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"I did all kinds of things in order to earn a living."
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"I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing."

"Don't look for meaning in life. It was meant to be lived not understood."

"I'm of a fearsome mind to throw my arms around every living librarian who crosses my path, on behalf of the souls they never knew they saved."

"The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases."

"It was the closest to purgatory that I've ever experienced while I've been living."

"I'm not saying that there's anything better than mated bliss at its best, but I'm saying that living alone is as good in its own way. But we haven't quite given ourselves permission to recognize that."
Explore more quotes by Alan Hovhaness

"This is not to say that the Scots are not fine people, but they were all sort of... well, my grandfather was a minister and sort of Protestant, and this was rather depressing to me."

"No, no, I didn't know him. He lost his mind around 1917 because of the tragedy of the Armenians."

"I found a greater identity with my own emotions in the Armenian culture as I grew older, as well as from the beginning, although I didn't know anything about it."

"There were periods when I sometimes made fires in a large, open fireplace that lasted about two weeks, which was how long it took to burn my compositions. So there has been an awful lot that I have destroyed."

"It's hard for me to think of others because I'm not particularly in sympathy with the music of this century."

"My mother's background was Scottish. She came from an old family, some of whom lived in upper New York State and some of whom had come over from Scotland."

"I was much more interested in the orchestra than the piano, but I did become fairly proficient as a pianist and my teachers felt I had talent and wanted me to become a good concert pianist and earn my living that way."

"I was born in Somerville, but I don't remember very much about it because we moved from there to Arlington when I was five years old, and it was in Arlington that I spent most of my childhood."
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