Opera Quotes - Page 25

• Bidding the wizard farewell, he turned to his daughter, who held up her finger and said, “Daddy, look — one of the gnomes actually bit me!” “How wonderful! Gnome saliva is enormously beneficial!” said Mr. Lovegood, seizing Luna’s outstretched finger and examining the bleeding puncture marks. “Luna, my love, if you should feel any burgeoning talent today — perhaps an unexpected urge to sing opera or to declaim in Mermish — do not repress it! You may have been gifted by the Gernumblies!” Ron, passing them in the opposite direction, let out a loud snort.

  J. K. Rowling

  Daughter, Farewell, Opposites

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• That small circle of earth became a second home to both of us. Gardening boring? Never! It has surprise, tragedy, startling developments - a soap opera growing out of the ground. I'd forgotten that tremolo of expectation produced by a tiny forest of sprouts.

  Paul Fleischman

  Home, Garden, Circles

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• For a long time I found the celebrities of modern painting and poetry ridiculous. I loved absurd pictures, fanlights, stage scenery, mountebanks backcloths, inn-signs, cheap colored prints; unfashionable literature, church Latin, pornographic books badly spelt, grandmothers novels, fairy stories, little books for children, old operas, empty refrains, simple rhythms.

  Arthur Rimbaud

  Love, Children, Latin

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• I love space opera, and I believe that every sub-genre has potential no matter how old it is.

  Erica Brown

  Believe, Space, Matter

  Source: www.gamesradar.com

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• Soap opera rappers, all these niggas sound like 'All My Children'.

  Drake

  Children, Humble, Rapper

  Song: Headlines

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• I always wanted to be a comedian. I loved comedy since I was a little kid, and while I was at university I started doing stand up shows. Once I realized that I was good at it I quit college and left although I had six months left. I went to England. I could have done the last six months but I realized that I was better at standup comedy than I was at singing opera.

  Jim Jefferies

  Kids, College, Singing

  Source: montrealrampage.com

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• One gets, sensitive about losing mornings after getting a little used to them with living in a country. Each one of these endlessly varied daybreaks is an opera but once performed.

  Nathaniel Parker Willis

  Country, Morning, Littles

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• I have sat through an Italian opera, til, for sheer pain, and inexplicable anguish, I have rushed out into the noisiest places of the crowded street, to solace myself with sounds which I was not obliged to follow and get rid of the distracting torment of endless, fruitless, barren attention!

  Charles Lamb

  Music, Pain, Italian

  Charles Lamb (2008). “The Life, Letters, and Writings of Charles Lamb”, p.193, Cosimo, Inc.

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• Liverpool's grand opera also gave us some light comedy - on hearing the news that the house of goalkeeper Pepe Reina was burgled, and his Porsche stolen, while he was heroically saving penalties at Anfield, fans took a typically witty line: police were said to be interviewing a man from the West London area, a certain Frank Lampard, whose whereabouts on Tuesday between 7.45pm and 10.15pm are unknown. Indeed.

  Declan Lynch

  Soccer, Football, Witty

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• Funny how the world always praises its opera-singers so much and pays 'em so well and then starves its shoemakers, and yet it needs good shoes so much more than it needs opera--or war or fiction.

  Sinclair Lewis

  War, Shoes, Needs

  Sinclair Lewis (1915). “The Trail of the Hawk: A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life”

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• Were a stranger to drop on a sudden into this world, I would show him, as a specimen of its ills, a hospital full of diseases, a prison crowded with malefactors and debtors, a field of battle strewed with carcasses, a fleet foundering in the ocean, a nation languishing under tyranny, famine, or pestilence. To turn the gay side of life to him, and give him a notion of its pleasures; whither should I conduct him? to a ball, to an opera, to court? He might justly think, that I was only showing him a diversity of distress and sorrow.

  David Hume

  Ocean, Gay, Thinking

  David Hume (2016). “Delphi Complete Works of David Hume (Illustrated)”, p.4068, Delphi Classics

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• I was playing in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra as principal horn. I was there for some 15 years - one of the most exciting and great musical periods in my life.

