Famous Quotes & Sayings

Carol Shields

The recounting of a life is a cheat...even our own stories are obscenely distorted...

Carlos Fuentes

Writing is a struggle against silence.

Carlos Castaneda

What is a truthful life? A life lived with deliberateness, a good, strong life.

Carlos Castaneda

I'm never angry at anybody! No human being can do anything important enough for that. You get angry at people when you feel that their acts are important. I don't feel that way any longer.

Carlos Castaneda

Burn your bridges every 2 years.

Carlos Castaneda

One ,must have something to die for in order to have something to live for

Carlos Castaneda

For me the world is weird because it is stupendous, awesome, mysterious, unfathomable; my interest has been to convince you that you must assume responsibility for being here, in this marvelous world, in this marvelous desert, in this marvelous time. I want to convince you that you must learn to make every act count, since you are going to be here for only a short while, in fact, too short for witnessing all the marvels of it.

C. S. Lewis

Bridge-players tell me that there must be some money on the game 'or else people won't take it seriously'. Apparently it's like that. Your bid - for God or no God, for a good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity - will not be serious if nothing much is staked on it. And you will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are raised horribly high, until you find that you are playing not for counters or for sixpences but for every penny you have in the world.

Agnes de Mille

Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.

Andre Previn

When you're working with music that is invariably better than you are, it's difficult to become swell-headed.

Agnes Obel

Even though music is something I travel around doing, it is also a very private thing. A sort of escapism.

Agnes Repplier

What strange impulse is it which induces otherwise truthful people to say they like music when they do not, and thus expose themselves to hours of boredom?

Charlie Byrd

And a musician has to learn to be frugal and to carefully manage financial affairs

Charlie Byrd

I had been to São Paulo the year before and became pretty well acquainted with the music of composer Antonio Carlos Jobim, I had already started playing that music, and the audience response had been pretty good because those songs are so melodic. I knew it would be something that would be appealing; I wasn't thinking that it would make the top of the pop charts or anything like that.

Charlie Byrd

Music's not like becoming a doctor, who can walk into a community and find people who need him.

Charlie Byrd

The guitar is a means of expressing music, When you get into the emotional side of it, then it's not the guitar that matters so much as the music itself. But the guitar is the vehicle I use. It's how I express myself. As for the emotional side, music takes up where language leaves off. To try and verbalize what music says, emotionally and spiritually, is futile. Let me put it this way, Louis Armstrong once said if you've got to ask, you'll never know.

Charlie Byrd

Usually, no one quite knew where Django Reinhardt was going to be, but I met his brother and about an hour later in walks Django with an entourage of friends. He always traveled with a large group-carried his own admirers with him, the most sinister-looking bunch of hoodlums you've ever seen. I walked up and offered to buy him a drink. That seemed to be the right thing to do... he was the first really brilliant solo guitarist I ever became aware of, I had records of his when I was 10 years old. It just blew my mind that anyone could play a guitar like that. Still does.

Charlie Byrd

A person should design the way he makes a living around how he wishes to make a life.

C. S. Lewis

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

Jane Byrne

The Chicago Symphony is considered the greatest orchestra in the world.

Charles Sanders Peirce

And what, then, is belief? It is the demi-cadence which closes a musical phrase in the symphony of our intellectual life.

Charles Mingus

I'm too busy playing. When I'm playing I don't pay attention to who's listening. When I was listening I listened to symphony orchestras, Beethoven, Bach, Brahms, Stravinsky. You don't listen to one instrument; you listen to music.

Eduard Hanslick

So long as we refuse to include lottery tickets among the symphonies, or medical bulletins among the overtures, we must refrain from treating the emotions as an aesthetic monopoly of music in general or a certain piece of music in particular.

Edward Abbey

Mozart, striving for perfection, wrote the same symphony forty-one times. In his case, it worked. He wrote a perfect symphony.

Edward Abbey

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

Anton Bruckner wrote the same symphony nine times, trying to get it just right. He failed.

Atul Gawande

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.