Soundtrack Quotes

I lost the plot for a while then. And I lost the subplot, the script, the soundtrack, the intermission, my popcorn, the credits, and the exit sign.

Did he just rip out the engine?" I asked. "Yes", Saiman said. "And now he is demolishing the Maserati with it." Ten seconds later Curran hurled the twisted wreck of black and orange that used to be the Maserati into the wall. The first melodic notes of an old song came from the computer. I glanced at Saiman. He shrugged. "It begged for a soundtrack.

Bullshit is truly the American soundtrack.

But why should you be interested in me?" Good question. I can’t explain it myself right this moment. But maybe – just maybe – if we start getting together and talking, after a while something like Francis Lai’s soundtrack music will start playing in the background, and a whole slew of concrete reasons why I’m interested in you will line up out of nowhere. With luck, it might even snow for us.

Sometimes words need music too. Sometimes the descriptions are not enough. Books should be written with soundtracks, like films.

Without a soundtrack, human interaction is meaningless.

For several years, I had been bored. Not a whining, restless child's boredom (although I was not above that) but a dense, blanketing malaise. It seemed to me that there was nothing new to be discovered ever again. Our society was utterly, ruinously derivative (although the word derivative as a criticism is itself derivative). We were the first human beings who would never see anything for the first time. We stare at the wonders of the world, dull-eyed, underwhelmed. Mona Lisa, the Pyramids, the Empire State Building. Jungle animals on attack, ancient icebergs collapsing, volcanoes erupting. I can't recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I didn't immediately reference to a movie or TV show. A fucking commercial. You know the awful singsong of the blasé: Seeeen it. I've literally seen it all, and the worst thing, the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can't anymore. I don't know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script. It's a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters. And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don't have genuine souls. It had gotten to the point where it seemed like nothing matters, because I'm not a real person and neither is anyone else. I would have done anything to feel real again.

Music is the soundtrack to every good and bad time we will ever have.

Mr. Spier, memorizing the Hamilton soundtrack is not going to save you on the AP Euro exam.

Music is the soundtrack of our lives.

Her graphite pencil scratches the thick paper and it is the soundtrack to my bliss. That, and her sound - dissonant, aching. Her breath and heartbeat and pulse are my new favorite symphony; I'm beginning to learn which notes will play when, and to interpret them.

Turn down the porn soundtrack! Trying to concentrate here!-Shane

Elsa is the sort of child who learned early in life that it's easier to make your way if you get to choose your own soundtrack.

We eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner to the soundtrack of our own impending death.

Every life has a soundtrack. There is a tune that makes me think of the summer I spent rubbing baby oil on my stomach in pursuit of the perfect tan. There's another that reminds me of tagging along with my father on Sunday morning to pick up the New York Times. There's the song that reminds me of using fake ID to get into a nightclub; and the one that brings back my cousin Isobel's sweet sixteen, where I played Seven Minutes in Heaven with a boy whose breath smelled like tomato soup. If you ask me, music is the language of memory.

Closing his eyes, he sent up a prayer to anyone who was listening, asking please, for God's sake, stop sending him signals that they were right for each other. He'd read that book, seen the movie, bought the soundtrack, the DVD, the T-shirt, the mug, the bobble-head, and the insider's guide. He knew every reason they could have been lock and key. But just as he was aware of all that aligned them, he was even clearer on how they were damned to be ever apart.

Society, you're a crazy breed.

Then I picked my book back up again and stroked her hair and read to the soundtrack of her breaths.

There was only one thing I could do to ease the pain. I turned to the only four guys who'd never let me down. The only four guys who'd never broken my heart, who'd never disappointed me. John, Paul, George, and Ringo. Anybody who has ever clung to a song like a musical life raft will understand. Or put on a song to bring out an emotion or a memory. Or had a soundtrack playing in their head to drown out a conversation or a scene.

And even if you didn't fall in love in the eighties, in your mind it will feel like the eighties, all innocent and airbrushed, with bright colors and shoulder pads and Pat Benetar or the Cure on the soundtrack.

Nobody should have to die to a crappy soundtrack

Just humor me for a few more minutes at least... You are hands-down, the most gorgeous woman here tonight. Or probably anywhere, for that matter. When you leave, at least I’ll be able to say I got a whole dance with you.” - Jonathan di Luca

Music can be your friend when you have none, your lover when you’re needy. Your rage, your sorrow, your joy, your pain. Your voice when you’ve lost your own. To be a part of that, to be the soundtrack of someone’s life, is a beautiful thing. —Killian James, lead singer and guitarist, Kill John

All of my most significant moments somehow involved music. It's like my life was a John Hughes film and somebody had to put together the perfect soundtrack.

believe that this way of living, this focus on the present, the daily, the tangible, this intense concentration not on the news headlines but on the flowers growing in your own garden, the children growing in your own home, this way of living has the potential to open up the heavens, to yield a glittering handful of diamonds where a second ago there was coal. This way of living and noticing and building and crafting can crack through the movie sets and soundtracks that keep us waiting for our own life stories to begin, and set us free to observe the lives we have been creating all along without ever realizing it. I don’t want to wait anymore. I choose to believe that there is nothing more sacred or profound than this day. I choose to believe that there may be a thousand big moments embedded in this day, waiting to be discovered like tiny shards of gold. The big moments are the daily, tiny moments of courage and forgiveness and hope that we grab on to and extend to one another. That’s the drama of life, swirling all around us, and generally I don’t even see it, because I’m too busy waiting to become whatever it is I think I am about to become. The big moments are in every hour, every conversation, every meal, every meeting. The Heisman Trophy winner knows this. He knows that his big moment was not when they gave him the trophy. It was the thousand times he went to practice instead of going back to bed. It was the miles run on rainy days, the healthy meals when a burger sounded like heaven. That big moment represented and rested on a foundation of moments that had come before it. I believe that if we cultivate a true attention, a deep ability to see what has been there all along, we will find worlds within us and between us, dreams and stories and memories spilling over. The nuances and shades and secrets and intimations of love and friendship and marriage an parenting are action-packed and multicolored, if you know where to look. Today is your big moment. Moments, really. The life you’ve been waiting for is happening all around you. The scene unfolding right outside your window is worth more than the most beautiful painting, and the crackers and peanut butter that you’re having for lunch on the coffee table are as profound, in their own way, as the Last Supper. This is it. This is life in all its glory, swirling and unfolding around us, disguised as pedantic, pedestrian non-events. But pull of the mask and you will find your life, waiting to be made, chosen, woven, crafted. Your life, right now, today, is exploding with energy and power and detail and dimension, better than the best movie you have ever seen. You and your family and your friends and your house and your dinner table and your garage have all the makings of a life of epic proportions, a story for the ages. Because they all are. Every life is. You have stories worth telling, memories worth remembering, dreams worth working toward, a body worth feeding, a soul worth tending, and beyond that, the God of the universe dwells within you, the true culmination of super and natural. You are more than dust and bones. You are spirit and power and image of God. And you have been given Today.

Humming the Star Wars theme to encourage myself, I wobbled onto my feet. Sometimes a girl's gotta provide her own trumpet-heavy heroic soundtrack.

I can't recall a single amazing thing I have seen first hand that I didn't immediately reference to amp is of a TV show. You know the awful singsong the blasé: Seeeen it. I've literally seen it all, and the worst thing, the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can't anymore. I don't know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script.

In movies, it's all beautifully choreographed, set to an increasingly dramatic soundtrack. In movies, when the boy pulls the girl to him when they are both finally undressed, they never bump their teeth together and get embarrassed and have to laugh and try again. But here's the truth: In movies, it's never half so lovely as it is here and now with Jase.

Music is the beat of a drum that keeps time with our emotions.

This song came on that sounded unlike anything I had ever heard: an aggressive drum machine pattern, unusual-sounding electronic noises, and of course, on top of it all, that voice. It struck me immediately, so warm and beautiful: The song was “Running Up that Hill (A Deal with God).” It was like a soundtrack to the evening. 

“You’ll have to excuse my shock. When the most gorgeous woman I’ve ever seen tells me she’s a virgin… I think I’ve just hit the lottery...” - Jonathan di Luca

...the first thing you do at the end is reflect on the beginning. Maybe it's some form of reverse closure, or just the basic human impulse toward sentimentality, or masochism, but as you stand there shell-shocked in the charred ruins of your life, your mind will invariably go back to the time when it all started. And even if you didn't fall in love in the eighties, in your mind it will fee like the eighties, all innocent and airbrushed, with bright colors and shoulder pads and Pat Benatar or The Cure on the soundtrack.

Come here and take off your clothes and with them every single worry you have ever carried. My fingertips on your back will be the very last thing you will feel before sleeping and the sound of my smile will be the alarm clock to your morning ears. Come here and take off your clothes and with them the weight of every yesterday that snuck atop your shoulders and declared them home. My whispers will be the soundtrack to your secret dreams and my hand the anchor to the life you will open your eyes to. Come here and take off your clothes.

Lagu-lagu yang ada dalam iPod seseorang itu mengungkapkan banyak hal tentang seseorang; hal-hal yang dia pikirkan, apa yang membuatnya sedih, dan apa yang membuatnya bahagia. Benda itu diisi dengan lagu-lagu yang mewakili perasaan-perasaan itu dalam hidupnya. It’s their soundtrack, the story of their lives.

Sometimes when you are standing still and it’s snowing, you think that you hear music. You can’t tell where it’s coming from either. I wondered if we all really did have a soundtrack, but we just get so used to it that we can’t hear it anymore, the same way that we block out the sound of our own heartbeat.

Every life has a soundtrack.

