A Quote by Madeleine L'Engle

Because I am a storyteller I live by words. Perhaps music is a purer art form. It may be that when we communicate with life on another planet, it will be through music, not through language or words.

Madeleine L'Engle

Quote Topics

Am Another Art Art Form Because Communicate Form Language Life Live Live By May Music Music Is Perhaps Planet Storyteller Through Will Words

Quote Author

Madeleine L'Engle
American - Writer
November 29, 1918 - September 6, 2007

If you have words and want to write music for them, the words hit you with a feeling which you can't really describe in words, and so what you do is to put music to them and in this way you make contact with the words, through the musical thing. It happens when two feelings come together and they do something together and they compliment each other.

Jim Capaldi

Kids use words in ways that release hidden meanings, revel the history buried in sounds. They haven't forgotten that words can be more than signs, that words have magic, the power to be things, to point to themselves and materialize. With their back-formations, archaisms, their tendency to play the music in words--rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, repetition--children peel the skin from language. Words become incantatory. Open Sesame. Abracadabra. Perhaps a child will remember the word and will bring the walls tumbling down.

John Edgar Wideman

A famous violinist once said. Music transcends words. By exchanging notes, you get to know one another, to understand one another. As if your souls were connected and your hearts were overlapping. It's a conversation through instruments. A miracle that creates harmony. In that moment, music transcends words.

KAORI

The being level speaks the language of art, music, color shape and pattern directly -- a language that requires no words -- is not limited by words -- nor does it have the specificity of words and thus cannot be broken onto parts that can be manipulated or analyzed by the intellect. It must be swallowed, whole not parsed, sorted and justified.

Thomas Campbell

In the 1960s, people like Bob Dylan, his music and words were a threat to the society and mainstream of the time. It shook people alive, and directly and indirectly things changed. But, as I see it, the change is never through the music alone. It's also the circumstances around the music that will cause/create the effect. And sometimes it's just strictly accidental that a piece of music becomes a form of protest.

G.W. Sok

A book, at the same time, also has to do with what I call a buzz in the head. It's a certain kind of music that I start hearing. It's the music of the language, but it's also the music of the story. I have to live with that music for a while before I can put any words on the page. I think that's because I have to get my body as much as my mind accustomed to the music of writing that particular book. It really is a mysterious feeling.

Paul Auster

Each time I write, each time the authentic words break through, I am changed. The older order that I was collapses and dies. I lose control. I do not know exactly what words will appear on the page. I follow language. I follow the sound of the words, and I am surprised and transformed by what I record.

Susan Griffin

Words performed through music can express what language alone had exhausted

Hugo von Hofmannsthal

My sense of humor keeps me from committing atrocities! I love rearranging words and destroying language and the established forms of art and music/challenging the reasoning of others. I'm not satisfied with the state of humanity. If I must live on the same planet as Mr and Mrs out of touch, I will do whatever I can to jolt their zombie-ass skulls from the upside-down veal market they hang from.

Alan Bishop

Books and music saved me as a teenager because it was through them that I realized that I wasn't alone in my obsessive love for words and music.

Charles de Lint

Growing up as a little, introverted boy, dance was the only way I could communicate. For me, it's the greatest language - no words. Sharing people's stories through the art of movement is magical.

Alyssa Edwards

I'm chasing a kind of language that can be unburdened by people's expectations. I think music is the primary model-how close can you get this language to be like music and communicate feeling at the base level in the same way a composition with no words communicates meaning? It might be impossible. Language is always burdened by thought. I'm just trying to get it so it can be like feeling.

Terrance Hayes

To talk about paintings is not only difficult but perhaps pointless too. You can only express in words what words are capable of expressing-- what language can communicate. Painting has nothing to do with that.

Gerhard Richter

I couldn't live without music. I experienced things through music in different countries where you cannot speak the same language, but the music and the dance relates everything.

Marion Cotillard

Every song I've ever written always starts with the words because I want the music to be the musical extension of the feelings of the words, and not the words being the emotional extension of the feeling of the music.