Elvis Costello Quotes

The difference between deafness and any other disability is that there is no way to put yourself in a position of knowing what it would be like because you can't stop yourself from hearing your own breath or your own heartbeat. You can not remove sound entirely from your life. You can get a sense of what being blind is like by closing and covering your eyes which provides a source of empathy because we can all project ourselves to that. But people who think they can project themselves into deafness are mistaken because you can't.

But what a humiliation for me when someone standing next to me heard a flute in the distance and I heard nothing, or someone standing next to me heard a shepherd singing and again I heard nothing. Such incidents drove me almost to despair; a little more of that and I would have ended my life - it was only my art that held me back.

The world's worst is when you find yourself going like Mother Hubbard and cupping your hand behind your ear. I was a major glutton for volume: 'Gotta feel it, gotta hear it.' Sooner or later you're going to pay the reaper.

I have terrible hearing trouble. I have unwittingly helped to invent and refine a type of music that makes its principal proponents deaf.

All rock musicians are deaf... Or insensitive to mellow sounds.

[On being deaf:] How much less pain there is in calmly estimating the enjoyments from which we must separate ourselves, of bravely saying, for once and for ever, 'Let them go,' than in feeling them waste and dwindle, till their very shadows escape from our grasp!

Beer makes people deaf.

The deafest man can hear praise, and is slow to think any an excess.

Something I am wondering: if you cannot hear do you have no sounds in your head? Do you see a silent movie

I am just as deaf as I am blind. The problems of deafness are deeper and more complex, if not more important than those of blindness. Deafness is a much worse misfortune. For it means the loss of the most vital stimulus- the sound of the voice that brings language, sets thoughts astir, and keeps us in the intellectual company of man.

I learned to speak first, and then to sign. I have never really known what it was like to hear, so I can't compare hearing aids to normal hearing.

There is something very basic to the sense of listening. The sense of hearing is the only one that operates totally from vibrations, without other physical or chemical reactions to receive the sensations.

But people who think they can project themselves into deafness are mistaken because you can't. And I'm not talking about imagining what a deaf person's whole life is like I even mean just realizing what it is like for an instant.

Of course, I also attribute some of my hearing loss to being in the infantry in World War II. It's probably a combination of heredity and noise exposure.

I'm hard of hearing. I miss a lot. It's really tough.

I have serious hearing loss. I'm challenged if I don't have my hearing aids in.

I'm totally deaf in my right ear, yeah.

People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder, but because they're going deaf, it has to be played louder still.

I have to concentrate more intently when people speak. I always have to position myself on their right side so that I can hear out of my left ear. I sometimes get a crick in my neck from listening. But I don't there's too much else.

I shot with it a lot. I still do now. That is why I am hard of hearing.

Although I'm deaf in only my left ear, when there is noise all around, I'm unable to distinguish sounds and can't hear anything.

I've always worn earplugs, but I'm sure my hearing's not great.

How can a man with such huge ears hear so very little?

I always say deafness is a silent disability: you can't see, and it's not life-threatening, so it has to touch your life in some way in order for it to be on your radar.

I was born deaf. Sound never existed in my life, and this is completely normal to me.