I believe that this way of living, this focus on the present, the daily, the tangible, this intense concentration not on the news headlines but on the flowers growing in your own garden, the children growing in your own home, this way of living has the potential to open up the heavens, to yield a glittering handful of diamonds where a second ago there was coal. This way of living and noticing and building and crafting can crack through the movie sets and soundtracks that keep us waiting for our own life stories to begin, and set us free to observe the lives we have been creating all along without even realizing it.

Music’s the soundtrack of my life and has been since I was a teenager. There’s always music. If I’m not playing it, I’m listening to it. With my writing…sometimes it inspires a story, sometimes it highlights something I’m working on, sometimes it simply helps me stay in the narrative mood.

Life is like a roller coaster, live it, be happy, enjoy life

If the world’s going to end someday, I was kind of hoping the soundtrack wouldn’t suck so fucking bad. But when the melodies are electronically corrected and the humanity has been sucked clean, it makes me beg for the apocalypse.

Silence is a mirror. So faithful, and yet so unexpected, is the relection it can throw back at men that they will go to almost any length to avoid seeing themselves in it, and if ever its duplicating surface is temporarily wiped clean of modern life's ubiquitous hubbub, they will hasten to fog it over with such desperate personal noise devices as polite conversation, hummin, whistling, imaginary dialogue, schizophrenic babble, or, should it come to that, the clandestine cannonry of their own farting. Only in sleep is silence tolerated, and even there, most dreams have soundtracks. Since meditation is a deliberate descent into deep internal hush, a mute stare into the ultimate looking glass, it is regarded with suspicion by the nattering masses; with hostility by buisness interests (people sitting in silent serenity are seldom consuming goods); and with spite by a clergy whose windy authority it is seen to undermine and whose bombastic livelihood it is perceived to threaten.

Curran lunged at a silver Bentley. The hood went flying. He thrust his hand into the car. Metal screamed, and Curran jerked a twisted clump out of the hood and smashed it into the nearest car like a club. “Did he just rip out the engine?” I asked. “Yes,” Saiman said. “And now he’s demolishing the Maserati with it.” Ten seconds later Curran hurled the twisted wreck of black and orange that used to be the Maserati into the wall. The first melodic notes of an old song came from the computer. I glanced at Saiman. He shrugged. “It begged for a soundtrack.

As darkness descended, fear continued hammering on the cracks of her rational mind. Even the critters had decided to ratchet up the volume. Great. A creepy nature soundtrack for my own personal nightmare. “How about some Tomb Raider music, people!

Wouldn't it help you to realize that you really do live in an epic if your life had a soundtrack?

It's easier to make your way if you choose your own soundtrack

Raegan and I were on the opposite side of town, strutting across the gravel lot of the Red Door, slowly and in unison, as if we were being filmed while walking to a badass soundtrack.

Maybe what life needs is a good soundtrack, especially during the long stretches when nothing interesting is being said. A soundtrack might dignify things a bit, ennobling us with the proper drama and tension and pathos.

avant-garde, adj. This was after Alisa' show, the reverse-blackface rendition of Gone With the Wind, including songs from the Empire Records soundtrack and an interval of nineteenth-century German poetry, recited with a lisp. "What does avant-garde mean, anyway?" I asked. "I believe it translates as favor to your friends," you replied.

Music made my day so much easier. Walking through the halls at school was somehow easier; sitting alone all the time was easier. I loved that no one could tell i was listening to music and that, because no one knew, i was never asked to turn it off. I'd had multiple conversations with teachers who had no idea i was only half hearing whatever they were saying to me, and for some reason this made me happy. Music seemed to steady me like a second skeleton; I leaned on it when my own bones were too shaken to stand. I always listened to music on the iPod i'd stolen from my brother, and here- as i did last year, when he first bought the thing- I walked to class like i was listening to the soundtrack of my own shitty movie. It gave me an inexplecable kind of hope.

In a way, what Tarantino has done with the French New Wave and with David Lynch is what Pat Boone did with rhythm and blues: He's found (ingeniously) a way to take what is ragged and distinctive and menacing about their work and homogenize it, churn it until it's smooth and cool and hygienic enough for mass consumption. Reservoir Dogs, for example, with its comically banal lunch chatter, creepily otiose code names, and intrusive soundtrack of campy pop from decades past, is a Lynch movie made commercial, i.e., fast, linear, and with what was idiosyncratically surreal now made fashionably (i.e., "hiply") surreal [...] D. Lynch is an exponentially better filmmaker than Q. Tarantino. For, unlike Tarantino, D. Lynch knows that an act of violence in an American film has, through repetition and desensitization, lost the ability to refer to anything but itself. A better way to put what I just tried to say: Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody's ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear.

This is a female text, composed by folding someone else's clothes. My mind holds it close, and it grows, tender and slow, while my hands perform innumerable chores. This is a female text, born of guilt and desire, stitched to a soundtrack of nursery rhymes.

