TV Quote of the Day (‘All in the Family,’ With a Difference of Opinion on Singing)

Cousin Maude [played by Bea Arthur] [after Maude sings loudly to wake everybody up]: “Are you waiting for a special invitation? I said breakfast is on the table.”

Archie Bunker [played by Carroll O’Connor]: “I heard ya. So did every moose up in Canada.”—All in the Family, Season 2, Episode 12, “Cousin Maude’s Visit,” original air date Dec. 11, 1971, teleplay by Phil Mishkin, Michael Ross, and Bernie West, directed by John Rich

Quote of the Day (Soprano Barbara Bonney, on How Mastering a Text Helps With Stage Fright)

"When you start to sing it after all this preparation, you have that wonderful deep memory; it’s like you’ve implanted it in the soles of your feet. So when you’re in a concert, let’s say you’re distracted by something and the words fly out of your head, there’s so much memory inside of you that you can quickly get back into it when you are about to completely fall apart. When I teach I find usually the first thing that goes when kids get nervous is their text; because they haven’t learnt the text—they’ve learnt the music and then sort of got the words along with it; that’s the wrong way to go about it. It’s much more fascinating and much more useful in life to have the words, because let’s say you’re driving along a country lane and all of a sudden the passage—not just the music, but the words—will come to you, and you make a connection in life as a poet would, and it’s so much more rich than just knowing words and knowing music, and performing them.” —American soprano Barbara Bonney quoted by Daniel Jaffe, “The Intimate Art of Barbara Bonney,” Classic CD, May 1999

Quote of the Day (The Poet Virgil, on Singing)

“If we fear the night may gather rain
Ere we arrive, then singing let us go,
Our way to lighten; and, that we may thus
Go singing, I will case you of this load.”— Roman poet Virgil (70 BC-19 BC), Eclogues, Book IX, line 64 (37 BC)

Quote of the Day (Linda Ronstadt, on ‘Why People Sing’)

“Someone once asked me why people sing. I answered that they sing for many of the same reasons the birds sing. They sing for a mate, to claim their territory, or simply to give voice to the delight of being alive in the midst of a beautiful day”—Linda Ronstadt, Simple Dreams (2013)