Librarian is a service occupation. Gas station attendant of the mind.
Evil is the refusal to see one's self in others.
When you're sure of what you're looking at, look harder.
What I really like to learn how to do is to build sentences that are equal to mental states.
Maybe happiness is like a virus. Maybe it's one of those bugs that sits for a long time, so we don't even know that we are infected.
The job of taste was to thin the insane torrent of human creativity down to manageable levels. But the job of appetite was never to be happy with taste.
The morning was glorious, one of those crystalline, dry, blue, fall days when the temperature hovers right at anticipation.
Only keep still, wait, and hear, and the world will open.
The web: yet another total disorientation that becomes status quo without anyone realizing it.
For a moment, looking felt like something that happened to you rather than something you did. Not 'Are you who I think you are?' Am I who you think I am?
Information may travel at light speed, but meaning spreads at the speed of dark.
The thing about music was that you never knew the shape of anyone’s desire.
Listen deep down: most life happens on scales a million times smaller than ours.
Chance was just an order that you hadn't yet perceived.
It had to be U. U. was the only town I could still bear, the one spot in the atlas I'd already absorbed head-on. When you take too many of your critical hits in one place, that place can no longer hurt you.
He will love this music to death. In a few more years, he’ll snort at its sentiment and mock its stirring progressions. Once you’ve loved like that, the only safe haven is resentment.
Synapses in motion tend to stay in motion. Synapses at rest tend to stay at rest.
Zag when they think you'll zig.
Music wasn't about learning how to love. It was about learning what to disown and when to disown it. Even the most magnificent piece would end up as collateral damage in the endless war over taste.
Still, history is the long process of outsourcing human ability in order to leverage more of it.
The oldest principle of composition: repeat everything.
Music is a system of proportions in the service of a spiritual impulse.
And you, fallen Wendy, eviscerated by the eternal recurrence of it all, hear Peter snarl at you for growing guilty and big and old...
Was tonality out there – God-given? Or were those magic ratios, like everything human, makeshift rules to be broken on the way to a more merciless freedom?
Be grateful for anything that still cuts. Dissonance is a beauty that familiarity hasn't destroyed yet.
Maybe the key to acclaim is simply to live long enough. But then, maybe acclaim is the foyer to death.
Art is not a mobocracy. It’s a republic.
Life is nothing but mutual infection.
It seemed to me that half of life’s problems would be solved if one of us had a vagina.
Reckless archaism. Arpeggiating under the influence. Presto in an andante zone.
The use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body.
What was acrophobia anyway, if not the half-acknowledged desire to jump?
Insecurity will always be a growth industry. The economy now depends on fear.
It was like so, but wasn't.
There's joy in a minor key, a deep pleasure to be had from hearing the darkest tune and discovering you're equal to it.
I don't know any sad songs. Except for the funny ones.
Do you run away or toward?
Sooner or later, all men will do and know all things.
Way too late in life, Els learned that the time to concentrate yourself was right before sunrise.
Creation is much in need of ordering.
How much they knew, these new children. How concentrated their knowledge of every mechanism, except for life.
There was nothing more pressing to do all day, every day, except think about the question that his whole life had failed to answer: How did music trick the body into thinking it had a soul?
There is no safety. There is only forgetfulness.
Love was long over, but what was lost to him he still loved so harshly that it prevented him from listening even to its trace.
Something in those jittery black-and-golden scraps recalled her sight’s desire. So it always went, with life and its paler imitations.
Time didn't age you; memory did.
Je ne fais aucun mal en restant ici. I do no harm by remaining here.
