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I realized late in life that my twin passions are music and people.

Yo-Yo Ma

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Yo-Yo Ma
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: October 7
Actor
Cellist
Composer
Music Pedagogue
Musician
Paris
France
Yo Yo Ma
YoYo Ma
People
Twin
Twins
Passions
Realized
Late
Passion
Music
Life

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Our cultural strength has always been derived from our diversity of understanding and experience.
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Each day I move toward that which I do not understand. The result is a continuous accidental learning which constantly shapes my life.
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This middle age thing is a little weird. Some friends and mentors are gone, and there's a very forward-looking new generation coming up behind me. So it's very much finding my own place.
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When your heart and your mind are engaged, you cannot go wrong.
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Sharing is a much better way to communicate than proving.
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I learn something not because I have to, but because I really want to. That's the same view I have for performing. I'm performing because I really want to, not because I have to bring bread back home.
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Many of the Central Asians know Russian, and Ted Levin speaks it fluently. I speak Chinese, but Mongolian is completely different, so we had to have translators.
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I really would like to be involved in things and to understand things, and in some ways you've got to be careful what you wish for because I feel very, very blessed to have such an interesting life and to be able to have little snapshots of lives of people from many different parts of the world.
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I love grocery shopping when I'm home. That's what makes me feel totally normal. I love both the idea of home as in being with my family and friends, and also the idea of exploration. I think those two are probably my great interests.
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You go through phases. You have to reinvent reasons for playing, and one year's answer might not do for another.
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With every year of playing, you want to relax one more muscle. Why? Because the more tense you are, the less you can hear.
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What came up at age 49 is I realized that of all the things I'm interested in, the thing I'm most interested in is figuring out what makes people tick, why people think the way they do, why they act the way they do. And I realized that music is such a great way to investigate why people do what they do.
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Culture opens our hearts to one another. And the currency in culture is not money, but trust.
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We may be coming to a new golden age of instrument making.
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Music is one of the ways we can achieve a kind of shorthand to understand each other.
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I've been traveling all over the world for 25 years, performing, talking to people, studying their cultures and musical instruments, and I always come away with more questions in my head than can be answered.
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It's easy for me to care about Toronto, because Toronto is a community that cares about itself. It represents the world. It talks to itself, and because it does, it figures out that there must be a music garden as part of its existence.
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I think the purpose of a piece of music is significant when it actually lives in somebody else. A composer puts down a code, and a performer can activate the code in somebody else. Once it lives in somebody else, it can live in others as well.
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I have yet to find something that beats the power of being in love, or the power of music at its most magical.
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I think one of the great things about being a musician is that you never stop learning.
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