Bel Canto

It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.

Some people are born to make great art and others are born to appreciate it. … It is a kind of talent in itself, to be an audience, whether you are the spectator in the gallery or you are listening to the voice of the world's greatest soprano. Not everyone can be the artist. There have to be those who witness the art, who love and appreciate what they have been privileged to see.

Love was action. It came to you. It was not a choice.

There was such an incredible logic to kissing, such a metal-to-magnet pull between two people that it was a wonder that they found the strength to prevent themselves from succumbing every second. Rightfully, the world should be a whirlpool of kissing into which we sank and never found the strength to rise up again.

It was never the right time or it was always the right time, depending on how you looked at it.

There was no time for kissing but she wanted him to know that in the future there would be. A kiss in so much loneliness was like a hand pulling you up out of the water, scooping you up from a place of drowning and into the reckless abundance of air. A kiss, another kiss.

He believed that life, true life, was something that was stored in music. True life was kept safe in the lines of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin while you went out in the world and met the obligations required of you. Certainly he knew (though did not completely understand) that opera wasn't for everyone, but for everyone he hoped there was something. The records he cherished, the rare opportunities to see a live performance, those were the marks by which he gauged his ability to love.

She sang as if she was saving the life of every person in the room.

He doesn’t know to want for more because nothing in his life has been as much as this...on that night he thinks that no one has ever had so much and only later will he know he should have asked for more.

It was too much work to remember things you might not have again, and so one by one they opened up their hands and let them go.

For a man to know what he has when he had it, that is what makes him a fortunate man.

If what a person wants is his life, he tends to be quiet about wanting anything else. Once the life begins to seem secure, one feels the freedom to complain.

Maybe the private life wasn't forever. Maybe everyone got it for a little while and then spent the rest of their lives remembering.

He realized now he was only just beginning to see the full extent to which it was his destiny to follow, to walk blindly into fates he could never understand. In fate there was reward, in turning over one's heart to God there was a magnificence that lay beyond description. At the moment one is sure that all is lost, look at what is gained!

The kind of love that offers its life so easily, so stupidly, is always the love that is not returned.

Most of the time, we're loved for what we can do rather than for who we are. It's not such a bad thing, being loved for what you can do.' 'But the other is better.' 'Better. I hate to say better, but it is. If someone loves you for what you can do then it's flattering, but why do you love them? If someone loves you for who you are then they have to know you, which means you have to know them.

Carmen prayed hard. She prayed while standing near the priest in hopes it would give her request extra credibility. What she prayed for was nothing. She prayed that God would look on them and see the beauty of their existence and leave them alone.

The quality of gifts depends on the sincerity of the giver.

Love is a rebellious bird that no one can tame

Maybe there would be a bad outcome for some of the others, but no one was going to shoot a soprano.

The timing of the electrical failure seemed dramatic and perfectly correct, as if the lights had said, "You have no need for sight. Listen.

But together they moved through the world quite easily, two small halves of courage making a brave whole.

It's easier to love a woman when you can't understand a word she's saying.

Sleep was a country for which he could not obtain a visa.

The light was cut to lace by the trees that had grown so thick with leaves in the last few months.

If someone loves you for what you can do then it's flattering, but why do you love them? If someone loves you for who you are then they have to know you, which means you have to know them.

When you think of love you think as an American. You must think like a Russian. It is a more expansive view.' 'Americans havea bad habbit of thinking like Americans,' Roxane said kindly.

Wearing shoes in the house was barbaric. There was almost as much indignity in wearing shoes in the house as there was in being kidnapped.

...as if the world had become a giant train station in which everything was delayed until further notice.

...it was a miraculous thing to be able to watch the person you love undetected,