Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman > Quotes

“And because you have not yet developed feelings toward yourself (other than negative feelings about your body), you see yourself only as a reflection of what other people think of you”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic

“Years later, the writer Malcolm Harris will articulate the ways in which people of your generation were taught to value work as an end in itself, rather than a process through which something tangible is gained.”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic

“There is a unique wisdom of the small American community, the isolated rural hamlet, and it is this: Everyone matters. Not in some clichéd humanistic sense, but in a literal, practical sense.”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic

“You are someone whose upbringing was upper class enough to make you believe you could make music for a living, but lower class enough to provide no knowledge of how to do it.”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic

“The impact on the audience is a sort of emotional hostage-taking: YOU WILL FEEL SOMETHING VERY POWERFUL RIGHT NOW, the eagle sings in the voice of a pennywhistle. YOU WILL SWELL WITH VAGUE BUT IMPORTANT-FEELING EMOTIONS FOR NO DIESCERNABLE REASON.”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic

“You had no idea that the Northeast was the place where rich important people determine what the rest of the country will read and listen to and think about.”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic: A Memoir

“By high school, the anorexia epidemic spreads its tentacles into the bodies and/or minds of almost every girl you know. It creeps into town and stalks its victims; girls collapse on the gymnasium floor, on the running track, in the shower. They are scraped off floors and lawns and bathtubs, shipped off to the hospital, then to rehab.”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic: A Memoir

“Faking violin stardom ultimately allowed me to return to what captivated me at four years old when I first heard Vivaldi's "Winter." It wasn't the desire to be seen as talented, or a ticket to the big city, or worldly success, or respect. It wasn't The Money. It was simply this: I loved a song. Playing the role of a famous, world-class violinist allowed me to return to the feeling that playing the violin doesn't require anything more than loving a song. Or anything less.

As Mr. Rogers says at the end of the trumpet factory episode, right after he explains that as a kid he pretended he was a songwriter on TV, right before he begins to sing on TV:

'It helps to play about things. It helps you to know how it really feels.”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic: A Memoir

“For the most enraging aspect of life in the body isn’t that you aren’t skinny or sexy enough, it’s that life in the body causes you to be dismissed as silly and shallow and stupid in a way that boys who are equally silly and shallow and stupid are not.”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic

“An understanding of classical music - something adults say they wish they knew more about but don't - gives a girl weight in a world that wants her to be weightless, gives her substance in a culture that asks her to be insubstantial.”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic: A Memoir

“An acidic current of anti-intellectualism and prowar sentiment will corrode nuance, subtlety, and complexity into a dull, generalized fear.”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic

“The guiding philosophy of the Suzuki method is that children should learn music as if it were a language, and that they should begin lessons as early as possible, ideally at the age of two and no later than five. Research by Oliver Sacks and others has confirmed this claim. After a certain age—somewhere between eight and twelve years old—the window for learning a spoken or musical language with native-level proficiency slams shut.”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic

“You don't know what to do with the jam jar, the chicken stink, the sinister mountain fog that is everywhere, but the adults pretend to ignore when you are in the room. It seems the only thing you can do is listen for it. You hear it in the four measures of Vivaldi's "Winter" that you can still remember from Sarah and the Squirrel, and once you make the connection between the music and mountain fog you play the notes over and over again inside your head.

You paw up the trash-strewn ravine. The sky is low and gray, the color of the cinder blocks the men in your town manufacture from ash and dust. The dirt-filled strawberry jam jar is in your denim coat pocket. Vivaldi is in your head. The music you hear is like the blaze-orange clothing the men wear on the mountainsides while deer hunting in autumn. The music is like a bulletproof vest, a coiled copperhead, a rabies shot. The music is both a warning and a talisman. The music tells you things: You're not imagining this. Better children than you die in the snow for no reason.

The music says: What's hidden beneath this picture of strawberry jam?

The music says: This isn't a Disney movie. Death doesn't just take the wicked villain. Look at that dirt in the jar. It will take you. It will take everyone, and everyone, and everyone.

