Violin Quotes

Quotes tagged as "violin" Showing 31-60 of 78
Alexandra Bracken
“Free the fire fluttering inside her rib cage. Work her muscles, the bow, the violin, until she played herself to ash and embers and left the rest of the world behind to smolder.”
Alexandra Bracken, Passenger

John Ciardi
“Translator's Note: When the violin repeats what the piano has just played, it cannot make the same sounds and it can only approximate the same chords. It can, however, make recognizably the same "music", the same air. But it can do so only when it is as faithful to the self-logic of the violin as it is to the self-logic of the piano.”
John Ciardi, Inferno

Kamand Kojouri
“Violinists wear the imprint on their necks with pride
For they are the players of harmony.

Pilgrims, too, wear the imprint on their foreheads with pride
For they are the conductors of unity.

And Lovers? Why, they are made humble by the imprint on their hearts
For they are merely the instruments of rhapsody.”
Kamand Kojouri

A.G. Howard
“He’d walked as a ghost in the gloomy bowels of this opera house for so long, darkness had become his brother, which was fitting, since his father was the night, and sunlight their forgotten friend.”
A.G. Howard, RoseBlood

A.S. Peterson
“She closed her eyes and began to weave a song. She abandoned the familiar melodies she’d played so many times before and went in search of something new, no longer wanting a song fed on pain or guilt. She needed one that could replace those wounds with strength, with resolve, with confidence. She needed a song that could not only assuage, but heal and build anew. The notes stumbled around the room, tripping over beds and empty stools and hollow men sleeping. They warbled and fell, haphazard, chaotic, settling without flight. Fin’s forehead creased and she persisted. She let her fingers wander, reached out with her mind. She chased the fleeting song she’d glimpsed once before. In Madeira she’d felt a hint of it: something wild, untameable, a thing sprung whole and flawless from the instant of creation.”
A.S. Peterson, Fiddler's Green

Alexandra Bracken
“—the longer you silence a violin, the harder it is for it to find its true voice again.”
Alexandra Bracken, Passenger

Misba
“One room in the two-story building glows, violin music emanating from it. Maroc is playing for his master: The Roar of Death Sonata, 1st Movement, one of the legendary Eleven Pieces composed after the Apocalypse.”
Misba, The Oldest Dance

Agatha Christie
“As the visitor left the office, Tuppence grabbed the violin and putting it in the cupboard turned the key in the lock.

"If you must be Sherlock Holmes," she observed, "I'll get you a nice little syringe and a bottle labelled Cocaine, but for God's sake leave that violin alone.”
Agatha Christie, Partners in Crime

A.S. Peterson
“She chased the song like a hound fast upon a scent. She pursued it through a forest primeval: a dark land planted with musical staves and rests and grown thick with briars of annotation. On she went and on still until she caught sight of the song ahead of her, fleeting and sly. “I see it,” she said aloud, though she didn’t mean to.”
A.S. Peterson, Fiddler's Green

“Just as we can play beautiful music only when the strings on the violin are in proper tension, so we can grow only when we are stretched from what we are to what we can be. There is no growth without tension.”
J. Grant Howard, Balancing Life's Demands: A New Perspective on Priorities

Gaston Leroux
“Mlle. Daaé's curious action in going out at that hour had worried me at first; but, as soon as I saw her go to the churchyard, I thought that she meant to fulfill some pious duty on her father's grave and I considered this so natural that I recovered all my calmness. I was only surprised that she had not heard me walking behind her, for my footsteps were quite audible on the hard snow. But she must have been taken up with her intentions and I resolved not to disturb her. She knelt down by her father's grave, made the sign of the cross and began to pray. At that moment, it struck midnight. At the last stroke, I saw Mlle. Daaé lift her eyes to the sky and stretch out her arms as though in ecstasy. I was wondering what the reason could be, when I myself raised my head and everything within me seemed drawn toward the invisible, which was playing the most perfect music! Christine and I knew that music; we had heard it as children. But it had never been executed with such divine art, even by M. Daaé. I remembered all that Christine had told me of the Angel of Music. The air was The Resurrection of Lazarus, which old Mr. Daaé used to play to us in his hours of melancholy and of faith. If Christine's Angel had existed, he could not have played better, that night, on the late musician's violin.”
Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera

أنيس منصور
“من شدة إحترامى لأوتار الكمان .. آمنت بتعدد الزوجات”
أنيس منصور, قالوا

Gaston Leroux
“Often he would play his saddest tunes on the beach and pretend that the sea stopped its roaring to listen to them.”
Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera

A.S. Peterson
“It throbbed and pulsed, channeled by elemental forces of fear, love, hope, and sadness. The bow stabbed and flitted across the strings in a violent whorl of creation; its hairs tore and split until it seemed the last strands would sever in a scrape of dissonance. Those who saw the last fragile remnants held their breath against the breaking. The music rippled across the ship like a spirit, like a thing alive and eldritch and pregnant with mystery. The song held. More than held, it deepened. It groaned. It resounded in the hollows of those who heard. Then it softened into tones long, slow, and patient and reminded men of the faintest stars trembling dimly in defiance of a ravening dark. At the last, when the golden hairs of the bow had given all the sound they knew, the music fled in a whisper. Fin was both emptied and filled, and the song sighed away on the wind.”
A.S. Peterson, Fiddler's Green

A.S. Peterson
“Then she took up the bow and began to play. The tone was warm and deep, storied with layers of age.”
A.S. Peterson, Fiddler's Green

A.S. Peterson
“And then she caught the song. She fell upon it and music poured from the fiddle’s hollow, bright and liquid like fire out of the heart of the earth. Pierre-Jean drew back and stood mesmerized. The room around Fin stirred as every ear bent to the ring of heartsong. It rushed through Fin and spread to the outermost and tiniest capillary reaches of her body. Her flesh sang. The hairs of her arms and neck roused and stood. She sped the bow across the strings. Her fingers danced on the fingerboard quick as fat raindrops. Every man in the room that night would later swear that there was a wind within it. They would tell their children and lovers that a hurricane had filled the room, toppled chairs, driven papers and sheets before it and blew not merely around them but through them, taking fears, grudges, malice, and contempt with it, sending them spiraling out into the night where they vanished among the stars like embers rising from a bonfire.