  Gunther Schuller

  Years, Musical, Orchestra

  "Listen Back To A 1988 Conversation With Composer Gunther Schuller". "Fresh Air", www.npr.org. June 22, 2015.

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• The shower is my time to open up my operatic chops, because of the enormous echo. You sound five times as big in the shower, so I break into some "Nessun Dorma" from Puccini 's Turandot or Pearl Jam. You've got to go big when you're in the shower. There's no half-singing in the shower, you're either a rock star or an opera diva.

  Josh Groban

  Stars, Echoes, Rocks

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• Cricket is first and foremost a dramatic spectacle. It belongs with theatre, ballet, opera and the dance.

  C. L. R. James

  Ballet, Theatre, Firsts

  "Beyond a Boundary". Book by C. L. R. James, 1963.

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• A resolution to attend theatres or operas is an absolute disqualification for Holy Orders.

  Samuel Wilberforce

  Order, Theatre, Resolution

  "The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll". Book by Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, p. 74, 1898.

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• Some of the opera houses in Italy had to be burnt down because people could neither see nor hear. They gave up seeing years ago, but they did enjoy the music.

  Philip Johnson

  Years, People, House

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• The error in the art-genre of Opera consists herein: a Means of expression (Music) has been made the end, while the End of expression (the Drama) has been made a means.

  Richard Wagner

  Art, Drama, Mean

  Richard Wagner (1966). “Prose works”

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• The arts were a big part of my childhood. We went to the theatre and opera a lot as a family. We were not at all wealthy, but it was at a time when the arts were publicly funded and there were free tickets available. For someone like myself who wasn't that academically inclined, it was a great escape.

  Sarah Jessica Parker

  Art, Childhood, Theatre

  "The Family Stone - Sarah Jessica Parker interview" by Jack Foley, www.indielondon.co.uk.

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• And what unity is to be had, at a time when orchestras are dying out, and when opera houses are about to close their doors; what's going to come next - when nothing new in music, for the orchestra, is truly lasting: pieces are performed once, and then they're thrown away.

  Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau

  Doors, House, Unity

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• You could probably prove, by judicious use of logarithms and congruent triangles, that real life is a lot more like soap opera than most people will admit.

  Molly Ivins

  Real, People, Use

  Molly Ivins (1992). “Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She?”, Vintage

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• Cinema is a kind of pan-art. It can use, incorporate, engulf virtually any other art: the novel, poetry, theater, painting, sculpture, dance, music, architecture. Unlike opera, which is a (virtually) frozen art form, the cinema is and has been a fruitfully conservative medium of ideas and styles of emotions.

  Susan Sontag

  Movie, Art, Ideas

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• Opera is an extremely disciplined art form, and every excess a singer indulges in has a direct effect on the voice.

  Beverly Sills

  Art, Indulge In, Direct Effect

  "Beverly: An Autobiography". Book by Lawrence Linderman, 1987.

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• I have been devoured all my life by an incurable and burning impatience: and to this day find all oratory, biography, operas, films, plays, books, and persons, too long.

  Margot Asquith

  Book, Play, Long

  Margot Asquith (1933). “More Memories”

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• Opera Australia has a mix - it produces new work, it produces from the classical repertoire and, particularly in more recent years, it's done those blockbuster musicals which are very lucrative for it and reach an audience that classic opera or a new opera perhaps wouldn't reach, like South Pacific for example.

  George Brandis

  Years, Australia, Example

  Source: www.abc.net.au

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• And I often dream of chemistry at night, dreams that conflate the past and the present, the grid of the periodic table transformed to the grid of Manhattan. Sometimes, too, I dream of the indecipherable language of tin (a confused memory, perhaps, of its plaintive "cry"). But my favorite dream is of going to the opera (I am Hafnium), sharing a box at the Met with the other heavy transition metals my old and valued friends Tantalum, Rhenium, Osmium, Iridium, Platinum, Gold, and Tungsten.

  Oliver Sacks

  Dream, Memories, Confused

  "Uncle Tungsten". Book by Oliver Sacks, 2001.

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