Sounds Quotes

“They lay on their heathery beds and listened to all the sounds of the night. They heard the little grunt of a hedgehog going by. They saw the flicker of bats overhead. They smelt the drifting scent of honeysuckle, and the delicious smell of wild thyme crushed under their bodies. A reed-warbler sang a beautiful little song in the reeds below, and then another answered.”
― Enid Blyton, The Secret Island

“I took him to the river and said “let’s watch something drown,” So he took a stone
and I took my necklace
and we threw it all together,
the way I always think I will get better in July. Things will change and sounds won’t ache
and I gave my heart to uncertainty so many times, and so I took him to the river,
threw the necklace in the river to slowly watch it drown, or burn, or fade away
like I’ve done so many times.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, You're Doing Just Fine

“On building homes for fallen angels:

When I was small - I sought a home,
a place to go and rest my bones.
Then founded something, of my own,
I lived among the restless stones.

If seeking leads you back to evil,
what good is that, I asked a weevil.
He said a home is what you make,
it can't be real, if it is fake...

And if you wait instead of seek,
will you find love, or something bleak?
I know (myself) for I have found,
a beauty, hidden – in a sound.

Waiting is boring.
And so is exploring.
A smile is sometimes all it takes.
And then your whole world simply breaks.”
― Will Advise, Nothing is here...

“I was downstairs, reading."
"Now?" I strained to see her face. She was smiling, it appeared.
"Yes, now," she said. "It's nice, sometimes, to read in the middle of the night. The sky is so dark and soft-looking outside the window, all the stars out. You have just on light on, you know, and it seems to pour onto the page. Makes the book seem better. You are this little island, just up alone with a book. And you heard the night sounds of the house...It's so interesting to me, that sound. Time. The measure of it.”
― Elizabeth Berg, What We Keep

“so many sounds do come close to our ears each moment. What we allow into our mind and how we interpret what we listen to is what propels our thought and actions”
― Ernest Agyemang Yeboah, The Untapped Wonderer In You: dare to do the undone

“When listening to the lightning storms in your area on a standard AM radio, you will hear a sound like bacon frying and this is the electromagnetic energy that the storm is generating. Plants react to this energy and may show vigorous growth during lightning seasons.”
― Steven Magee, Electrical Forensics

“we are too busy listening to our thoughts that we don't hear the wonderful sounds surrounding us...”
― Alina Radoi

“The gruff murmur, irregularly broken by the taking out of pipes and the putting in of pipes which had kept on assuring her, though she could not hear what was said (as she sat in the window which opened on the terrace), that the men were happily talking; this sound, which had lasted now half an hour and had taken its place soothingly in the scale of sounds pressing on top of her, such as the tap of balls upon bats, the sharp, sudden bark now and then," How's that? How's that? "of the children playing cricket, had ceased; so that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts and seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again as she sat with the children the words of some old cradle song, murmured by nature," I am guarding you––I am your support, "but at other times suddenly and unexpectedly, especially when her mind raised itself slightly from the task actually in hand, had no such kindly meaning, but like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life, made one think of the destruction of the island and its engulfment in the sea, and warned her whose day had slipped past in one quick doing after another that it was all ephemeral as a rainbow––this sound which had been obscured and concealed under the other sounds suddenly thundered hollow in her ears and made her look up with an impulse of terror.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“Stillness does not mean the absence of sounds, not at all, but rather the tranquillity that allows one to perceive quiet, soft and distant sounds.”
― Nihad Sirees, The Silence and the Roar

“sometimes music isn't just a bunch of sounds and lyrics, sometimes it's more than that: a time machine...”
― Alina Radoi

“Some sounds are so exquisite - far more exquisite than anything seen. Daff's purr there on my rug, for instance - and the snap and crackle of the fire - and the squeaks and scrambles of mice that are having a jamboree behind the wainscot.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Emily Climbs

“Sound gives life to our words just as well as the images they conjure up and the sound is there, whether or not we read them aloud.”
― A.A. Patawaran, Write Here Write Now: Standing at Attention Before My Imaginary Style Dictator

