Weekend Words: Piano
On Mayday, the new Whitney Museum, designed by Renzo Piano, opens to the public.
On Mayday, the new Whitney Museum, designed by Renzo Piano, opens to the public.
I love a piano, I love a piano
I love to hear somebody play
Upon a piano, a grand piano
It simply carries me away
—Irving Berlin, “I Love a Piano”
If I’m going to Hell, I’m going there playing the piano.
—Jerry Lee Lewis
We grew up founding our dreams on the infinite promise of American advertising. I still believe that one can learn to play the piano by mail and that mud will give you a perfect complexion.
—Zelda Fitzgerald
Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.
In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.
So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.
—D. H. Lawrence, “Piano”
Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power.
—Joan Didion
A PIANO.
If the speed is open, if the color is careless, if the selection of a strong scent is not awkward, if the button holder is held by all the waving color and there is no color, not any color. If there is no dirt in a pin and there can be none scarcely, if there is not then the place is the same as up standing.
This is no dark custom and it even is not acted in any such a way that a restraint is not spread. That is spread, it shuts and it lifts and awkwardly not awkwardly the centre is in standing.
—Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons
Isn’t this a death-trap, wanting to put too much in
So the floor sags, as under the weight of a piano, or a piano-legged girl
And the whole house of cards comes dinning down around one’s ears!
—John Ashbery, “The Skaters”
The piano has been drinking, not me.
—Tom Waits
I wish the government would put a tax on pianos for the incompetent.
—Edith Sitwell