Sometimes in the great soundtrack of our lives there are no words, there are only emotions; I believe this is why God gave us classical music.

I'm the blues in your left thigh/ Trying to become the funk in your right." -LORENZ TATE/LOVE JONES SOUNDTRACK

In the feed, ART started to play the soundtrack to Sanctuary Moon and weirdly, that helped.

Jede Nacht ist für mich ein Song. Jeder Augenblick ist für mich ein Song. Aber diesmal ist alles anders. Und gleichzeitig spüre ich, dass das Leben von uns nicht nur in einem einzigen Song gelebt wird. Wir leben von Lied zu Lied, von Augenblick zu Augenblick, von Akkord zu Akkord. Das Leben ist mehr als der Soundtrack einer Nacht. Es ist ein unendlicher Soundtrack.

The soundtrack should be a lilting indie affair; equal parts hopeful and with a broken, bittersweet lyric hook that makes your heart hurt for some unknown reason. But instead it’s scored by the 1980s hair metal I found in an incriminating iPod playlist titledGym. “You seriously got those abs while listening to Poison and Bon Jovi,” I crow, and he can’t deny it. It’s just us, windows down, stereo cranked, the road curling in front of us like a tongue.

Because I hate the ocean, theme parks and airplanes, talking with strangers, waiting in line. I'm through with these pills that make me sit still, are you feeling fine? Yes, I feel just fine.

Thomas Jefferson helped the Marquis de Lafayette draft a declaration,” Simon blurts. “Mr. Spier, memorizing the Hamilton soundtrack is not going to save you on the AP Euro exam.

We are the memory keepers and the trappers of time; stealers of stolen glances and breathless lungs from all that have been taken away. We are the noticers of subtle signs hidden in plain sight by a benevolent universe bigger than we'd ever believe...We are the directionless wanderers and the destinationless travelers and we are the crumpled map that never got packed to join us. We are the cinematic lovers and the translucent curtains saturated in light. The soundtrack to the moments without sounds and the swiftness that two bodies can become one in the stillness of a second. We, says the last string pulled out, the final string that kept it all together, balled up tight, filling us after all this time, We, are the chasers of the light.

The movies, I thought, have got the soundtrack to war all wrong. War isn't rock 'n' roll. It's got nothing to do with Jimi Hendrix or Richard Wagner. War is nursery rhymes and early Madonna tracks. War is the music from your childhood. Because war, when it's not making you kill or be killed, turns you into an infant. For the past eight days, I'd been living like a five-year-old — a nonexistence of daytime naps, mushy food, and lavatory breaks. My adult life was back in Los Angeles with my dirty dishes and credit card bills.

We’re both making noises similar to the soundtrack of a porno—they’re coming from me because I’m finally touching his ridiculously huge dick again; and I assume it probably feels good for Alex, too.

She stepped back and frowned at me. "Open it." "Me?" I felt sure she was picking on me because I was the only enslaved god she had. "I'm not Hermes! I'm not even Valdez!" "Try." As if that were a simple request! I attempted to get my fingertips under the edge and prise it open. I spread my arms and yelled the standard magic words: MELLON! SHAZAM! SESAME STREET! None of these worked. At last I tried my infallible ace in the hole. I sang 'Love Is an Open Door' from the Frozen soundtrack. Even this failed. "Impossible!" I cried. "This door has no taste in music!

I saw the paper.” Wes looked like he was trying not to laugh as his entire face smiled. “I saw the paper, so it’s pointless to deny it. It was sitting on your planner this morning and it said ‘The Soundtrack of M&L.’ Oh my God, Buxbaum, that is freaking adorable.” I laughed even though I was mortified. “Shut up, Wes.” “What songs are on it?” “Seriously.” “Seriously, I want to know. Is it all boot-knocking songs, like Ginuwine and Nine Inch Nails, or is it cheesy romance? Was Taylor Swift on the list?

I'm angry that I want to cry because I feel like I've been manipulated by the soundtrack in my head - the same one that made me cry in some shit sentimental movie with Julia Roberts where the mum is dying of cancer.

The perfect soundtrack for my personal hell.

A Broken Record can still play the best soundtrack. Broken can be beautiful when you allow God work on you.

With a soft gasp from Aaron, the soundtrack started up in Joey’s brain again. Goldfrapp’s “Ooh La La” was perfect for blow jobs. If he sang along, his tongue did interesting things.

I was always fishing for something on the radio. Just like trains and bells, it was part of the soundtrack of my life. I moved the dial up and down and Roy Orbison's voice came blasting out of the small speakers. His new song, "Running Scared," exploded into the room. Orbison, though, transcended all the genres - folk, country, rock and roll or just about anything. His stuff mixed all the styles and some that hadn't even been invented yet. He could sound mean and nasty on one line and then sing in a falsetto voice like Frankie Valli in the next. With Roy, you didn't know if you were listening to mariachi or opera. He kept you on your toes. With him, it was all about fat and blood. He sounded like he was singing from an Olympian mountaintop and he meant business. One of his previous songs, "Ooby Dooby" was deceptively simple, but Roy had progressed. He was now singing his compositions in three or four octaves that made you want to drive your car over a cliff. He sang like a professional criminal. Typically, he'd start out in some low, barely audible range, stay there a while and then astonishingly slip into histrionics. His voice could jar a corpse, always leave you muttring to yourself something like, "Man, I don't believe it." His songs had songs within songs. They shifted from major to minor key without any logic. Orbison was deadly serious - no pollywog and no fledgling juvenile. There wasn't anything else on the radio like him.

Here are the things that do fill me: a night sky, endless and rammed with stars. The soaring of a soundtrack over a triumphal point in a film trailer, something inside me stirring like an animal. Dark roads and cosy cars, and imagining having somebody I loved enough to distract me in the front seat. Helplessness, sometimes. Anger, always.

My world shattered that day. I lost my best friend. I lost my heart. My shield. My soul. And buried it right along with his body. The boy who hadn’t been who he said he was — the boy who’d protected me from my own family. The boy who took two bullets for me and paid with his life. Bang, Bang was the new soundtrack to my life. Welcome to the Mafia.

“I’m going to love fucking you, Ella...” - Jonathan di Luca

Then I noticed, in all my pain and sickness,what music it was that like crackled and boomed on the sound-track, and it was Ludwig van, the last movement of the Fifth Symphony, and I creeched like bezoomny at that. "Stop!" I creeched. "Stop, you grahzny disgusting sods. It's a sin, that's what it is, a filthy unforgivable sin, you bratchnies!

My eye is still used to searching for her in a crowd. My breath is still used to catching when I see her and the light is angled just right. My body is still used to hers moving next to mine. So the distance—anything short of contact—is a constant rejection. We were together for six months, and in each of those months my desire found new ways to be fueled by her. It’s over can’t kill that. All of the songs I wrote in my head were for her, and now I can’t stop them from playing. This null soundtrack. I’m tired, she’d said, and I told her that I was tired, too, and that I wanted to take some time for us, too. And then she’d said, No, I’m tired of you, and I slipped into the surreal-but-true universe where we were over and I wasn’t over it. She was no longer any kind of here that I could get to

A year later we were in a coffee shop, the kind taking a last stand against Starbucks with its thrift-store chairs, vegan cookies, and over-promising teas with names like Serenity and Inner Peace. I was curled up with a stack of causes, trying to get in a few extra hours of work over the weekend, and Andrew sat with one hand gripping his mug, his nose in The New York Times; the two of us a parody of the yuppie couple of the new millennium. We sat silently that way, though there wasn't silence at all. On top of the typical coffee-shop sounds - the whir of an expresso machine, the click of the cash register, the bell above the door - Andrew was making his noises, an occasional snort at something he read in the paper, the jangle of his keys in his pocket, a sniffle since he was getting over a cold, a clearing of his throat. And as we sat there, all I could do was listen to those Andrew-specific noises, the rhythm of his breath, the in-out in-out, its low whistle. Snort. Jangle. Sniffle. Clear. Hypnotized. I wanted to buy his soundtrack. This must be what love is, I thought. Not wanting his noises to ever stop.

[T]he relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios--the overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to happen so that you could have something really hot to talk about--was still startling. We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. That, you could conclude mordantly, is the real soundtrack of our time: the amplification of the self-evident toward the creation of paralyzing, preëmptive paranoia.

We act out our lives to a soundtrack, thought Isabel, the music that becomes, for a spell, out favourite and is listened to again and again until it stands for the time itself. But that was about all the scripting that we achieved; the rest, for most of us, was extemporising.

The most uplifting music in the world is that of Mother Natures orchestra. Sit atop a hill or mountain, with a fabulous view and listen..... Hear the winds song, the birds chorus, and the far off sound of childrens laughter and song and the sounds of life that you can soundtrack to your own playlists.

Are you prepared?" she asked when the other Valkyries had their passengers in place. "Sure," Matt said. "But we could use a soundtrack this time. Maybe a little Wagner. Da-da-da DUM dum." Hildar looked back at hiim blankly. "Wagner? Ride of the Valkyries? Da-da-da...Er, never mind." "Oh!" Baldwin said. "I know that one!" "Don't feed the geek," Fen muttered. "Hey," Matt said. "I'm not a-" "Oh, yeah, you are, Thorsen. You really are," Fen said in a voice that might have been teasing.

