Цитаты из книги Partita

The point of art is to help you like your life better.

It’s the God’s honest truth of grief. It doesn’t resolve; it will always be there. It’s going to walk with you.

Funny how people can’t take their eyes off a fire, while every other kind of beast wants to look away.

Her problem with me wasn’t me. It was hatefulness that got to her before we were even born. She kept that, Charlie. Under her bed.

It was his choice to call me now, scaring the sleep out of my nights and lurking around my days.

God in whom I don’t really believe, except as inspiration for the kindest instincts and most torrid, passionate music ever mustered by humankind, please tell me. Because we’re made of both things, kindness and craving. If you did make us, that’s the complicated clay you used, those two ingredients in equal measure. So, you tell me. Which one is right?
Oh! God.

I played Gaspard de la Nuit just for Sigurd that spring, all three parts, and explained the story poems behind each one. First is “Ondine,” the flirtatious water nymph, and last comes “Scarbo,” a wiry goblin that comes out at night to terrify you, scrambling all around the bed and up the walls. The middle movement, “Le Gibet,” is very slow and sad, with a B-flat octave tolling like a bell all the way through.

Just by threatening to come look at me, he left me looking at myself.

I covered my guilt with outrage.

A child can’t hate her mother without putting the load-bearing walls of the known world at risk. I settled for hating her shoes.

When I told him it was a partita, I had to explain then what that is, a composition made of a lot of parts with different paces and moods.

I explained why I loved Bach, because of balance. Not a flat-out symmetry of Question: Answer. That would be Mozart. Bach is more winsome, making his opening promise, then taking it out for a little walk around, which is called fortspinnung, and then, finally, inevitably, delivering heart-in-hands the conclusion he had you longing for. You could count on it.

Music could always help me find my feelings, had stood beside me at funerals, celebrated my joys, sat patiently with my loneliness. Not just mine, every person’s. It could reach inside them to find what they needed to say or cry or yell into the ears of a hard old world.