Song Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Pop culture is filth. It is now completely degenerate. Why do you never hear anyone humming a current pop song any more? Because none of them is hummable, or even worth bothering to remember. What is the main topic on TV sitcoms and "dramedies"? You know what. Why do you stand in the aisle in Blockbuster muttering to yourself: "There isn't a single damn movie in here I want to watch"? Because Hollywood produces nothing but crap, crap, crap.

John Derbyshire

Lo, the book I hold here,
In the city cold here! I hold it with a gentle hand and love it as I may;
Lo, the weary moments!
Lo, the icy comments!
And lo, false Fortune's knife of gold swift-lifted up to slay! Has the strife no ending?
Has the song no meaning? Linger I, idle as of old, while men are reaping or gleaning?

Robert Williams Buchanan

All music is folk music, I ain't never heard no horse sing a song.

Louis Armstrong

The whole trouble with a folk song is that once you have played it through there is nothing much you can do except play it over again and play it rather louder. Most Russian music, indeed, consists in ringing changes on this device, skilfully disguised though the fact may be.

Constant Lambert

The fields might fall to fallow and the birds might stop their song awhile; the growing things might die and lie in silence under snow, while through it all the cold sea wore its face of storms and death and sunken hopes...and yet unseen beneath the waves a warmer current ran that, in its time, would bring the spring.

Susanna Kearsley

The more congenial page of some tenth-rate poeticule worn out with failure after failure and now squat in his hole like the tailless fox, he is curled up to snarl and whimper beneath the inaccessible vine of song.

Algernon Charles Swinburne

Where the ring of twilight gleams
Round the sanctuary wrought,
Whispers haunt me — in my dreams
We are one yet know it not.
Some for beauty follow long
Flying traces; some there be
Seek thee only for a song:
I to lose myself in thee.
Symbolism

George William Russell

I should be glad of loneliness
And hours that go on broken wings,
A thirsty body, a tired heart
And the unchanging ache of things,
If I could make a single song
As lovely and as full of light,
As hushed and brief as a falling star
On a winter night.

Petal, like a persistent song phrase, like a few stubborn lines of verse memorized in childhood. The needle was stuck.

Thus far, gentlemen, I have been insisting very strenuously upon what the most vulgar common sense has every disposition to assent to and only ingenious philosophers have been able to deceive themselves about. But now I come to a category which only a more refined form of common sense is prepared willingly to allow, the category which of the three is the chief burden of Hegel's song, a category toward which the studies of the new logico-mathematicians, Georg Cantor and the like, are steadily pointing, but to which no modern writer of any stripe, unless it be some obscure student like myself, has ever done anything approaching to justice.

Charles Sanders Peirce

The whole truth…
sings only —and all lovers are the song

Some fans get genuinely upset if I admit that a song that they held close to their heart was not based on actual events in my life. Like What Sarah Said : I was never in a waiting room in a hospital waiting for news that somebody was going to die.

And the song, from beginning to end,
I found again in the heart of a friend.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world's great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire's glory:
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song's measure
Can trample an empire down.

Arthur O'Shaughnessy

- Report...

Three wise men of Gotham Went to sea in a bowl: And if the bowl had been stronger, My song had been longer.

We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.

That's the magic of this band: shooting from the hip. The lights have to follow our cues, because we're not going to follow their cues. We're not going to stick to a song the way it's supposed to be. Everything is up to us. That's music to me. That's American music. We're an American band.

Households that have lost the soul of cooking from their routines may not know what they are missing: the song of a stir-fry sizzle, the small talk of clinking measuring spoons, the yeasty scent of rising dough, the painting of flavors onto a pizza before it slides into the oven.

Barbara Kingsolver

Nor for you, for one alone,
Blossoms and branches green to coffins all I bring, For fresh as the morning, thus would I chant a song for you O sane and sacred death.

What never yet was heard in tale or song,
From old or modern bard, in hall or bower.

I remember it so clearly —
how people, seeing me, would break off in midword.
Laughter died.
Lovers' hands unclasped.
Children ran to their mothers.
I didn't even know their short-lived names.
And that song about a little green leaf —
no one ever finished it near me.

Wisława Szymborska

I wrote a song called "Father & Son" about the son running off to do his own thing. Now the story is about my son coming back and bringing a guitar into the house. A couple of years ago, one morning after prayers, his guitar was lying around. I picked it up and my fingers knew exactly where to go. I'd written some words and when I put them to music, it moved me and I realized I could have another job to do. Things just grew from there.

The old song of Chevy Chase is the favourite ballad of the common people of England; and Ben Jonson used to say he would rather have been the author of it than of all his works.

Over increasingly large areas of the United States, spring now comes unheralded by the return of the birds, and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of bird song.

What I fear most is that you will know where the laughs are going to come, or that you will know a character so well that you know when they're going to sing a song. In some shows, you just know that the audience is sitting there going "Oh no, she's going to sing."