That was exactly what Tabucchi was suggesting with his title ("La Nostalgie du Possible") --that we can pass right by something very important: love, a job, moving to another city or another country. Or another life. 'Pass by' and at the same time be 'so close' that sometimes, while in that state of melancholy that is akin to hypnosis, we can, in spite of everything, manage to grab little fragments of what might have been. Like catching snatches of a far-off radio frequency. The message is obscure, yet by listening carefully you can still catch snippets of the soundtrack of the life that never was. You hear sentences that were never actually said, you hear footsteps echoing in places you've never been to, you can make out the surf on a beach whose sand you have never touched. You hear the laughter and loving words of a woman though nothing ever happened between you. The idea of an affiar with her had crossed your mind. Perhaps she would have liked that --probably, in fact-- but nothing every happened. For some unknown reason, we never gave in to the exquisite vertigo that you feel when you move those few centimeters towards the face of the other for the first kiss.

Give me a reason, to end this discussion, to break with tradition, to fall and divide. So let's not get carried, away with the process, of healing relations, I don't want to waste your time!

There’s a particular grubbiness that comes with travel. You start showered and fresh in clean and comfortable clothes, upbeat and hopeful that this will be like travel in the movies; sunlight flaring on the windows, heads resting on shoulders, laughter and smiles with a lightly jazzy soundtrack. But in reality the grubbiness has set in

The days are passing so quickly. This is the only time of year when I want to slow time down. I spend the entire year trying to get here as fast as I can, then once I'm here I want to slam on the brakes. I'm beginning to have those moments when the feel of autumn is so strong it drowns out everything else. Lately it's been making me think about the perfect soundtrack for a Halloween party. The top of any Halloween music list as to be the theme song from the movie Halloween; right on its heels is "Pet Sematary" by the Ramones. For some reason I've always equated the old Van Morrison song "Moondance" with Halloween, too. I love that song. "Bela Lugosi's Dead" by Bauhaus is an October classic, as well as anything by Type O Negative. And Midnight Syndicate. If you've never heard anything by Midnight Syndicate, look them up right this moment. If you distilled the raw essence of every spooky story you ever heard, you would have Midnight Syndicate. I have a friend who swears by them, believing them to be a vital element of any Halloween party. To finish off the list you must have "The Lyre of Orpheus" by Nick Cave and "I Feel Alright" by Steve Earle.

There are far too many beautiful women in the world out there who don’t get how attractive they are simply because stupid men are too busy being too intimidated to talk to them. Lucky for my girl, I’m a cocky son of a bitch. - Jonathan di Luca

There’s a reason why the story of the ghetto should never come with a photo. The Third World slum is a nightmare that defies beliefs or facts, even the ones staring right at you. A vision of hell that twists and turns on itself and grooves to its own soundtrack. Normal rules do not apply here. Imagination then, dream, fantasy. You visit a ghetto, particularly a ghetto in West Kingston, and it immediately leaves the real to become this sort of grotesque, something out of Dante or the infernal painting of Hieronymus Bosch. It’s a rusty red chamber of hell that cannot be described so I will not try to describe it. It cannot be photographed because some parts of West Kingston, such as Rema, are in the grip of such bleak and unremitting repulsiveness that the inherent beauty of the photographic process will lie to you about just how ugly it really is.

Oh, for the love of God, Ella. You’re going to make me come right now.” I grunted, trying to steel myself and last a little longer. I could feel my own tension building and knew I wouldn’t last long. “Screw it,” I said. “I’ll just fuck you again later.” - Jonathan di Luca

Ella let out a squeal when I picked her up, “Jonathan!” I loved carrying her around in my arms. After all, modern man is just an illusion, we’re all still cavemen. We just wear better clothes now.

Music is not my life. My life is music.

....harmony that would fittingly imitate the utterances and accents of a brave man who is engaged in warfare or in any enforced business, and who, when he has failed […] confronts fortune with steadfast endurance and repels her strokes

There are some who relish the quiet life. Free of the frantic and discord. I used to be one of them; until my life got loud and dramatic, down right unbearable at moments. And now I love the volumes of my life. The adagio of my heart’s beating or the metronome of the rainfall. How can one expect to live without the welcome of the bird’s chirp in the morning or the night’s vehement winds pounding our window pane? The sound of joy, heartbreak, ecstasy. It is all for the fine tuning of our soul. We learn to calibrate the sounds of life. No more sensitivity, but making it all music. Go ahead, appreciate the soundtrack of your life. It makes for good dancing too.

Sometimes, I recall the little things in life that make the journey more joyful, like the cheerful guy playing the accordion in Paris, on the way to Versailles. Of course everyone has their own perspective, but I believe that music does indeed provide more substance to life, so I dare imagine that one day I could walk through life as in a movie scene, with a soundtrack accompanying and enriching my every emotion, slowly dancing a tango towards one of those "and then they lived happily ever after" endings.

Sometimes it's okay to be surprised. It's going to sound stupid, and I wouldn't ever say this out loud, but the way Theo and I came out to each other was sort of like getting caught in a thunderstorm. Storms can suck when they're knocking out power and ripping apart houses, no doubt. But other times the thunder is a soundtrack to something unpredictable, something that gets our hearts racing and wakes us up. If someone had warned me about the weather, I might have freaked out and stayed inside. But I didn't.