The music says: What you feel is real. Follow me. Run.”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic: A Memoir

“Snoop Doggy Doo-oww-ohhhoggg!” The sexual ministrations of inner-city lyricists become the lingua franca of your generation, fluently spoken by every thirteen-year-old kid regardless of race,”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic

“Only America has fake fute smell. If you want to smell fute in Moscow, you have to smell a real fute.”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic

“My mind is a CD player with a broken Fast-Forward button, thoughts flying by faster than I can hear them, zooming past any restful pause.”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic

“But you had mistaken her success for happiness, which turns out not to be the same thing.”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic

“There is no way “I” am in front of the live microphone, no way anyone would want to listen to “me,” no way anyone has paid to attend this concert starring “myself,” and so I become “you,” and in faking you, I am finally able to say what I want to say.”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic

“It doesn’t matter that you weren’t born a prodigy.”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic

“The music makes you feel something that is not quite sadness, but not happiness either. These particular notes that you heard only once make you feel something akin to seriousness. What is this seriousness? you wonder. Eventually you realize: The seriousness of the Sarah music is the same as the seriousness of the adult world. You have found the key—serious music—that will unlock the secrets of being a grown-up.”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic

“The idea that the word “I” can function as a static entity on the page—instead of a shape-shifting representation of an actual human being who changes her mind, sometimes on a moment-to-moment basis, about everything from what she wants for lunch to what her place is in the universe—is perhaps the biggest fakery of all.”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic

“Life in the body means that no physical part of you—not even the lips that you have no choice but to bring with you into prealgebra class—is left unseen, unremarked upon, uncalculated for sexual potential”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic

“This book argues that while determining the difference between the real and the fake can be maddening and ultimately imperfect, it remains a worthy endeavor.”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic

“His attention to you and only you makes you feel important, special, loved, and, most of all, grown up.”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic

“You don’t know it, but these are the last moments of the brief courtship you get to have with yourself as a female human being in 1990s America, a courtship in which you do not “love yourself” or “hate yourself” (because those terms would not have made sense to you) but instead have a profound sense of satisfaction with the world around you and your apparent role in it. Then something happens to you. It’s not a single-event trauma. Your parents do not get divorced. No one dies. You are not abused. And yet. Something happens to you. And because you cannot trace what happens to you to a single, traumatic event, you struggle to explain it, struggle for years to admit that anything happened to you at all. But it did. It’s obvious, visible in your face, your posture. A friend in middle school tells you that her mom has asked her, “What happened to Jessica?” What happened to you? It’s a big fish of a question, large and slippery. When you are twelve years old, a book titled Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls becomes a national best-seller. The author, Mary Pipher, writes, “Something dramatic happens to girls in early adolescence. Just as planes and ships disappear mysteriously into the Bermuda Triangle, so do the selves of girls go down in droves.” Pipher argues that while adolescence has always been a difficult transition for boys and girls alike, there is something in the cultural air of the early 1990s that has spawned an epidemic of depression, self-mutilation, and eating disorders.”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic

“The Mozart Effect Effect thrives in a realm that is neither science nor art, a realm that is far more organically American: marketing. Megacorporations like “Baby Einstein” are born and flourish by promoting the disproven belief that blasting Mozart toward a baby—or even a fetus—can fast-track the kid to Harvard.”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic

“An understanding of classical music—something adults say they wish they knew more about but don’t—gives a girl weight in a world that wants her to be weightless, gives her substance in a culture that asks her to be insubstantial.”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic

“The club—really a poolside lounge at one of Dallas’s fanciest hotels—is full of blondes dripping with diamonds, their faces glowing with the flawless, glossy finish that can only be achieved by an hour-long sit-down with a professional makeup artist, their breasts sculpted into tanned teardrops by the best surgeons oil money can buy. One particularly stunning specimen—standing at least six feet tall, her perfectly proportioned legs, hips, and breasts accentuating the tailor cut of her red blazer and skirt suit—strides across the open courtyard in sling-back stilettos, puffing on a cigar with bee-stung red lips.”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic

“In America, an entire landscape can disappear in an instant.”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic

“All of your years of music are going to "pay off," that distinctly American phrase that conflates all work with reward, all positive outcomes with money.”
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic