Ben Connolly

“The Yirkalla aborigines of Arnhem Land in Australia hear sacred song words in the babbling of babies. To them, songs are never composed but only discovered: all songs exist already.”
― Philip Ball, The Music Instinct: How Music Works and Why We Can't Do Without It

“Or we could buy the French Barracuda design with its nuclear power plant rather than go to the trouble and risk of developing a conventionally powered version.”
― Hugh White, How to Defend Australia

“Music had stirred him like that. Music had troubled him many times. But music was not articulate. It was not a new world, but rather another chaos, that it created in us. Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“When an apple ripens and falls—what makes it fall? Is it that it is attracted to the ground, is it that the stem withers, is it that the sun has dried it up, that it has grown heavier, that the wind shakes it, that the boy standing underneath wants to eat it?”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace