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"If you always do what interests you, at least one person is pleased."
~ Katherine Hepburn
Save The Rainforest
National Gallery Of Art-- The Collection
The Smithsonian Institute
Library Of Congress
Shepherd University
New York University
John Hopkins University
Writer's Guild Of America-- East
Writer's Guild Of America-- West
Screen Actor's Guild
The New Yorker
New York Times
Washington Post
Brilliant people who are passionate about what they do. People who are honest and open-minded. Artistic people. People who are willing to make a difference in the world. People who go against the grain but still maintain respect.
"Of all noises, I think music is the least disagreeable."
~ Samuel Johnson
Beehtoven to a fellow composer:"I liked your opera. I think I will set it to music."
"The music of Wagner imposes mental tortures that only algebra has a right to inflict."
~French critic Paul de Saint-Victor
"Of all the noises known to man, opera is the most expensive."
~Voltaire.
"If you want to please only the critics, don't play too loud, too soft, too fast, too slow."
~Arturo Toscanini
"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music."
~ Aldous Huxley
"He has a woman's name and wears makeup. How original.
~ Alice Cooper, on Marilyn Manson
"One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain."
~ Bob Marley
"Music is the silence between the notes."
~ Claude Debussy
"It is the stretched soul that makes music, and souls are stretched by the pull of opposites-opposite bents, tastes, yearnings, loyalties. Where there is not polarity-where energies flow smoothly in one direction-there will be much doing but no music."
~ Eric Hoffer
"Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. Truth is not beauty. Beauty is not love. Love is not music. MUSIC IS BEST."
~ Frank Zappa
"Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid."
~ Frank Zappa
"You thought I was a little girl, you thought I was a little mouse, you thought you'd take me by surprise. Now I'm here burning down your house."
~ Garbage
"The whole business is built on ego, vanity, self-satisfaction, and it's total crap to pretend it's not."
~ George Michael
"…[But] they can’t kill music. God knows, they’ve tried. But music always wins. As long as there’s kids coming up that have a passion. All the bean counters in the world can’t kill that. You know? You just can’t. They can try, of course, to feed you the most puerile, benign horse manure, but some kid’s going to come along and demand something more than that."
~ John Hiatt
"Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind."
~ Lewis Thomas
"If ya ain't got it in ya, ya can't blow it out."
~ Louis Armstrong
"When I open my eyes, I can only sigh, for what I see is contrary to my creed: and I must despise the world for not perceiving that music is a higher revelation than any wisdom or philosophy. It is the wine that inspires new creations, and I am the Bacchus, who presses out this wine for men, and makes them spiritually drunk; when they are sober they bring to shore all kinds of things which they have caught. God is nearer to me than to others. I approach him without fear, I have always known him. Neither am I anxious about my music, which no adverse fate can overtake, and which will free him who understands it from the misery which afflicts others."
~ Ludwig Von Beethoven
"Life is about the betterment of the human condition, stretching one's own mind, increasing social awareness, or even random acts of kindness that spill into the soul of humanity. This is why I play music."
~ Mark Haugh, of Caroline's Spine
"...It's no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently or if your favorite films wouldn't even speak to each other if they met at a party."
~ Nick Hornby, "High Fidelity"
"At night, as I tried to go to sleep, I listened to Mr. Fox play the piano, and I learned from those evening recitals that music could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide."
~ Pat Conroy, "Beach Music"
"[Music] takes us out of the actual and whispers to us dim secrets that startle our wonder as to who we are, and for what, whence, and whereto."
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
Many years ago, in the easy, earliest time of the Dead, I was the girl who danced on stage-- before the need for stringent backstage security, before record contracts, world travels, and a general nervousness about the motives of nearby peoples. I had no motive except to step inside that magic circle of music and dance with it from that cental place. I knew this time of privilege wouldn't last long, so I wasn't surprised when it ended. But for some of the most unspeakably happy and truely liberated times I have ever had in my life, I always wanted to thank you guys."
~ Rosie McGee
"Give me a laundry list and I'll set it to music."
~ Rossini
"Great music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and leaves the memory with difficulty. Magical music never leaves the memory."
~ Sir Thomas Beecham
10 Things I Hate About You
Runaway Bride
You've Got Mail
Pillow Talk
Pretty Woman
Nanny McPhee
The Devil Wears Prada
Lord Of The Rings Trilogy
Pride & Predjudice
Pirates Of The Carribean
Wild Hearts Can't Be Broken
Little Women
Where The Red Fern Grows
Finding Nemo
Dreamer
The Horse Whisperer
Breakfast At Tiffany's
Sabrina (The original with Audrey Hepburn)
Gigi
The Secret Of The N.I.M.P.H.
and any movie starring Mr. Johnny Depp....
