Sound Quotes

“When we take the time to break free from the tyranny of Time and learn to listen to the sound of unspoken words, we discern the hot air behind the frenzy of the wheeling and dealing around. (“Wheeling and dealing »)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Yesterday it was sun outside. The sky was blue and people were lying under blooming cherry trees in the park. It was Friday, so records were released, that people have been working on for years. Friends around me find success and level up, do fancy photo shoots and get featured on big, white, movie screens. There were parties and lovers, hand in hand, laughing perfectly loud,
but I walked numbly through the park, round and round,
40 times for 4 hours
just wanting to make it through the day.

There's a weight that inhabits my chest some times. Like a lock in my throat, making it hard to breathe. A little less air got through
and the sky was so blue I couldn’t look at it because it made me sad, swelling tears in my eyes and they dripped quietly on the floor as I got on with my day. I tried to keep my focus, ticked off the to-do list, did my chores. Packed orders, wrote emails, paid bills and rewrote stories,
but the panic kept growing, exploding in my chest. Tears falling on the desk
tick tick tick
me not making a sound
and some days I just don't know what to do. Where to go or who to see and I try to be gentle, soft and kind,
but anxiety eats you up and I just want to be fine.
This is not beautiful. This is not useful. You can not do anything with it and it tries to control you, throw you off your balance and lovely ways
but you can not let it.

I cleaned up. Took myself for a walk. Tried to keep my eyes on the sky. Stayed away from the alcohol, stayed away from the destructive tools we learn to use.
the smoking and the starving, the running, the madness,
thinking it will help but it only feeds the fire
and I don't want to hurt myself anymore.
I made it through and today I woke up, lighter and proud because I'm still here. There are flowers growing outside my window. The coffee is warm, the air is pure. In a few hours I'll be on a train on my way to sing for people who invited me to come, to sing, for them. My own songs, that I created. Me—little me. From nowhere at all.
And I have people around that I like and can laugh with, and it's spring again.
It will always be spring again.
And there will always be a new day.”
― Charlotte Eriksson

“Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of radio, believed that sound waves never completely die away, that they persist, fainter and fainter, masked by the day-to-day noise of the world. Marconi thought that if he could only invent a microphone powerful enough, he would be able to listen to ancient times.”
― Hari Kunzru, White Tears

“Silence, it appears, is not the opposite of sound. It is another world altogether, literally offering a deeper level of thought, a journey to the bedrock of the self.”
― Michael Finkel, The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit

“Language and hearing are seated in the cerebral cortex, the folded gray matter that covers the first couple of millimeters of the outer brain like wrapping paper. When one experiences silence, absent even reading, the cerebral cortex typically rests. Meanwhile, deeper and more ancient brain structures seem to be activated--the subcortical zones. People who live busy, noisy lives are rarely granted access to these areas. Silence, it appears, is not the opposite of sound. It is another world altogether, literally offering a deeper level of thought, a journey to the bedrock of the self.”
― Michael Finkel, The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit

“A great voice is a unique instrument, not to sound like another instrument, but to be played like one.”
― Jeffrey Fry

“His voice was a deep and quiet rumble. It made me think of a freshly tuned tractor engine.. He didn't sound illiterate, but he didn't sound educated. In his speech as in so many other things, he was a mystery. Mostly it was his eyes that troubled me - a kind of peaceful absence in them, as if he were floating far, far away.”
― Stephen King, The Green Mile

“Water begins to boil in the kettle; it starts as a private, secluded sound, pure as rain, and grows to a steady, solipsistic bubbling.”
― Amit Chaudhuri, Afternoon Raag

“Wouldn't it be nice if there weree a planet where the sound of rain falling is like Bach?" he says.
"Yes, Planet Bach," I respond.
He smiles -"Yes", he murmurs- picturing it, hearing it.”
― Bill Hayes, Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me

“Without sound,
There would be no music.
And without music,
There would be no life.
And without a life force,
There would be no matter.
But it does not matter -
Because what is matter,
If there is no light?”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“I thought of you and how you love this beauty,
And walking up the long beach all alone
I heard the waves breaking in measured thunder
As you and I once heard their monotone.

Around me were the echoing dunes, beyond me
The cold and sparkling silver of the sea–
We two will pass through death and age lengthen
Before you hear that sound again with me.”
― Sara Teasdale, The Collected Poems

“When Arecibo is not listening to anything else, it hears the voice of creation.”
― Ted Chiang, The Great Silence

“The first music I ever heard
was only one hundred and sixty days
after I was conceived.
Da dum
Da dum
Da dum
Have you ever heard the sound
a blessing makes? This is it.

The first thing I ever saw
was only one hundred and eighty days
after I was conceived.
It was a bright light
soft like clouds
warm like candles.
Have you ever seen the colour
of a blessing? This is it.