And though the spirited cry of the fiddle’s song blew through others and around the room and everything in it, Fin sat at the heart of it. It poured into her. It found room in the closets and hollow places of her soul to settle and root. It planted seeds: courage, resolve, steadfastness. Fin gulped it in, seized it, held it fast. She needed it, had thirsted for it all her days. She saw the road ahead of her, and though she didn’t understand it or comprehend her part in it, she knew that she needed the ancient and reckless power of a holy song to endure it. She didn’t let the music loose. It buckled and swept and still she clung to it, defined it in notes and rhythm, channeled it like a river bound between mountain steeps. And a thing happened then so precious and strange that Fin would ever after remember it only in the formless manner of dreams. The song turned and spoke her name—her true name, intoned in a language of mysteries. Not her earthly name, but a secret word, defining her alone among all created things. The writhing song spoke it, and for the first time, she knew herself. She knew what it was to be separated out, held apart from every other breathing creature, and known. Though she’d never heard it before and wouldn’t recall it after, every stitch of her soul shook in the passage of the word, shuddered in the wake of it, and mourned as the sound sped away. In an instant, it was over. The song ended with the dissonant pluck of a broken string.”
A.S. Peterson, Fiddler's Green

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“The statue was of a nude woman playing a slide trombone. It was entitles, enigmatically, Evelyn and Her Magic Violin.”
Kurt Vonnegut Jr., The Sirens of Titan

Kiera Cass
“I gulped. Too many rules, too much structure, too many people. I just wanted to be alone with a violin.”
Kiera Cass, The Selection
tags: violin

Arthur Rimbaud
“So much the worse for the wood if it finds that it has become a violin, and I feel nothing but contempt for those ignoramuses who argue over things that they know nothing about.”
Arthur Rimbaud

Sarah Blake
“And when the man had touched his bow to the string, touched and then drawn the bow across, holding that long first note, Ogden had understood that every life had at its center a beginning that was not birth, a moment when the catch on the lock in one's life opens, and out it comes, starting forward.”
Sarah Blake, The Guest Book

Alex Brunkhorst
“She held a violin delicately tucked in between her soft neck and athletic shoulder, and she was dressed in a white goddess-like gown that pooled on the floor. Wide gold cuffs covered her wrists, dangly earrings hung from her ears and an ornate headband haloed her sharply bobbed black wig. Her eyes were outlined in a smoldering, liquid black, and her lips were the color of blood.
She was dressed as Cleopatra.
Is there a moment in every relationship when it becomes life-threateningly dangerous? When you realize that your heart is so comfortably resting in someone else's hands that should they decide to drop it you would never fully recover? In the case of my relationship with Matilda Duplaine it was at this very moment.”
Alex Brunkhorst, The Gilded Life of Matilda Duplaine

Lemony Snicket
“The siblings' father stood in the doorway of the library and said something they never forgot. "Children," he said, "There is no worse sound in the world than somebody who cannot play the violin who insists on doing so anyway.”
Lemony Snicket, The Austere Academy

Klaus Kinski
“Most likely, my film could have been compared to a highly sensible musical clip. An operatic musical clip. At that time, I had no idea of this expression. I did not puzzle my head over the form of my film, the structure arose, as I said before, from alone and urged me to commit this structure to paper.
Indications, suggestions, just sufficed. The audience should have the liberty to keep on thinking, conceiving, living. My film had to remain a fragment. Abstract it its form. Yet harmonical and first hand. It would have never occurred to me to lash up what I wanted to express into a waist coat of idiotically trimmed up film plots for the audience: with their meticulous and dictarioral logic and continutity. The attempt to wedge Paganini into the usual form of a movie, would have resulted in immuring him alive. For he did live – in me.”
Klaus Kinski, Paganini (Heyne allgemeine Reihe)

Catherynne M. Valente
“Ivan said, If only we could eat violin music.”
Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“Chopin did not wrote anything for the Violin, because all his music is written for the Violin.”
Jean-Michel Rene Souche

Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman
“..but what you really hate is the fact that in the middel of two catastrophic wars, it is easier to hold a job fake-fiddling, playing calming music for Americans while Bagdad burns, than it is to get a job reporting form the middel of the blaze.”
Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic

“I held you gently and closely like a violin.”
Sagar Ramdeo

David Elkind
“It is next to impossible to learn a complex skill by observation alone. One does not learn to play the violin by watching Heifitz or the piano by observing Rubenstein.”
David Elkind, Child Development and Education: A Piagetian Perspective

Rodrigo Éker
“Descubrió que, nuevamente, ante su propia incredulidad, volvía a parecerle el mismo objeto de antaño, sin ningún tipo de diatriba grandilocuente o significado trascendental.
El violín no era más que un simole violín.”
Rodrigo Éker

Suzy  Davies
“But in her head, she believed what Einstein had suggested. The enigma of The Universe itself was answered in mathematics. Mushing was all about timing. It was about the rhythm of dog and man - synchronicity of movement, elegance. And sometimes, the movement of her bow across the strings of her violin reminded her of the swish and glide of the runners on a sled ride in the snow.”
Suzy Davies