"Television has done much for psychiatry by spreading information about it, as well as contributing to the need for it."
~Alfred Hitchcock (1899 - 1980)
"Seeing a murder on television... can help work off one's antagonisms. And if you haven't any antagonisms, the commercials will give you some."
~Alfred Hitchcock (1899 - 1980)
"Don't you wish there was a knob on the TV to turn up the intelligence? There's one marked 'Brightness,' but it doesn't work."
~Gallagher
"I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book."
~Groucho Marx (1890 - 1977)
Where The Red Fern Grows.
"Although they couldn't talk in my terms, they had a language of their own that was easy to understand. Sometimes I would see the answer in their eyes, and again it would be in the friendly wagging of their tails. Other times I could hear the answer in a low whine or feel it in the soft caress of a warm flicking tongue. In some way, they would always answer." Chapter 7, pg. 68"
I knelt down and put my arms around them. I knew that if it hadn't been for their loyalty and unselfish courage I would have probably been killed by the slashing claws of the devil cat. 'I don't know how I'll ever pay you back for what you've done,' I said, 'but I'll never forget it.'" Chapter 19, pg. 230
1984.
The thought police would get him just the same. He had committed—would have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper—the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you." —pg 19
"It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same—everywhere, all over the world, hundreds or thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another's existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same—people who had never learned to think but were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world." —pg 181
Animal Farm.
"Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself." Chapter 1, pg. 7
"If she herself had had any picture of the future, it had been of a society of animals set free from hunger and the whip, all equal, each working according to his capacity, the strong protecting the weak... Instead - she did not know why - they had come to a time when no one dared speak his mind, when fierce, growling dogs roamed everywhere, and when you had to watch your comrades torn to pieces after confessing to shocking crimes." Chapter 7, pp. 73-4
"[S]ome of the animals remembered - or thought they remembered - that the Sixth Commandment decreed 'No animal shall kill any other animal.' And though no one cared to mention it in the hearing of the pigs or the dogs, it was felt that the killings which had taken place did not square with this." Chapter 8, pg. 76
"No question now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which." Chapter 10, pg. 118
The Great Gatsby.
"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one...just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 1
"what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 1
"I hope she'll be a fool--that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool... You see, I think everything's terrible anyhow... And I know. I've been everywhere and seen everything and done everything."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 1
"a valley of ashes--a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 2
"He thinks she goes to see her sister in New York. He's so dumb he doesn't know he's alive."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 2
"Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets... I saw him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 2
"It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 3
"young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 3
"A phrase began to beat in my ears with a sort of heady excitement: 'There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired.'"
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 4
"She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 6
"with every word she was drawing further and further into herself, so he gave that up, and only the dead dream fought on as the afternoon slipped away, trying to touch what was no longer tangible, struggling unhappily, undespairingly, toward that lost voice across the room."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 7
"the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair. But there was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age..."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 7
"It excited him, too, that many men had already loved Daisy--it increased her value in his eyes."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 8
"he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about..."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 8
"Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock... his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 9
"tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning-- So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 9
To Kill A Mockingbird.
It was times like these when I thought my father, who hated guns and had never been to any wars, was the bravest man who ever lived. ~Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 11
They're certainly entitled to think that, and they're entitled to full respect for their opinions... but before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience. ~Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 11, spoken by the character Atticus
I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do. ~Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 11, spoken by the character Atticus
She seemed glad to see me when I appeared in the kitchen, and by watching her I began to think there was some skill involved in being a girl. ~Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 12
So it took an eight-year-old child to bring 'em to their senses.... That proves something - that a gang of wild animals can be stopped, simply because they're still human. Hmp, maybe we need a police force of children. ~Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 16, spoken by the character Atticus
The one place where a man ought to get a square deal is in a courtroom, be he any color of the rainbow, but people have a way of carrying their resentments right into a jury box. As you grow older, you'll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don't you forget it - whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash. ~Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 23, spoken by the character Atticus
I think there's just one kind of folks. Folks. ~Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 23, spoken by the character Scout
When a child asks you something, answer him, for goodness' sake. But don't make a production of it. Children are children, but they can spot an evasion quicker than adults, and evasion simply muddles 'em. ~Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 9, spoken by the character Atticus
Bad language is a stage all children go through, and it dies with time when they learn they're not attracting attention with it. ~Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 9, spoken by the character Atticus
Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square. Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer's day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men's stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.
