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Classic Quote by Ned Rorem

“Classic means standard as opposed to Romantic: form before meaning…” quote by Ned Rorem — Download Open image

“Classic means standard as opposed to Romantic: form before meaning as opposed to meaning before form. It grows from inside out, while Romantic grows from outside in.”

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Classic Form Grows Love Mean Standards

More by Ned Rorem

Greatness is not the effect of which inspiration is the cause. We are all inspired, but we are all not great.

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Intelligence is silence, truth is being invisible. But what a racket I make in declaring this.

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If a composer could state in words what being a composer means, he would no longer need to be a composer.

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Perfection is no more a requisite to art than to heroes. Frigidaires are perfect. Beauty limps. My frigidaire has had to be replaced.

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Anyone can be gay - it's no accomplishment - but only I can be me.

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Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced.

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The Great don't innovate, they fertilize seeds planted by lackeys, they leave to others the inhaling of the flowers whose roots they've manured. A…

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If music could be translated into human speech, it would no longer need to exist.

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As a lifelong pacifist, Quaker, and a gay man, I despair that gays and lesbians are expending energy trying to get into the military…

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“We endow our poor lovers with godly traits, and then destroy them for being mortal. ”

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All men are forced into one of two categories: those with eleven fingers and those without.

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Art's the biggest vanity: the assumption that one's view of peace or fright or beauty is permanently communicable.

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Explore all 46 Ned Rorem quotes

More Classic quotes

Many individuals spend a considerable portion of their lifetimes in terror of one imagined catastrophe or another. The classic is that your immortal soul…

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I think what was special about 'Music by Prudence' was the classic story of the title subject's life path - from being an outcast…

Roger Ross Williams

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What I love about watching classic horror films is that they take you on a ride and they obviously make you scared because you're…

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To see classic rock, you had to go to an arena. But punk was happening everywhere, even in little towns in the middle of…

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A classic is like a hidden treasure. Its core is buried under so many layers of varnish that it can be reached only by…

Jean-Louis Barrault

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I like everything with a heaping dose of feminitity, including my cell phone. I created this phone for the classic woman, who like me,…

Kimora Lee Simmons

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One glance and I knew exactly who and what he was. The classic alpha male, the kind who had spurred evolution forward about five…

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I'd always wanted the show to be more reality based science fiction, something along the lines of The Day the Earth Stood Still, which…

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Classic mountaineering grows out of a traditional romantic imagination. Its heart is the feeling, its path is blood, sweat and tears, and its restriction…

Wojciech Kurtyka

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In his anti-Darwinian book... (and eponymously named The Neck of the Giraffe ), Francis Hitching tells the story... "The need to survive by reaching…

Stephen Jay Gould

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The story being told in 'Star Wars' is a classic one. Every few hundred years, the story is retold because we have a tendency…

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In the tradition of the classic songwriter rooms like The Bluebird in Nashville, Strange Brew is a gift to the music community in Austin,…

Christopher Cross

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