Weekend Words: Violin
"The difference between a violin and a viola is that a viola burns longer."
Today marks the 100th birthday of blues violinist Papa John Creach (May 28, 1917 – February 22, 1994).
Singing has always seemed to me the most perfect means of expression. It is so spontaneous. And after singing, I think the violin. Since I cannot sing, I paint.
—Georgia O’Keeffe
Philosophy, astronomy, and politics were marked at zero, I remember. Botany variable, geology profound as regards the mud stains from any region within fifty miles of town, chemistry eccentric, anatomy unsystematic, sensational literature and crime records unique, violin player, boxer, swordsman, lawyer, and self-poisoner by cocaine and tobacco.
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Dr. Watson on Sherlock Holmes in “The Five Orange Pips”)
Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.
—G. K. Chesterton
To say that these men paid their shillings to watch twenty-two hirelings kick a ball is merely to say that a violin is wood and catgut, that Hamlet is so much paper and ink. For a shilling the Brudderfrod United AFC offered you Conflict and Art.
—J. B. Priestley, Good Companion
Happiness is a thing to be practiced, like the violin.
—John Lubbock
Love is not the dying moan of a distant violin-it’s the triumphant twang of a bedspring.
—S. J. Perelman
If one had to worry about one’s actions in respect of other people’s ideas, one might as well be buried alive in an antheap or married to an ambitious violinist. Whether that man is the prime minister, modifying his opinions to catch votes, or a bourgeois in terror lest some harmless act should be misunderstood and outrage some petty convention, that man is an inferior man and I do not want to have anything to do with him any more than I want to eat canned salmon.
—Aleister Crowley
I love power. But it is as an artist that I love it. I love it as a musician loves his violin, to draw out its sounds and chords and harmonies.
—Napoleon Bonaparte
Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.
—Samuel Butler
The difference between a violin and a viola is that a viola burns longer.
—Victor Borge
I am sad, sad as a circus-lioness, sad as an eagle without wings, sad as a violin with only one string and one that is broken, sad as a woman who is growing old.
—Jean Rhys
Les sanglots longs
Des violons
De l’automne
Blessent mon coeur
D’une langueur
Monotone.
The long sobs
of autumn’s
violins
wound my heart
with a monotonous
languor.
—Paul Verlaine, “Chason d’Automne”
A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a violin; what else does a man need to be happy?
—Albert Einstein