Grace to me is a little bit of extra help when you're feeling stuck or doomed or, probably, hopefully, out of good ideas on how to save yourself, and how to salvage the situation or the friendship or the whatever it is,” Anne Lamott once told me. “I wish it was accompanied by harp music so you could know that's what was happening, but for me it's that extra pause or that extra breath or that extra minute's patience against all odds.” On that first trip to Ireland, grace—the kick-in-the-pants, clarifying, cosmic-pause-button kind of grace—didn't just have a harp. It had an entire soundtrack...

It seemed to me that there was nothing new to be discovered ever again. Our society was utterly, ruinously derivative...we were the first human beings who would never see anything for the first time. We stare at the wonders of the world, dull-eyed, underwhelmed. Mona Lisa, the Pyramids, the Empire State Building. Jungle animals on attack, ancient icebergs collapsing, volcanoes erupting. I can't recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I didn't immediately reference to a movie or a TV show. A fucking commercial. You know the awful singsong of the blasé: Seeeen it. I've literally seen it all, and the worst thing, the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crispier, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can't. I don't know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script.

Here it often imagines things going wrong and negative outcomes; this is called worry. Sometimes this soundtrack is accompanied by visual images or “mental movies.” Even if the voice is relevant to the situation at hand, it will interpret it in terms of the past. This is because the voice belongs to your conditioned mind, which is the result of all your past history as well as of the collective cultural mind-set you inherited. So you see and judge the present through the eyes of the past and get a totally distorted view of it. It is not uncommon for the voice to be a person’s own worst enemy. Many people live with a tormentor in their head that continuously attacks and punishes them and drains them of vital energy. It is the cause of untold misery and unhappiness, as well as of disease.

The Dave Matthews Band’s “Crash into Me” played over the montage, not that the lyrics had anything to do with the images the song was played over but it was “haunting”, it was “moody”, it was “summing things up”, it gave the footage an “emotional resonance” that I guess we were incapable of capturing ourselves. At first my feelings were basically so what? But then I suggested other music: “Hurt” by Nine Inch Nails, but I was told that the rights were sky-high and that the song was “too ominous” for this sequence; Nada Surf’s “Popular” had “too many minor chords”, it didn’t fit the “mood of the piece,” it was – again – “too ominous.” When I told them I seriously did not think things could get any more fucking ominous than they already were, I was told, “Things get very much more ominous, Victor,” and then I was left alone.

THE SOUNDTRACK OF WES AND LIZ Someone Like You | Van Morrison Paper Rings | Taylor Swift Lovers | Anna of the North ocean eyes | Billie Eilish Bad Liar | Selena Gomez Public Service Announcement (Interlude) | Jay-Z Up All Night | Mac Miller How Would You Feel (Paean) | Ed Sheeran Hello Operator | The White Stripes Paradise | Bazzi Sabotage | Beastie Boys Feelin’ Alright | Joe Cocker Someone Like You | Adele Monkey Wrench | Foo Fighters Bella Luna | Jason Mraz Forrest Gump | Frank Ocean Electric (feat. Khalid) | Alina Baraz Kiss | Tom Jones Enter Sandman | Metallica Death with Dignity | Sufjan Stevens We Are Young | fun. feat. Janelle Monáe New Year’s Day | Taylor Swift River | Joni Mitchell

There is nothing so bracing as planning a murder. I recommend it to the weak-willed and those with a leaky sense of self. It is fortifying as a drop of coagulant in a solution. I had planned (The word is too strong. Imagined. Anticipated?) this particular murder for so many years that it had taken on an air of performance and respectability. To understand how a murder can be domesticated and even humdrum may be hard for fans of the pounce of the soundtrack, the streak of scarlet, the gunky skeleton jiggling in the flashlight beam. But I am convinced that if murder is horrible, its for the overflow into the ordinary: severed heads in Ziploc bags, the dead baby in the dumpster behind Chubby’s. Anyone who has eaten a pork chop has all the information she needs for murder…It takes a special kind of person, a criminal, to commit a crime? You know better; in your dreams you’ve already tried it…

That was exactly what Tabucchi was suggesting in his title – that we can pass right by something very important: love, a job, moving to another city or another country. Or another life. ‘Pass by’ and at the same time be ‘so close’ that sometimes, while in that state of melancholy that is akin to hypnosis, we can, in spite of everything, manage to grab little fragments of what might have been. Like catching snatches of a far-off radio frequency. The message is obscure, yet by listening carefully you can still catch snippets of the soundtrack of the life that never was. You hear sentences that were never actually said, you hear footsteps echoing in places you’ve never been to, you can make out the surf on a beach whose sand you have never touched. You hear the laughter and loving words of a woman though nothing ever happened between you. The idea of an affair with her had crossed your mind. Perhaps she would have liked that – probably in fact – but nothing ever happened. For some unknown reason, we never gave in to the exquisite vertigo that you feel when you move those few centimetres towards the face of the other for the first kiss. We passed by, we passed so close that something of the experience remains.

