Melody Gardot

When you make a sound, it carries on to infinity. Sound is a vibration. Vibration is energy. All of that survives in space long after we’re dead. When I walk on stage at the Wiener Staatsoper, I can feel the footsteps of Chopin and Rachmaninov.

For a long time I hated my body, because I was constantly suffering. But now I look at it like an old Mercedes with chrome bumpers. It costs a fortune to repair, it breaks down all the time, you can only use it once a week, the seat leather is starting to crack – but nonetheless it’s mine.

The first jazz I heard was Duke Ellington. I was learning to play classical music, but my teacher swapped out those lessons for jazz lessons because I had started adding grace notes to Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff.

Music activates the brain at a high level.

The first time I ever had to go overseas for music was to play the Royal Festival Hall in London, singing in a tribute to Ella Fitzgerald, and that week was insane: Thursday I rehearse with the orchestra; Friday I sing two songs in front of 2,500 people, which I have never done before; and the next day I go to Abbey Road to record with Herbie Hancock; and then I am playing a pub in south London somewhere, and nobody cares because London have lost some sporting match; and then I go home and I’m standing in front of my washing machine, putting my unmentionables into the dryer, and in that instant, I just looked at myself and said ‘This life is going to be strange’.

People always ask, “Why jazz?” and I’m like “Why not?” It’s kind of like asking Seurat, “Why so many dots?” I imagine if you asked Bjork, “Why the Tibetan bells?” She’d probably be like “That’s just what I heard.” It’s the same thing. This is just the way I see music.

Optimism is the madness of insisting that all is well when we are miserable.

No member of society has the right to teach any doctrine contrary to what society holds to be true.

Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born -a hundred million years -and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.

If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.

Knowledge does not come to us in details, but in flashes of light from heaven.

Not even the Devil can call a woman “Slut” if he is not able to make her fall in love.

Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.

Pain never really goes away; you just elevate and get used to it by growing stronger.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.

The best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.

I found you essay to be good and original. However, the part that was original was not good and the part that was good was not original.

When we direct our thoughts properly, we can control our emotions…

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. The conviction of the rich that the poor are happier is no more foolish than the conviction of the poor that the rich are.

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.