Jessye Norman Quotes

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Jessye Norman

Profession : Musician

Birth : September 15, 1945

I am deeply spiritual; I revel in those things that make for good - the things that we can do to shed a little light, to help place an oft-dissonant universe back in tune with itself... Long live art, long live friendship, long live the joy of life!

Jessye Norman

I have enjoyed most particularly reading the correspondence between Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss. The genuine friendship, competitiveness and support that thread through their communications are life lessons for us all.

Jessye Norman

It takes a caring community to raise a child that will be a whole person and a contributing citizen.

Jessye Norman

I'm dying always.

Jessye Norman

I have a particular affliction. I am unable to say a word I can't spell.

Jessye Norman

I would like to see more African-American singers as part of our opera companies. If you take music and the arts out of the public schools, then you're going to lose a lot of people that you might have discovered were talented, very early.

Jessye Norman

There's no anger ever in a spiritual. There's always the dream of a hope of a better day coming. That God understands the troubles that I'm experiencing.

Jessye Norman

I sing in languages that I speak. So when I'm singing a Schubert song, I know precisely what every word means and, you know, when it was composed and who was the poet and all of that and whether Strauss or Wagner or French Belioz, Duparc or Debussy or whatever.

Jessye Norman

I sing in Hungarian. I read Hungarian. I do not pretend to speak Hungarian, but I sing in languages that I have studied as languages. And I find that to be central and very, very helpful. I think if you're not really cognizant of what every single word means, I think that might be a little tricky.

Jessye Norman

One of the reasons that I take such joy in being a trustee of the New York Public Library is the love of reading that I found as a child in the Saturday morning library events for preschoolers and first and second graders as I was growing up in Augusta, GA.

Jessye Norman

If I were not able to separate the art from the artists, I think I would limit myself a great deal, and life wouldn't be nearly as interesting.

Jessye Norman

It is still more likely that a woman's power would be seen as aggression, and a man's power would be seen as assertion.

Jessye Norman

One needs more than ambition and talent to make a success of anything, really. There must be love and a vocation.

Jessye Norman

I am grateful that my horizons were not narrowed at the outset.

Jessye Norman

Problems arise in that one has to find a balance between what people need from you and what you need for yourself.

Jessye Norman

If you send up a weather vane or put your thumb up in the air every time you want to do something different, to find out what people are going to think about it, you're going to limit yourself. That's a very strange way to live.

Jessye Norman

I was given a stethoscope in a child's 'doctor's bag' at about age six and I loved it! One could hear the heart beating through that plastic toy.

Jessye Norman

I walk an 11-minute mile without huffing and puffing.

Jessye Norman

There has never been a time when I was not committed to, involved in, or caring of, the social and political issues of my world.

Jessye Norman

As for my voice, it cannot be categorised - and I like it that way, because I sing things that would be considered in the dramatic, mezzo or spinto range.

Jessye Norman