The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle.
"In the shadowy light that twisted and distorted its features I was struck by the notion that this figure looked more like an angry avenging angel than a docile bird." Chapter 2, pg. 12
"But when a ship is upon the sea, there's but one who rules. As God is to his people, as king to his nation, as father to his family, so is captain to his crew. Sheriff. Judge and jury. He is all." Chapter 4, pg. 35
Confessions of A Shopaholic.
The Outsiders.
"And you can't win against them no matter how hard you try, because they've got all the breaks and even whipping them isn't going to change that fact." Chapter 1, pg. 11
"He liked to show he didn't care whether there was a law or not." Chapter 2, pg. 20
"It's not just money...We're sophisticated to the point of not feeling anything. Nothing is real with us." Chapter 3, pg. 38
"The fight for self-preservation had hardened him against caring." Chapter 4, pg. 59
"So Cherry Valance, the cheerleader, Bob's girl, the Soc, was trying to help us. No, it wasn't Cherry the Soc who was helping us, it was Cherry the dreamer who watched sunsets and couldn't stand fights." Chapter 6, pg. 86
"I wanted to cry, but Greasers don't cry in front of strangers. Some of us never cry at all. Like Dally and Two-Bit and Tim Shepard--they forgot how at an early age." Chapter 7, pg. 102
"He wasn't going to be any hood when he got old. He was going to get somewhere. Living the way we do would only make him more determined to get somewhere." Chapter 9, pg. 138
"You get tough like me and you don't get hurt. You look out for yourself and nothin' can touch you..." Chapter 9, pg. 147
In Her Shoes.
Maggie Feller: The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seem... f... filled... with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn't hard to master. I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster. Even losing you... the joking voice, a gesture I love... I shan't have lied. It's evident the art of losing's not too hard to master though it may look like... Write it!... like disaster.
Maggie Feller: I carry your heart with me. I carry it in my heart. I am never without it. Anywhere I go, you go, my dear. And whatever is done by only me... is your doing, my darling. I fear no fate... for you are my fate, my sweet. I want no world, for, beautiful... you are my world, my true. Here is the deepest secret no one knows. Here is the root of the root... and the bud of the bud... and the sky of the sky of a tree called life... which grows higher than the soul can hope... or mind can hide. It is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart. I carry your heart. I carry it in my heart.
Tithe: A Modern Day Faerie Tale.
Living Wild: The Story Of a Lion Raised In Captivity.
Little Women.
"During the fifteen minutes that followed, the proud and sensitive girl suffered a shame and pain which she never forgot. To others it might seem a ludicrous or trivial affair, but to her it was a hard experience, for during the twelve years of her life she had been governed by love alone...." Chapter 7, pg. 81
"'It's my dreadful temper! I try to cure it; I think I have, and then it breaks out worse than ever. Oh, Mother, what shall I do? What shall I do?' cried poor Jo, in despair." Chapter 8, pg. 93
"'You may try your experiment for a week and see how you like it. I think by Saturday night you will find that all play and no work is as bad as all work and no play,'" their Mother said. Chapter 11, pg. 127
"If 'genius is eternal patience,' as Michelangelo affirms, Amy had some claim to the divine attribute, for she persevered in spite of all obstacles, failures, and discouragements, firmly believing that in time she would do something worthy to be called 'high art.'" Chapter 26, pg. 302
"...When the first soreness was over, she could laugh at her poor little book, yet believe in it still, and feel herself the wiser and stronger for the buffeting she had received." Chapter 27, pg. 321
"'I only did as I'd be done by. You laugh at me when I say I want to be a lady, but I mean a true gentlewoman in mind and manners, and I try to do it as far as I know how. I can't explain exactly, but I want to be above the little meannesses and follies and faults that spoil so many women,'" Amy says. Chapter 30, pg. 363
"'You have grown abominably lazy, and you like gossip, and waste time on frivolous things, you are contented to be petted and admired by silly people, instead of being loved and respected by wise ones.'" Chapter 39, pg. 480
"'An old maid, that's what I'm to be. A literary spinster, with a pen for a spouse, a family of stories for children, and twenty years hence a morsel of fame, perhaps....'" Chapter 43, pg. 517
. . for when women are the advisers, the lords of creation don't take the advice till they have persuaded themselves that it is just what they intended to do. Then they act upon it, and, if it succeeds, they give the weaker vessel half the credit of it. If it fails, they generously give her the whole.
