Lyric Quotes - page 2

From the simplest lyric to the most complex novel and densest drama, literature is asking us to pay attention. Pay attention to the frog. Pay attention to the west wind. Pay attention to the boy on the raft, the lady in the tower, the old man on the train. In sum, pay attention to the world and all that dwells therein and thereby learn at last to pay attention to yourself and all that dwells therein. (Frederick Buechner)
At present we are living through an unusual period in time a new cosmic creation has become reality in the world, a creativity within ourselves which pervades our consciousness.... in this way the artist became the foundation on which progress in the reconstruction of life could advance beyond the frontiers of the all-seeing eye and the all-hearing ear. Thus a picture was no longer an anecdote nor a lyric poem nor a lecture on morality nor a feast for the eye but a sign and symbol of this new conception of the world which comes from within us. View quote
El Lissitsky
I fell into lyric writing because of music. I backed into it. View quote
Stephen Sondheim
Lyrics have to be underwritten. That's why poets generally make poor lyric writers because the language is too rich. You get drowned in it. View quote
Stephen Sondheim
There is a wonderful Hungarian literature, especially in lyric poetry. View quote
György Ligeti
Enormous enlargements of an object or a fragment give it a personality it never had before, and in this way, it can become a vehicle of entirely new lyric and plastic power. View quote
Fernand Léger
The video forum for me has been a source of great consternation because once you start projecting a look to a song, it robs the listener of their ability to adopt that song and make the lyric their own. View quote
Sheryl Crow
After using four different languages on an album, it's tough to decide which one I'm gonna actually learn to speak. I always study the lyric, make sure I know what I'm singing, and try to get the pronunciation as perfect as possible. View quote
Josh Groban
I just have to feel it first. It can't be cerebral at all. I'm big on lyrics, a big lyric person, especially the kind of singing I do. It's hard to sound not cheesy sometimes with the voice I have with English songs. View quote
Josh Groban
"The Itch" was an accident. I responded to [co-writer] Billy Steinberg's lyric because I thought even though we set it in this particular story of a girl in a relationship who isn't getting what she needs, it's really a metaphor for desire. Everything just coincided without my realizing it. I was playing Lucy in Dracula 2000, and she's a character who is totally open, sexual and curious and definitely has "The Itch" on many different levels. And it was just coincidence that all this stuff kind of like came together for me. Because I get the itch all the time. And to me that really means something. View quote
Colleen Fitzpatrick
I've always thought of music as something which gives the words their flight and their wings and the music often comes first, although sometimes I'll have a concept, a title idea, a lyric idea that I want to write and the lyric will come first. (Neil Diamond)
I won't get over that in a hurry: my least favourite atrophied Hazel McWitch lookalike in the world, singing "I just want to make love to you", right there on primetime telly. She has to be the only person on Earth who can take a lyric like that and make it seem like a blood-curdling threat without changing any of the words. View quote
Charlie Brooker
I really hate it when I think I'm on the precipice of saying something deep and empowering when it's actually more or less a quote from Rocky IV ("If I can change and you can change, everybody can change”) or a lyric from an M People song ("search for the hero inside yourself”) but I've really got very little to add to these scattered and perennial pop cultural artifacts. View quote
Russell Brand
Before I start, like to make sure I'm smart. Gather my composure, rather my swagger and my couture. Pivot my fitted, then begin to rivet, with a change of lyric. In other words, I reposition how I sit it. Then make you feel it, like I mispronounced "filet.”. View quote
Lupe Fiasco
‘Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time-' That's the sort of thing she would have written before the rise of advertising. The correlation is perfectly clear. Advertising up, lyric poetry down. View quote
Frederik Pohl
Rhyme is the native condition of lyric verse in English; a rhymeless lyric is a maimed thing. View quote
Algernon Charles Swinburne
A new type of poem has been evolved and popularized by the demands of the anthology-reading public. It is called 'the perfect modern lyric.' Like the best-seller novel, it is usually achieved in the dark; but certain critical regulations can be made for it. It must be fairly regular in form and easily memorized, it must be a new combination of absolutely warn-out material, it must have a certain unhealthy vigour or languor, and it must start off engagingly with a simple sentimental statement. Somewhere a daring pseudo-poetical image must be included... View quote
Laura Riding
Gentlemen, to the lady without whom I should never have survived for eighty, nor sixty, nor yet thirty years. Her smile has been my lyric, her understanding, the rhythm of the stanza. She has been the spring wherefrom I have drawn the power to write the words. She is the poem of my life. View quote
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The fact that The Bridge contains folk lore and other material suitable to the epic form need not therefore prove its failure as a long lyric poem, with interrelated sections. View quote
Hart Crane
He has no equal in medieval German lyric poetry and perhaps not even in European lyric poetry of the Middle Ages. View quote
Walther von der Vogelweide
When we study Shakespeare on the page, for academic purposes, we may require all kinds of help. Generally, we read him in modern spelling and with modern punctuation, and with notes. But any poetry that is performed - from song lyric to tragic speech - must make its point, as it were, without reference back. (James Fenton)
Verse no longer stands at the centre of communicative discourse. It is no longer, as it was from Homer to Milton, the natural repository of knowledge and traditional sentiment. It no longer gives to society its main record of past grandeur or its natural setting for prophecy, as it did in Virgil and Dante. Verse has grown private. It is a special language which the individual poet insinuates, by force of personal genius, into the awareness of his contemporaries, persuading to learn and perhaps hand on his own uses of words. Poetry has become essentially lyric - that is to say, it is the poetry of private vision rather than of public or of national occasion. View quote
George Steiner
A short poem is often called a lyric, which originally meant a poem short enough to be set to music and sung for a moment's pleasure. View quote
Herbert Read
From the poet's viewpoint a lyric is a poem which embodies a single or simple emotional attitude that expresses directly an uninterrupted mood or inspiration. View quote
Herbert Read
Every phrase can be a good lyric if it has the good rhythm. View quote
Chris Martin