The first time I ever suffered
was in the three thousand and sixty seconds
after I was born.
I listened for her heartbeat.
I searched for her light.
I cried for the first time until she was born.
Have you ever known
a blessing? A twin is it.”
― Kamand Kojouri

“Well, there would be no sound
if we shout on the background.”
― Ana Claudia Antunes, The Tao of Physical and Spiritual

“A sound idea is a form of energy.
It can not be destroyed.
It evolves from inspiration, to a function of preparation, then determination - till the ideator's dream becomes actualized in real life
At the very least, success is a second iteration of the original, unscripted Idea
So your idea refinement process needs to be test-driven
Test
Determine on time if investment in terms of effort and time is worth it
Work Smart
Fail early, fail often,
Success lies on the paths yet to be treaded,
Open your mind,
Think Disruption,
Be Flexible
Be AGILE

I think this is an idea worth sharing”
― Eniitan Akinola

“Sound had a freedom that no thought could equal because a sound made no absolute claim on meaning. Any word, on the other hand, could be forced to signify its opposite.”
― Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“I've got a couple of other ideas. For instance, about the viscosity of sound. Sounds spread over surfaces, slide across polished floors, flow in gutters, pile up in corners, snap on ridges, fall like rain on mucous membranes, swarm on plexuses, flame up on body hair, and flutter on skin like warm air over summer fields. There are aerial battles where sound waves bounce back on themselves, start spinning and whirl between heaven and earth, like the indestructible regret of the suicide, who halfway down from the sixth floor all of a sudden no longer wants to die any more. There are words which do not reach their mark and roll up into roving balls, swollen with danger, like lightning does sometimes when it fails to find its target. There are words which freeze...”
― René Daumal, A Night of Serious Drinking

“Nature is sound in many forms and states of existence.”
― João Mendes, Sound: The Fabric of Soul, Consciousness, Reality, and the Cosmos

“In a real poem a sound does not swallow a letter, but a letter swallows a sound.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, Serbian Satire and Aphorisms

“For once I want the beat louder than my mind.”
― Irfa Rahat

“Sound and light are two different things,
But it's more than just that, isn't it?”
― Eniitan Akinola

“Sissy realigned her own posture, and another creak was issued. Sissy's creak followed Jelly's creak down the hall of sonar eternity. Sounds travel through space long after their wave patterns have ceased to be detectable by the human ear; some cut right through the ionosphere and barrel on out into the cosmic heartland, while others bounce around, eventually being absorbed into the vibratory fields of earthly barriers, but in neither case does the energy succumb; it goes on forever – which is why we, each of us, should take pains to make sweet notes.”
― Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

“He tongue swiped my sex like was licking the frosting off a cupcake. I called out to heaven again. . . . My sounds encouraged him to torture me.”
― Eric Jerome Dickey, One Night

“Laughter bounced off the seats like party balloons, each ear catching its sound, magnifying it, carrying it forwards and backwards, soaring on a ripple of words.”
― Maggie Harris, Shoal: A Thanet Writers Anthology

“Jicho ni kiungo cha ajabu zaidi kuliko viungo vyote katika mwili wa mwanadamu baada ya ubongo. Jicho moja linatengenezwa na viungo vidogovidogo zaidi ya milioni mbili, vinavyofanya kazi kwa pamoja bila kukosea. Macho yana nguvu ya ajabu. Huu ni wito kwa akina mama wanaonyonyesha: Usizungumze maneno mabaya mtoto wako mchanga anapokuangalia machoni wakati ananyonya ziwa lako. Neno lolote utakalomwambia, zuri au baya, pamoja na kwamba amekuwa akisikia sauti yako kwa miezi kadhaa akiwa tumboni, litajirekodi katika akili yake isiyotambua bila wewe au yeye mwenyewe kujua. Neno hilo litakuja kumuathiri baadaye atakapokuwa mkubwa. Atakapopevuka, atakapokuwa na uwezo wa kupambanua mambo, atakuwa anaota na kuwaza kile ambacho ulikuwa ukimwambia alipokuwa tumboni; na alipokuwa akinyonya na kukukodolea macho.”
― Enock Maregesi

“Marie-Louise Mallet emphasizes the decreased control over the experience of listening as opposed to looking:
To look is to choose one’s point of view. [ . . . ] To listen is to be “touched” without ever being able to touch what touches us, without being able to seize or retain it. [ . . . ] It is to hear what one listens to take its distance, lose itself like a fleeting echo. To listen is to not be able to maintain, to keep present. It is not being able to retain. It’s to not be able to come back. [ . . . ] What has been heard will be kept only in memory, that is, kept as lost, without ever assuring that we have heard well, without being able to reassure ourselves.”
― Marie-Louise Mallet

“Once, in grade school, our class was taken on an overnight excursion to a campground. The air was warm: we had a campfire and ate hot dogs; and as darkness fell, we were herded down to the lake. There were perhaps thirty children, so I suppose there were at least four or five adults. We trooped through the woods with flashlights. There must have been yelling and singing, the grown-ups chattering. A noisy expedition. At the shore of the lake we were presented, as if on a stage, with a doubled moon -- one floating in the clear dark sky, one in the clear dark calm of the water.

Were there exclamations, shouts of amazement, loud giggle praise for this sight? There might have been, but for me there was only silence. An unprecedented silence, tranquil and immense. Silence, and the moon on the lake -- a sight so pure I nearly staggered under its impact. I knew, without the words to say it, that the lack in my life of what this moon and lake represented was the other side of the coin of happiness. Not unhappiness, but shame, which was possibly the same thing, and which then rose up in me in nauseating waves.”
― Norma Fox Mazer

“If we would think-to-speak at an adaptive, and comprehensible ear-speed of human sound, we might vastly hear so much more, than the expensive sensory gift of ocular attention, could afford.”
― Tracey Bond

“The siblings' father stood in the doorway of the library and said something they never forgot. "Children," he said, "There is no worse sound in the world than somebody who cannot play the violin who insists on doing so anyway.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Austere Academy

“Alice's voice rang out confidently from the back of the room. "Silent night, holy night. All is calm, all is bright..." Her rendition was flawless: clear, true notes strung together in a necklace of sound, a gift for everyone in the room to wear.”
― Peg Kehret, Small Steps: The Year I Got Polio