The Music Shop Quotes

“Music comes out of silence and at the end it goes back to it. It's a journey. You see?”
― Rachel Joyce, The Music Shop

“...the vivid past would not go away.

Like music, said Peg. Even when it was over, it kept living inside you.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Music Shop

“Jazz was about the spaces between notes. It was about what happened when you listened to the thing inside you. The gaps and the cracks. Because that was where life really happened, when you were brave enough to free-fall.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Music Shop

“Silence was where the magic happened.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Music Shop

“I think that loving another person and being kind is about the best thing you can do.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Music Shop

“It wasn’t just 1) the artwork and sleeve notes on the album sleeve. It wasn’t 2) the possibility of a hidden track, or a little message carved in the final groove. It wasn’t 3) the mahogany richness of the quality of sound. (But CD sound was clean, the reps argued. It had no surface noise. To which Frank replied, “Clean? What’s music got to do with clean? Where is the humanity in clean? Life has surface noise! Do you want to listen to furniture polish?”) It wasn’t even 4) the ritual of checking the record before carefully lowering the stylus. No, most of all it was about the journey. 5) The journey that an album made from one track to the next, with a hiatus in the middle, when you had to get up and flip the record over in order to finish. With vinyl, you couldn’t just sit there like a lemon. You had to get up off your arse and take part.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Music Shop

“For Frank, music was like a garden – it sowed seeds in far-flung places. People would miss out on so many wonderful things if they only stuck with what they knew.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Music Shop

“Real love was a journey with many pitfalls and complications, and sometimes the place you ended up was not the one you hoped for.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Music Shop

“It is hard to look back on a moment when you are haring right through the center of it.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Music Shop

“Frank was so busy loving other people he had no room to accommodate the fact that someone might turn around one day and love him back.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Music Shop

“The way to Heaven is not through the clouds. It’s in the joy with which you look at the world despite your pain and your sorrow.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Music Shop

“Aretha is soul. You can’t argue with Aretha.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Music Shop

“You ease a record from its cover. It's years since you've held one but you do this without thinking. Slide your fingers inside the sleeve, careful not to touch the vinyl. Draw it out. Hear the rustle of paper. Balance it in the span of your palm, the outer rim on your thumb, the label on the tip of your middle finger. As it brushes your wrist, feel the soft static kiss of it. Smooth as liquorice and twice as shiny. Light spills over it like water. Breathe in the new smell.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Music Shop

“Real love was not a bolt out of the blue, it was not the playing of violins, it was like anything else, it was a habit of the heart. You got up every day and you put it on, same as your pants, your boots, and you kept treading the constant path.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Music Shop

“Over time, Peg played all the silences she loved. The more Frank listened, the more he understood. Silence could be exciting, it could be scary, it could be like flying, or even a really good joke. Years later, he would hear that final pause in “A Day in the Life” by the Beatles—the one that gave just enough time to breathe before the last chord fell like a piece of furniture from the sky—and he would dance with joy at the sheer audacity of it.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Music Shop

“Because life goes on, the music told her, even when you think it can’t. Yes, there is fear. There is real cruelty. Not knowing what the fuck. Those things are there. But listen because there is this too—this beauty. The human adventure is worth it, after all.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Music Shop

“Frank wanted a song that would arrive like a little raft and carry this man safely home”
― Rachel Joyce, The Music Shop

“It was Haydn and Mozart who really cracked the sonata, but it was Beethoven who reinvented it, just as he reinvented the symphony. Bach was king of the Baroque; Mozart and Haydn were kings of the Classical; Brahms, Chopin, Liszt, and Berlioz were the great Romantics. Bruckner, Mahler, and Wagner brought music into the twentieth century; Stravinsky and Schoenberg redefined harmony. But Beethoven was in a class of his own. He didn’t write music to praise God. He didn’t write it to earn a living. Beethoven wrote music because he had to.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Music Shop

“That was why Peg loved the Messiah best of all. Because it showed people they were not alone. No matter about their differences, the music lifted them up and lowered them down, only to raise them even higher. It worked like a spell.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Music Shop

“The fact was, it was safer to stay uninvolved. He was perfectly fine with emotions, so long as they belonged to other people. Oh, he tried relationships after Peg's death, for a while he really tried, but he couldn't bear to get closed ... [it was easier] to disconnect from that part of life and turn his back on love altogether.Easier to find what he needed in music.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Music Shop

“Here they were, living together on Unity Street, trying to make a difference in the world, knowing they couldn't, but still doing it anyway.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Music Shop

“There is no guarantee that just because you are ready to go back and claim something, it will be there.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Music Shop

“So is this what life is? The steady amassing of little things, trinkets, small prettinesses, that we save for and plan for, and which make the passing of time more meaningful, and yet which – come the end – will be wrapped in newspaper and driven to the charity shop? She”
― Rachel Joyce, The Music Shop

“Music comes out of silence and at the end it goes back to it. It’s a journey. You see?”
― Rachel Joyce, The Music Shop

“They just had to look after one another. They would be OK, so long as they stuck together.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Music Shop

“Dear Lord. Please help us to understand what we don’t know. It is our differences that make us richer. All will be well.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Music Shop

“Moonlight filled the shop like water.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Music Shop

“It wasn’t 3) the mahogany richness of the quality of sound. (But CD sound was clean, the reps argued. It had no surface noise. To which Frank replied, “Clean? What’s music got to do with clean? Where is the humanity in clean? Life has surface noise! Do you want to listen to furniture polish?”)”
― Rachel Joyce, The Music Shop

“Being with her was the same as staring into the sun; he saw nothing, and yet when he looked away, there she was, a raucous white light imprinted at the heart of everything”
― Rachel Joyce, The Music Shop

“Don’t care what anyone tells me. The future’s vinyl,’ he said ... Life has surface noise! Do you want to listen to furniture polish?”
― Rachel Joyce, The Music Shop