Opera Quotes

“Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, he sings.”
― Robert Benchley

“Love is a rebellious bird,
that nobody can tame,
and you call him quite in vain,
if it suits him not to come.”
― Ludovic Halévy

“None of us can choose where we shall love...”
― Susan Kay, Phantom

“Floating, falling, sweet intoxication. Touch me, trust me, savor each sensation. Let the dream begin, let your darker side give in to the power of the music of the night.”
― Charles Hart, The Phantom of the Opera: Piano/Vocal

“They played at hearts as other children might play at ball; only, as it was really their two hearts that they flung to and fro, they had to be very, very handy to catch them, each time, without hurting them.”
― Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera

“Theatres are curious places, magician's trick-boxes where the golden memories of dramtic triumphs linger like nostalgic ghosts, and where the unexplainable, the fantastic, the tragic, the comic and the absurd are routine occurences on and off the stage. Murders, mayhem, politcal intrigue, lucrative business, secret assignations, and of course, dinner.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly

“Well, basically there are two sorts of opera," said Nanny, who also had the true witch's ability to be confidently expert on the basis of no experience whatsoever. "There's your heavy opera, where basically people sing foreign and it goes like "Oh oh oh, I am dyin', oh I am dyin', oh oh oh, that's what I'm doin'", and there's your light opera, where they sing in foreign and it basically goes "Beer! Beer! Beer! Beer! I like to drink lots of beer!", although sometimes they drink champagne instead. That's basically all of opera, reely.”
― Terry Pratchett, Maskerade

“My mind has touched the farthest horizons of mortal imagination and reaches ever outward to embrace infinity. There is no knowledge beyond my comprehension, no art or skill upon this entire planet that lies beyond the mastery of my hand. And yet, like Faust, I look in vain, I learn in vain. . . . For as long as I live, no woman will ever look on me in love.”
― Susan Kay, Phantom

“The Departure Aria, a very important and romantic song -
This damn door sticks,
This damn door sticks
It sticks no matter what I do.
It is marked 'pull' and indeed I am pulling
Perhaps it should be marked 'push'?”
― Terry Pratchett, Maskerade

“The only thing worse than opera is someone who hums along with opera.”
― Josh Lanyon, A Dangerous Thing

“Dedication: My thanks to the people who showed me that opera was stranger than I could imagine. I can best repay their kindness by not mentioning their names here.”
― Terry Pratchett, Maskerade

“I can see Richard Wagner standing at the gates of heaven. "You have to let me in," he says. "I wrote Parsifal. It has to do with the Grail, Christ, suffering, pity and healing. Right?" And they answer, "Well, we read it and it makes no sense." SLAM.”
― Philip K. Dick, VALIS

“For the love of God, unless you’re prepping for Rigoletto at the Met, go easy on the eyeliner.”
― Cheryl Cory

“You can learn more by going to the opera than you ever can by reading Emerson. Like that there are two sexes.”
― David Markson

“(Referring to the piano's natural shape) Isn't it a shame when those big fat opera singers lean against the pianos and bend them?”
― Victor Borge

“The opera…is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.”
― H. L. Mencken

“Opera lovers may be the narrowest people in the world.”
― Haruki Murakami, After the Quake

“Without a doubt it was Dr. Urbino's most contagious initiative, for opera fever infected the most surprising elements in the city and gave rise to a whole generation of Isoldes and Otellos and Aidas and Siegfrieds. But it never reached the extremes Dr. Urbino had hoped for, which was to see Italianizers and Wagnerians confronting each other with sticks and canes during the intermissions.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

“La dictadura es como una aria y nunca llega a ser ópera.”
― Emilia Pardo Bazán

“That´s the problem with planning a late night supper after the opera, not only does the hero or the heroine die singing, but you end up famished after the last notes of the finale.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly

“You want to feel that you belong to something higher, to something even beyond this universe, then go to the opera!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“The dictatorship is like an aria that never becomes an opera.”
― Emilia Pardo Bazán

“Opera has the power to warn you that you have wasted your life. You haven't acted on your desires. You've suffered a stunted, vicarious existence. You've silenced your passions. The volume, height, depth, lushness, and excess of operatic utterance reveal, by contrast, how small your gestures have been until now, how impoverished your physicality; you have only used a fraction of your bodily endowment, and your throat is closed.”
― Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality and the Mystery of Desire

“Ah! Pauvre ami, comme il m'aimait!”
― Massenet Jules

“Whenever the Bucharest Opera's curtain rose, the Iron Curtain seemed to go up with it...”
― Maria-Cristina Necula, Life in Opera Truth, Tempo, and Soul: Encounters with Stars, Innovators, and Leaders of Todays Opera World

“In the freezing darkness, the voices and the music alone wrapped the audience in beauty, emotion, and fantasy. The singing soothed, stirred, and seduced until you were madly in love, and became addicted. That was opera in its purest, most sincere form.”
― Maria-Cristina Necula, Life In Opera: Truth, Tempo and Soul: Encounters with Stars, Innovators and Leaders of Today's Opera World

“We hooked up only once and I felt I had communed with my soulmate. I was still a student then she was already in the corps de ballet. A seriously gorgeous woman Lisa was the sexiest woman I have seen in well ever.”
― Yvonna Russell, The Bari Tenor Hunk

“Infatuation nurtured by imagination enflamed by a portrait turns into love at first sight in Saint-Réal's nouvelle as it will in Schiller's play and Verdi's opera.”
― Maria-Cristina Necula Ph.D., The Don Carlos Enigma: Variations Of Historical Fictions

“Such immediate sliding into fiction under the guise of history reveals a remarkable fluidity between history and fiction that, while pertinent to innumerable portrayals of historical personages of other eras and nationalities, seems to acquire a particularly transformational narrative power in the case of Don Carlos.”
― Maria-Cristina Necula Ph.D., The Don Carlos Enigma: Variations Of Historical Fictions

“Non c’è bisogno di inventare nulla. La vita è abbastanza straordinaria di per sé.”
― Lucia Berlin, Manual para mujeres de la limpieza