Melody Quotes

212 Sourced quotes

As the screams in the water multiplied, another sound was heard, strong and clear at first, then fainter in the distance. It was the melody of the hymn Nearer, My God, To Thee, played by the string orchestra in the dining saloon.

I wrote a little song for you
With a melody I'd borrowed put to words that didn't rhyme
To repeat what you already knew;
As the stones thrown at your window tapped in syncopation,
You kept a distance out of fear you'd break,
But what good's a single windchime, hanging quiet all alone?

I'm not one for walking the beaches humming a melody... I love the discipline of sitting in the studio, writing and listening. That is my domain.

What? You don't think he's cute?" "I didn't really notice." "How can you not notice when a guy is cute?" Melody stared at her in disbelief.

Nicholas Sparks

It's like picking up an unfamiliar piece of sheet music & starting to stumble through it, only to realize it is a melody you'd once learned by heart, one you can play without even trying.

I have always believed that music and poetry detract from each other when they are associated. Each is an art complete in itself: music contains its own feeling and beautiful poetry its own melody.

Alphonse de Lamartine

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some of them woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

The melody of birds finds its way to the heart of everyone; but the cause that prompts the outpourings that make copse, rock, and river, ring again on a fine spring morning is more a matter of doubt with ornithologists than the uninitiated in zoological mysteries might suppose.

William Broderip

The night comes stealing o'er me,
And clouds are on the sea;
While the wavelets rustle before me
With a mystical melody.

Song like a rose should be;
Each rhyme a petal sweet;
For fragrance, melody,
That when her lips repeat
The words, her heart may know
What secret makes them so.
Love, only Love.

Frank Dempster Sherman

The nightingale appear'd the first, And as her melody she sang, The apple into blossom burst, To life the grass and violets sprang.

The language of tones belongs equally to all mankind, and melody is the absolute language in which the musician speaks to every heart.

I think of my life as a kind of music, not always good music but still having form and melody.

It's not always easy for a father to understand the interests and ways of his son. It seems the songs of our children may be in keys we've never tried. The melody of each generation emerges from all that's gone before. Each one of us contributes in some unique way to the composition of life.

The music throbbed in a voice of singular and delicate power; the air was resonant with melody, love and pain. The meanest Italian in the gallery far up beneath the ceiling, the most exalted of the land in the boxes and the stalls, leaned indulgently forward, to be swept by this sweet storm of song.

When the uniqueness of a place sings to us like a melody, then we will know, at last, what it means to be home

The flowers absorb the sunshine because it is their nature. I give out melody because God filled my soul with it.

Matilda Sissieretta Joyner Jones

To regard analogy as an aid to the invention of theories is as absurd as to regard melody as an aid to the composition of sonatas.

Norman Robert Campbell

My fingers traced the melody on an invisible keyboard—my usual way to connect with the music, to feel its emotions on my fingertips. I touched the keys softly, as if gliding my hands through water, but the musical notes kept slipping between my fingers like bubbles, waltzing away in the blue radiance.

I have found in every word a certain musical value, a melody in every thought, harmony in every feeling, and I have tried to interpret the same things with clear and simple words to those who used to listen to my music.

Some birds represent the majesty of Nature, like the eagles ; others its ferocity, like the hawks ; others its cunning, like the crow; others its sweetness and melody, like the song-birds. The loon represents its wildness and solitariness.

One nightingale in an interfluous wood Satiate the hungry dark with melody.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

From the time I could play the piano, I remember trying to write tunes. They were in my head, and I would just sit down and start noodling. Next thing I knew, I had written a melody.

Marvin Hamlisch

No one can explain how the notes of a Mozart melody, or the folds of a piece of Titian's drapery, produce their essential effects. If you do not feel it, no one can by reasoning make you feel it.

Writing is like listening to a melody line in my head. Note by note, it knows where it wants to go. I follow it and lay it down. I can pare it, shape it, and polish it later...My job is to take down the dribs and drabs - to free-associate, if you will, knowing that the associations have their own plans for where we're going with all this.