He’s brought a sleeping bag, one of those big green bulky L.L. Bean ones. I look at it questioningly. Following my gaze, he turns red. “I told my parents I was going to help you study, then we might watch a movie, and if it got late enough, I’d crash on your living room floor.” “And they said?” “Mom said, ‘Have a nice time, dear.’ Dad just looked at me.” “Embarrassing much?” “Worth it.” He walks slowly over, his eyes locked on mine, then puts his hands around my waist. “Um. So . . . are we going to study?” My tone’s deliberately casual. Jase slides his thumbs behind my ears, rubbing the hollow at their base. He’s only inches from my face, still looking into my eyes. “You bet. I’m studying you.” He scans over me, slowly, then returns to my eyes. “You have little flecks of gold in the middle of the blue.” He bends forward and touches his lips to one eyelid, then the other, then moves back. “And your eyelashes aren’t blond at all, they’re brown. And . . .” He steps back a little, smiling slowly at me. “You’re already blushing—here”—his lips touch the pulse at the hollow of my throat—“and probably here . . .” The thumb that brushes against my breast feels warm even through my T-shirt. In the movies, clothes just melt away when the couple is ready to make love. They’re all golden and backlit with the soundtrack soaring. In real life, it just isn’t like that. Jase has to take off his shirt and fumbles with his belt buckle and I hop around the room pulling off my socks, wondering just how unsexy that is. People in movies don’t even have socks. When Jase pulls off his jeans, change he has in his pocket slips out and clatters and rolls across the floor. “Sorry!” he says, and we both freeze, even though no one’s home to hear the sound. In movies, no one ever gets self-conscious at this point, thinking they should have brushed their teeth. In movies, it’s all beautifully choreographed, set to an increasingly dramatic soundtrack. In movies, when the boy pulls the girl to him when they are both finally undressed, they never bump their teeth together and get embarrassed and have to laugh and try again. But here’s the truth: In movies, it’s never half so lovely as it is here and now with Jase.

1. Choose to love each other even in those moments when you struggle to like each other. Love is a commitment, not a feeling. 2. Always answer the phone when your husband/wife is calling and, when possible, try to keep your phone off when you’re together with your spouse. 3. Make time together a priority. Budget for a consistent date night. Time is the currency of relationships, so consistently invest time in your marriage. 4. Surround yourself with friends who will strengthen your marriage, and remove yourself from people who may tempt you to compromise your character. 5. Make laughter the soundtrack of your marriage. Share moments of joy, and even in the hard times find reasons to laugh. 6. In every argument, remember that there won’t be a winner and a loser. You are partners in everything, so you’ll either win together or lose together. Work together to find a solution. 7. Remember that a strong marriage rarely has two strong people at the same time. It’s usually a husband and wife taking turns being strong for each other in the moments when the other feels weak. 8. Prioritize what happens in the bedroom. It takes more than sex to build a strong marriage, but it’s nearly impossible to build a strong marriage without it. 9. Remember that marriage isn’t 50–50; divorce is 50–50. Marriage has to be 100–100. It’s not splitting everything in half but both partners giving everything they’ve got. 10. Give your best to each other, not your leftovers after you’ve given your best to everyone else. 11. Learn from other people, but don’t feel the need to compare your life or your marriage to anyone else’s. God’s plan for your life is masterfully unique. 12. Don’t put your marriage on hold while you’re raising your kids, or else you’ll end up with an empty nest and an empty marriage. 13. Never keep secrets from each other. Secrecy is the enemy of intimacy. 14. Never lie to each other. Lies break trust, and trust is the foundation of a strong marriage. 15. When you’ve made a mistake, admit it and humbly seek forgiveness. You should be quick to say, “I was wrong. I’m sorry. Please forgive me.” 16. When your husband/wife breaks your trust, give them your forgiveness instantly, which will promote healing and create the opportunity for trust to be rebuilt. You should be quick to say, “I love you. I forgive you. Let’s move forward.” 17. Be patient with each other. Your spouse is always more important than your schedule. 18. Model the kind of marriage that will make your sons want to grow up to be good husbands and your daughters want to grow up to be good wives. 19. Be your spouse’s biggest encourager, not his/her biggest critic. Be the one who wipes away your spouse’s tears, not the one who causes them. 20. Never talk badly about your spouse to other people or vent about them online. Protect your spouse at all times and in all places. 21. Always wear your wedding ring. It will remind you that you’re always connected to your spouse, and it will remind the rest of the world that you’re off limits. 22. Connect with a community of faith. A good church can make a world of difference in your marriage and family. 23. Pray together. Every marriage is stronger with God in the middle of it. 24. When you have to choose between saying nothing or saying something mean to your spouse, say nothing every time. 25. Never consider divorce as an option. Remember that a perfect marriage is just two imperfect people who refuse to give up on each other. FINAL