There are many Beths in the world, shy and quiet, sitting in corners till needed, and living for others so cheerfully that no one sees the sacrifices till the little cricket on the hearth stops chirping, and the sweet, sunshiny presence vanishes, leaving silence and shadow behind.
Pride & Prejudice.
"The gentlemen pronounced him to be a fine figure of a man, the ladies declared he was much handsomer than Mr. Bingley, and he was looked at with great admiration for about half the evening, till his manners gave a disgust which tuned the tide of his popularity; for he was discovered to be proud, to be above his company, and above being pleased; and not all his large estate in Derbyshire could then save him from having a most forbidding, disagreeable countenance, and being unworthy to be compared with his friend" (58).
"I have no wish of denying that I did every thing in my power to separate my friend from your sister, or that I rejoice in my success. Towards him I have been kinder than towards myself" (223).
You are mistaken, Mr. Darcy, if you suppose that the mode of your declaration affected me in any other way, than as it spared me the concern which I might have felt in refusing you, had you behaved in a more gentleman-like manner" (224).
"Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us."
"Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance."
“Which do you mean?†and turning round, he looked for a moment at Elizabeth, till catching her eye, he withdrew his own and coldly said, “She is tolerable; but not handsome enough to tempt me; and I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men. You had better return to your partner and enjoy her smiles, for you are wasting your time with me.â€
“In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.†Elizabeth’s astonishment was beyond expression. She stared, coloured, doubted, and was silent. This he considered sufficient encouragement, and the avowal of all that he felt and had long felt for her, immediately followed. He spoke well, but there were feelings besides those of the heart to be detailed, and he was not more eloquent on the subject of tenderness than of pride. His sense of her inferiority—of its being a degradation—of the family obstacles which judgment had always opposed to inclination, were dwelt on with a warmth which seemed due to the consequence he was wounding, but was very unlikely to recommend his suit.
They gradually ascended for half a mile, and then found themselves at the top of a considerable eminence, where the wood ceased, and the eye was instantly caught by Pemberley House, situated on the opposite side of a valley, into which the road with some abruptness wound. It was a large, handsome, stone building, standing well on rising ground, and backed by a ridge of high woody hills;—and in front, a stream of some natural importance was swelled into greater, but without any artificial appearance. Its banks were neither formal, nor falsely adorned. Elizabeth was delighted. She had never seen a place where nature had done more, or where natural beauty had been so little counteracted by an awkward taste. They were all of them warm in her admiration; and at that moment she felt that to be mistress of Pemberley might be something!
Elizabeth was much too embarrassed to say a word. After a short pause, her companion added, “You are too generous to trifle with me. If your feelings are still what they were last April, tell me so at once. My affections and wishes are unchanged, but one word from you will silence me on this subject forever.†Elizabeth feeling all the more than common awkwardness and anxiety of his situation, now forced herself to speak; and immediately, though not very fluently, gave him to understand, that her sentiments had undergone so material a change, since the period to which he alluded, as to make her receive with gratitude and pleasure, his present assurances.
Mr. Darcy's Diary.
Mr. Darcy Presents His Bride.
Treasure Island.
Fifteen men on the dead man's chest- Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum! Drink and the devil had done for the rest- Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!" (Ch. I, p.10)
"Fetch aft the rum, Darby!" (Ch. XXXII, p. 316)
I was no sooner certain of this than I began to feel sick, faint, and terrified. The hot blood was running over my back and chest. The dirk, where it had pinned my shoulder to the mast, seemed to burn like a hot iron; yet it was not so much these real sufferings that distressed me ... it was the horror I had upon my mind of falling from the cross-trees into that still green water beside the body of the coxswain. I clung with both hands till my nails ached, and I shut my eyes as if to cover up the peril. Gradually my mind came back again, my pulses quieted down to a more natural time, and I was once more in possession of myself.
The bar silver and the arms still lie, for all that I know, where Flint buried them; and certainly they shall lie there for me. Oxen and wain-ropes would not bring me back again to that accursed island; and the worst dreams that ever I have are when I hear the surf booming about its coasts, or start upright in bed, with the sharp voice of Captain Flint still ringing in my ears: ‘Pieces of eight! pieces of eight!’
The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn.
What Dreams May Come.
Hard Times.
"The characteristic of genuine heroism is its persistency. All men have wandering impulses, fits and starts of generosity. But when you have resolved to be great, abide by yourself, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself with the world. The heroic cannot be the common, nor the common the heroic."
~Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) U.S. poet, essayist and lecturer.
"A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer."
~Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) U.S. poet, essayist and lecturer.