Elie Wiesel Quotes

Anytime a person can play the blues, he has a soul and he has a 'lift' to play anything else he wants to play. It's sort of like the foundation to a building.

The soul is like a violin string: it makes music only when it is stretched.

I don't know if my work is a concerted effort to make kids sad! But life and death go hand in hand. It's our condition as human beings.

Death is the king of this world: 'Tis his park where he breeds life to feed him. Cries of pain are music for his banquet.

Death is an art, you know.

I write to music, and Nina Simone is always on my playlist to write to. I mean, she's inspiring. She's truthful and real and raw.

A great melodic line is like a person's soul, and coming up with an original melody, it can be like you are illustrating the soul.

Put all your soul into it, play the way you feel!

Little soul, gentle and drifting, guest and companion of my body, now you will dwell below in pallid places, stark and bare; there you will abandon your play of yore. But one moment still, let us gaze together on these familiar shores, on these objects which doubtless we shall not see again....Let us try, if we can, to enter into death with open eyes.

What need is there to weep over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears.

It was pitch dark. I could hear only the violin, and it was as though Juliek's soul were the bow. He was playing his life. The whole of his life was gliding on the strings--his last hopes, his charred past, his extinguished future. He played as he would never play again...When I awoke, in the daylight, I could see Juliek, opposite me, slumped over, dead. Near him lay his violin, smashed, trampled, a strange overwhelming little corpse.

How many of us will be saved the pain of seeing the most important things in our lives disappearing from one moment to the next? I don't just mean people, but our ideas and dreams too: we might survive a day, a week, a few years, but we're all condemned to lose. Our body remains alive, yet sooner or later our soul will receive the mortal blow. The perfect crime - for we don't know who murdered our joy, what their motives were, or where the guilty parties are to be found...they too are the victims of the reality they created.

Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.

Any great movie you watch has some element of darkness or loss or some suffering in it. That's what makes the fun parts fun.

Art is good for my soul precisely because it reminds me that we have souls in the first place.

Every day a little death.

If you should ask me where I've been all this time I have to say "Things happen." I have to dwell on stones darkening the earth, on the river ruined in its own duration: I know nothing save things the birds have lost, the sea I left behind, or my sister crying. Why this abundance of places? Why does day lock with day? Why the dark night swilling round in our mouths? And why the dead?

The world is so ordered that we must, in a material sense, lose everything we have and love, one thing after another, until we ourselves close our eyes.

A person dies, or something you had identified with completely is gone. Your home goes up in flames. There is extreme pain at first. But whenever a form dissolves, which is called "death," what remains is an opening into emptiness.

As Eric Dolphy said 'Once you play the music, it's in the air. It's gone'. And that's true. But when you record it, it comes back to haunt you sometimes.

Are we fallen angels who didn't want to believe that nothing is nothing and so were born to lose our loved ones and dear friends one by one and finally our own life, to see it proved?

I yearn for the darkness. I pray for death. Real death. If I thought that in death I would meet the people I've known in life I don't know what I'd do. That would be the ultimate horror. The ultimate despair. If I had to meet my mother again and start all of that all over, only this time without the prospect of death to look forward to? Well. That would be the final nightmare. Kafka on wheels.

What I try to write about are the darkest things in the soul, the mortal dreads... The closer I get to the burning core of my being, the things which are most painful to me, the better is my work.

The value of jazz still has to be clarified. People involve themselves with its superficialities without digging for its soul.