A Quote by Oscar Levant

You can't possibly hear the last movement of Beethoven's Seventh and go slow. (Oscar trying to talk his way out of a speeding ticket) — © Oscar Levant
You can't possibly hear the last movement of Beethoven's Seventh and go slow. (Oscar trying to talk his way out of a speeding ticket)
When Beethoven's Seventh Symphony was premiered, after the second movement, they clapped so much that they had the repeat the second movement and do it again.
It's funny, because in 1970 I met the Beatles quite by a chance at a party. It was the Beethoven bicentenary, and I was then also playing the Beethoven Sonatas. And that's all they wanted to hear about - I wanted to talk about them, and all they wanted to talk about was Beethoven.
Whether it's a speeding ticket or whatever it might be, some of us are trying to get an edge some way or another in life.
I've been pulled over five times for speeding - and talked my way out of every single ticket!
I miss that moment when you're about to go through the tube turn-style but you put your ticket in the wrong way and then as you're trying to figure out how exactly to get in the damn station you hear a collective sigh of 40 people behind you pissed that you're slowing down the herd.
You get a lot of speeding tickets, and you say, 'I'm so unlucky!' No, you're not. You're speeding. Slow down.
Meditation is the most extraordinary thing if you know how to do it, and you cannot possibly learn from anybody; and that's the beauty of it. It isn't something you learn, a technique, and therefore there is no authority. Therefore if you will learn about yourself, watch yourself, watch the way you walk, the way you talk, how you eat, what you say, the gossip, the hate, the jealousy. If you are aware of it without any choice, all that is part of meditation, and as you go, as you journey, as that movement goes, all that movement is meditation. Then that movement is endless, timeless.
They all trying to say something with music that you can't say with plain talk. There ain't really no words for love or pain. And the way I see it, only fools go around trying to talk their love or talk their pain. So the smart people make music and you can kinda hear about it without them saying anything.
Out of the Slow Food movement has grown something called the Slow Cities movement, which has started in Italy but has spread right across Europe and beyond. And in this, towns begin to rethink how they organize the urban landscape so that people are encouraged to slow down and smell the roses and connect with one another.
You'll have games where you're out there a long time. Being able to go through that and not get stiff was a good thing for me, ... As I went along, it felt better, and on that last play [a nifty move to his right and a throw across his body for the final out in the seventh] had a lot of body torque to it, and no problems.
Beethoven's fourth and seventh symphonies have a certain amount in common. Well, of course they're both written by Beethoven, but besides that, I would say their overall effect and idea is to provide the listener with an incredible sense of joy.
Writing fiction is like music. You have to keep it moving. You can have slow movements but there has to be a sense of momentum, of going someplace. You hear a snatch of Beethoven and it has a sense of momentum that is unmistakably his. That's a nice quality if you can do it in fiction.
The ticket out of the Depression was an education, a college degree. It really didn't matter if you knew anything. You just had to have the degree. My dad, up until the last two years of his life, thought he had failed miserably with me 'cause I didn't go to college. I mean, you've seen postgame interviews with the star of the game and the players always talk about how proud his parents are because he's the first guy in his family ever to attend college. I'm the first in my family not to! I'm the first of my family not to have a degree. It's thrown everybody for a loop.
A country girl can talk her way out of a ticket.
If you mess up the tiniest little thing in the Beethoven concerto, or the phrasing isn't just exactly perfectly executed, Beethoven brings out the worst in the best violinist. You almost never hear a satisfying performance, because it doesn't play itself.
If you don't want a speeding ticket, don't speed.
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