Daniel Handler Quotes

That is basically me, and although I have done many things in my life - conducting, playing piano, and so on - what is fundamental is my being a composer.

I can take any series of numbers and turn it into music, from Bach to bebop, Herbie Hancock to hip-hop.

I can write music but I'm not much for words.

I consider myself a composer.

Sometimes I would make myself very still and try to imagine myself dead. I tried to invoke the feeling of the very last breath I would take.

It's very demanding to make up your own music.

All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead.

Absolute silence leads to sadness. It is the image of death.

Creep into thy narrow bed, Creep, and let no more be said!

Sleep: the stepchild of Death.

Time and death sleep side by side.

Then star nor sun shall waken, Nor any change of light: Nor sound of waters shaken, Nor any sound or sight: Nor wintry leaves nor vernal; Nor days nor things diurnal; Only the sleep eternal In an eternal night.

He’s quiet then. We lie next to each other, twin corpses waiting for burial.

Words move, music moves Only in time; but that which is only living Can only die. Words, after speech, reach Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern, Can words or music reach The stillness.

We now to peace and darkness And earth and thee restore Thy creature that thou madest And wilt cast forth no more.

When it comes, you’ll be dreaming that you don’t need to breathe; that breathless silence is the music of the dark and it’s part of the rhythm to vanish like a spark.

The night will close the door & fasten my anchor within the veil and I shall go away to sleep.

The rest, is silence.

He got right down in the dark between heartbeats, and rested there. And then he saw that another one wasn't going to come. That's it. That's the last. He looked at the dark. I would like to take this opportunity, he said, to pray for another human being.

Time moves in it special way in the middle of the night.

When I lie where shades of darkness Shall no more assail mine eyes.

May night continue to fall upon the orchestra

Black is like the silence of the body after death, the close of life.

Night, having Sleep, the brother of Death.

Night has patterns that can be read less by the living than by the dead.