgment is crazy.
Morrissey
Hold on to your friends.Resist - or move onBe mad, be rashSmoke and explodeSell all of your clothesJust bear in mind:There just might come a timeWhen you need some friends
Morrissey
Nothing fortified me, and simple loneliness all but destroyed me, yet I felt swamped by the belief that life must mean something- otherwise why was it there? Why was anything anything?
Morrissey
The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected. The commonplace person begins to play, and shoots into the empyrean without effort, whilst we look up, marvelling how he has escaped us, and thinking how we could worship him and love him, would he but translate his visions into human words, and his experiences into human actions. Perhaps he cannot; certainly he does not, or does so very seldom.
E.M. Forster
I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.
George Eliot
When you sleepI will creepInto your thoughtsLike a bad debtThat you can't payTake the easy wayand give in!
Morrissey
I used to dream, and I used to vow;I wouldn't dream of it now.
Morrissey
Satan rejected my soul; as low as he goes,he never quite goes this low.
Morrissey
And my head told my heart"Let love grow"But my heart told my head"This time noThis time no
Mumford & Sons