“I hadn’t realized that music could unlock things in you, could transport you to somewhere even the composer hadn’t predicted. It left an imprint in the air around you, as if you carried its remnants with you when you went.”

There is a whole lot more to life than winning.

I thought anything might happen if I wasn’t vigilant. I didn’t eat. I didn’t go out. I didn’t want to see anyone. But I survived, Paul.

My nerve endings seemed to have come alive; they almost jangled with anticipation I was going to see Will. Whatever else,

If all we are allowed is hours, minutes, I want to be able to etch each of them on to my memory with exquisite clarity so that I can recall them at moments like this, when my very soul feels blackened.

I realized I was afraid of living without him. How is it you have the right to destroy my life, I wanted to demand of him, but I’m not allowed a say in yours? But I had promised.

There are normal hours, and then there are invalid hours, where time stalls and slips, where life—real life—seems to exist at one remove.

She does not want to feel even the faintest temptation to call his mobile number, as she had done obsessively for the first year after his death so she could hear his voice on the answering service.

You know, you spend your whole life feeling like you don’t quite fit in anywhere.

I wanted to press every bit of me against him. I wanted to will something into him. I wanted to give him every bit of life I felt and force him to live.

I let him know a hurt had been mended in a way that he couldn’t have known, and for that alone there would always be a piece of me indebted to him.

I frowned at the list. “So… I’ll go back and tell the Traynors that I’m going to get their suicidal quadriplegic son drunk, spend their money on strippers and lap dancers, and then trundle him off to the Disability Olympics-

… if you’re going to wear a dress like that you need to wear it with confidence. You need to fill it out mentally as well as physically.

I just tried to be, tried to absorb the man I loved through osmosis, tried to imprint what I had left of him on myself. I did not speak.

Sometimes, she realizes suddenly, it is simply a matter of blind faith.

Sometimes when you get hammered till the small hours you feel pretty good in the morning, but really it’s just because you’re still a bit drunk.

When you put someone down all the time, eventually they stop listening to the sensible stuff.

My two years with Dan Szabo at the New England Conservatory were indeed a gift — he is a pianist with unlimited potential and a composer that makes my heart sing. I deeply feel that he is an important musician for the coming years.

Some is subtle, wry-mouthed, or back-handed. It is by turns bitter, agonized, and grotesque. Even in the hands of white composers it involuntarily reflects the half-forgotten suffering of the negro.

As a composer I might class myself as a Neo-Romantic, inasmuch as I have always regarded music as a highly personal and emotional form of expression.

The model of a composer.

I am convinced that it is my own fault. Verdi is one of those composers.

For my qualifying concert, Helmut Walcha would not coach Charles-Marie Widor or any American compositions. In his defense, his forte was Germanic composers, and his forte was really a fortissimo!

It may well be that some composers do not believe in God. All of them, however, believe in Bach.

I have written six symphonies, they are smaller-scale works. I seem to emit my themes, work them out, combine and intertwine them, and then come to a close. I usually feel that there are no superfluous extras, but probably most composers feel that way about their works.