I'd rather be dead than singing "Satisfaction" when I'm forty-five.
—From a 1975 interview with Mick Jagger, who still performs the song at age sixty-seven
I can't stand to sing the same song the same way two nights in succession, let alone two years or ten years. If you can, then it ain't music, it's close-order drill or exercise or yodeling or something, not music.
—Billie Holiday
A religious life is a struggle and not a hymn.
—Madame de Stael
The Qabalists believed that the universe was created from sound. Thus by reciting sacred sounds, changes or transformations of matter could take place. Healing could simply consist of reinvoking those sacred sounds in the body.… Perhaps this is what the shamans do when they chant.
—Fred Alan Wolf
Jews and blacks come from the same history.… We've just expressed our suffering differently as people. Blacks developed the blues. Jews complain; we just never thought of putting it to music.
—Jon Stewart
Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart, and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears.
—Frederick Douglass
A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.
—Henry Giles
I am all for singing. If I had had children, I should have hounded them into choirs and choral societies, and if they weren't good enough for that, I would have sent them out, to sing in the streets.
—Sylvia Townsend Warner
Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously.
—Henry Miller
Country music is three chords and the truth.
—Harlan Howard
Rock-and-roll starts between the legs and goes through the heart, then to the head. As long as it does those three things, it's a great rock song.
—John Mellencamp
Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back, and, instead of bleeding, he sings.
—Robert Benchley
We normally think of history as one catastrophe after another, war followed by war, outrage by outrage—almost as if history were nothing more than all the narratives of human pain, assembled in sequence. And surely this is, often enough, an adequate description. But history is also the narratives of grace, the recountings of those blessed and inexplicable moments when someone did something for someone else, saved a life, bestowed a gift, gave something beyond what was required by circumstance.
—Thomas Cahill
The days are too short even for love; how can there ever be time for quarreling?
—Margaret Gatty
Life, as we all know, is conflict, and man, being part of life, is himself an expression of conflict. If he recognizes the fact and accepts it, he is apt, despite the conflict, to know peace and to enjoy it.
—Henry Miller