Music - Quotes from Science Fiction

A lot of quotations carefully collected from a very big amount of books and divided by categories.

Have fun reading it, this is really interesting and breathtaking!

If we could have devised an arrangement for providing everybody with music in their homes, perfect in quality, unlimited in quantity, suited to every mood, and beginning and ceasing at will, we should have considered the limit of human felicity already attained, and ceased to strive for further improvements.

- Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888)

The melody was piercingly sweet, and resembled at times the singing of some voluptuous feminine voice. However, no human voice could have possessed the unearthly pitch, the shrill, perpetually sustained notes that somehow suggested the light of remote worlds and stars translated into sound.

- Clark Ashton Smith, ''The City of the Singing Flame'' (1931)

Red-head said, ''I feel like mew-sik,'' and went to a corner of the room to turn on a machine of some kind. Oh Ilha! Such a burst of overpoweringly sweet sound came from it that my probe tips quivered in ecstasy. They are masters of sound, these hew-men. Not in my life have I imagined such an art. There was a mathematically regulated change of pitch, recurring with an urgent feeling of logic; there was a blending of tones in infinite variety; there was a measured rhythm. But none of these will give you the slightest idea of the effect on me, when all were put together.

- Laurence Manning, ''Good-Bye, Ilha!'' (1952)

Space is my harp, and I touch it lightly with fingers of steel. Space sings.

- Walter M. Miller, Jr., ''The Big Hunger'' (1952)

Music is the most perishable of things, fragile and delicate, easily destroyed.

- Philip K. Dick, ''The Preserving Machine'' (1953)

Softly, barely audible at first, the strains of the ancient song of evening and requiem swelled to the final poignant measure until black space itself echoed back the sound of the song the ship sang.

- Anne McCaffrey, ''The ShipWho Sang'' (1961)

Sarah Boyle thinks of music as the formal articulation of the passage of time, and of Bach as the most poignant rendering of this.

- Pamela Zoline, ''The Heat Death of the Universe'' (1967)

Music is a cooperative art, organic by definition, social. It may be the noblest form of social behavior we're capable of. It's certainly one of the noblest jobs an individual can undertake. And by its nature, by the nature of any art, it's a sharing. The artist shares, it's the essence of his act.

- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974)

Music, and in fact, art in general, is the process of consciously communicating an emotional judgment or point of view in terms of abstract symbology.

- Jack Vance, ''Assault on a City'' (1974)

Colors made sounds in his mind: Sunlight in summer was a blaring chord; moonlight in winter a thin, mournful wail; new green in spring, a low murmur in almost (but not quite) random rhythms; the flash of a red fox in the leaves, a gasp of sudden startlement.

- Orson Scott Card, ''Unaccompanied Sonata'' (1979)

The beauty of the universe lay not in the stars figured into it but in the music generated by human minds, human voices, human hands.

- Philip K. Dick, ''Chains of Air, Web of Aether'' (1980)

He had been listening to the music of life itself. The music of light dancing on water that rippled with the wind and the tides, of the life that moved through the water, of the life that moved on the land, warmed by the light.

- Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (1987)

Learn a little music, so you'll know what discipline really is.

- Elizabeth Moon, ''Hand to Hand'' (1995)

The whites, as conquered people will, found liberation in their music that they could not have in life.

- Harry Turtledove, ''Must and Shall'' (1995)