Song and Singing
» “Precisely because we do not communicate by singing, a song can be out of place but not out of character; it is just as credible that a stupid person should sing beautifully as that a clever person should do so.”
– W. H. Auden
» ”It seems to me that those songs that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them. The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page.”
– Joan Baez
» ”It is the best of all trades, to make songs, and the second best to sing them.”
– Hilaire Belloc
» ”That’s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over, lest you should think he never could recapture the first fine careless rapture!”
– Robert Browning
» ”Swans sing before they die — t’were no bad thing did certain persons die before they sing.”
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
» ”The songs are inspired by my experiences. Sometimes they are more than my real-life and, conversely, my life is more than just my songs.”
– Melissa Etheridge
» ”If a song’s about something I’ve experienced or that could’ve happened to me it’s good. But if it’s alien to me, I couldn’t lend anything to it. Because that’s what soul is all about.”
– Aretha Franklin
» ”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
» ”This is a fault common to all singers, that among their friends they will never sing when they are asked; unasked, they will never desist.”
– Horace
» ”I’d rather be dead than singing ”Satisfaction” when I’m forty-five.”
– Mick Jagger
» ”Singing has always seemed to me the most perfect means of expression. It is so spontaneous. And after singing, I think the violin. Since I cannot sing, I paint.”
– Georgia O’Keeffe
» ”There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few.”
– Edgar Allan Poe
» ”Odds life! must one swear to the truth of a song?”
– Matthew Prior
» ”He who sings, frightens away all his ills.”
– Traditional Saying
» ”When Satan makes impure verses, Allah sends a divine tune to cleanse them.”
– George Bernard Shaw
» ”I would rather be remembered by a song than by a victory.”
– Alexander Smith
» ”Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung.”
– Voltaire