“In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.”
― Wallace Stevens, Ideas of Order

“There was a strange exciting smell in the air - the smell of wine, cigar smoke, and perfume, mingled with the scent of the roses. The bright colors merged into one another, and the music rose and fell.”
― Joan G Robinson

“Imagine you are tied to a chair with your hands tightly bound behind you, preventing you from covering your ears. Before you is a giant chalkboard. A woman enters the room. Her fingernails are long, hard, and ready for attack. You follow her with your eyes as she saunters to the chalkboard and raises her hand to make a claw. She looks at you with a blank stare as she digs her fingernails into the chalkboard and drags downward. As the harsh sound hits your ears, you squeeze your eyes shut in an instinctive yet vain effort to shut out the noise, but the absence of sight only magnifies the vile sound. Your ears have become hypersensitive, and you feel an unpleasant chill shoot through your body down to the toes of your feet. Finally, the sound stops as she removes her nails from the board, and a wave of relief passes over you. But the reprieve is short-lived. Again, the nails dig into the board and screech all the way down. The process repeats itself several times, and each time she stops dragging, you think it has ended for good, but soon she starts all over again. You frantically call out to her and ask her why she is doing this. You wonder what you have done to earn this perpetual torture. But she only looks back at your with a blank, almost quizzical stare, and that is when you realize that she is unaware of the pain she is causing. You feel the hopelessness pass over you. You squirm to free yourself from the chair, but it's no use. This is your life now, listening to this terribly unpleasant sound with no way to stop it. Sometimes she leaves, but she always comes back to repeat the scene, oblivious to the torture she creates.”
― Rachel Cinelli

“By focusing on the interior of a speaker's larynx and using infrared, he was able to convert the visible vibrations of the vocal cords into sound of fair quality, but that did not satisfy him. He worked for a while on vibrations picked up from panes of glass in windows and on framed pictures, and he experimented briefly with the diaphragms in speaker systems, intercoms and telephones. He kept on into October without stopping, and finally achieved a device that would give tinny but recognizable sound from any vibrating surface - a wall, a floor, even the speaker's own cheek or forehead.”
― Damon Knight, One Side Laughing: Stories Unlike Other Stories

“Oh! The blissful sounds of nature
Sink deep into your heart
Give eternal joy,
All anxiety melts away.
 ”
― Balroop Singh

“One day, walking neer one of your Yuman houses, smelling all the interest with snout, I herd, from inside, the most amazing sound. Turns out, what that sound is, was: the Yuman voice, making werds. They sounded grate! They sounded like prety music! I listened to those music werds until the sun went down...”
― George Saunders, Fox 8

“The only sounds here were lazy, ponderous, gentle sounds. A bee hung low in the warm afternoon haze, and he watched it unafraid, listened to the dull electric razor sound of its wings cutting the air. Birds sang sweet and unseen, and a hundred eyes watched him from the dark.”
― Michael Montoure, Slices

“Grace was pouring out everywhere, from hidden sounds, into Els's damaged auditory cortex. And all that secret, worldwide composition said the same thing: listen closer, listen smaller, listen lighter, to any noise at all, and hear what the world will still sound like, long after your concert ends.”
― Richard Powers

“There are things in this world that the children hear, but whose sounds oscillate below an adult's sense of pitch.”
― Edmund de Waal, The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss

“Wake up to think of words… want to walk through pages of meanings, the links in assonance, alliteration, or just simple sense that moves the eye to leap that way to the next-door play of sound and resonance.”
― Initially NO, Percipience: Outside the range of understood sense

“I listen to the grinding whir of the clock, and the creaking of my listing bed, and the sound the phone doesn't make when it's shut off.”
― Michael Montoure, Counting From Ten

“Pre-high tech, objects thunked and crashed and clopped, amid a thunder of drums, a tumult of trumpets. Today things beep and cheep and whistle. We have come from the roar of the lion to the chirp of the tree frog, ceaselessly bleating our identities while the frog-eating bats hover above us.”
― A.J. Orde