The Queen of the Night

When the earth opens up under your feet, be like a seed. Fall down; wait for the rain.

Men often complain of the wickedness of women. Of how we delight in what power we have over their hearts. But they reign over everything else, so of course, they grudge us this, should we ever come to rule over this thing the size of their fist.

Why is it so loud when you cry from grief? Because it must be loud enough for the missing one to hear, though it never can be. Loud enough to scale the sky and the backs of angels, or to fall through the earth to where they rest. And so it is sometimes when I sing that the notes come from me as if I believed I could reach them where they rest, they sure of a reunion I still cannot imagine or believe in except, sometimes, in song.

And the gods did not kill for hubris-for hubris, they let you live long enough to learn.

In this world, some time ago, far past anyone's remembering,women as a kind had done something so terrible, so awful, so fantastically cruel that they and their daughters and their daughters' daughters were forever beyond forgiveness until the end of time- unforgiving, distrusted, enslaved, made to suffer for the least offenses committed against any man. What was remembered were the terms of our survival as a class: We were to be docile, beautiful,uncomplaining, pure, and failing that at the least useful.bin return we might be allowed something like a long life. But if we were not any of these things, but a man's reckoning, or if perchance we violated their sense of that pact, we would have no protection whatsoever and were to be treated worse than any wild dog or lame horse.

Sorrow seemed to me to be more like a road wound through life

She wanted only to be feared. I wanted to be feared and loved. I didn't want everything she had as she stood onstage that night. I wanted more.

It was such a hard thing, this virtue, it seemed to me. Keeping it was like having to grip the knife by the blade and defend yourself with the hilt. Ever since I’d been old enough to know about virtue in a woman, it had seemed like a bull’s-eye painted on my head in rouge. I was sure, as I was led away, I would be better off without it. It was better to be done with it and be gone.

Why was there never an opera that ended with a soprano who was free?

The secret to being a rider in the hippodrome wasn't just that you must be agile, or that you must be good with horses, or that you must be strong and steady as the horse careens to the far end of the arena and back with you riding on its back. It was that you must hide inside your costume a little of a killer's heart. The animal will be tender with you, and you with it, but the animal never forgets that when what it wants for survival requires your death, it will become unafraid to kill you. And so you cannot forget this, either. It is, on reflection, good training to be a courtesan. A woman of any kind.

The night is a wonderful country to rule.

And I would tell him, as we rise into the air, The curse is not that we cannot choose our Fates. The curse, the curse we all live under, is that we can.

You are never lost in sorrow, it seems to me, ever. You do know the way. In fact, you don't think there's any other. Sorrow seemed to me to be more like a road would through life, through the days of your life, like the old Roman ruins near the Tuileries or the rue d'Enfer -- underneath this life, but never really apart from it.

Nothing to fear from a fate that was already yours, then, except, perhaps, that it would never leave you.

There was a question I wanted answered more than I wanted anything else, and it could take my life to answer it. This question was What could I be? This was what I wanted to know.

The sacrifice is usually chained to the rock. She does not usually dance out to meet her monster.

And then she leaned back her head with the faintest smile and, tapping her chin, asked, Are you in love with him, this mystery composer? How can I be? I asked in return. I don’t even know him. Almost every opera is about this, she said, her smile growing. Love before first sight.

A singer learned her roles for life - your repertoire was a library of fates held close, like the gowns in this closet, yours until your voice failed.

Your health, when you have it, is invisible to you.

They had the faces of angels and the determination of demons.

The animal will be tender with you, and you with it, but the animal never forgets that when what it wants for survival requires your death, it will become unafraid to kill you. And so you cannot forget this, either. It is, on reflection, good training to be a courtesan. A woman of any kind.

Love is never governed by Reason.

In some way I had never known how to express, I’d feared I would have to become the first of my kind, whatever my kind was, should I be allowed to survive—that which history has never seen before.

I sang it as a gift to the audience, to the composer, to me. I sang it as a taunt to the Fates, too. I was weary of my fears as well as my desires, and so I sang it in simple defiance of all of it, even defying myself.

If Chopin’s Nocturne in F Minor, op. 55, no. 1 is like looking for a love lost in the darkness, this is the descent into love, in all its richness, mortifications, and subsequent glories.

All thirsts are without explanations, as are all loves.

I was now both the secret and the keeper of it, but the idea that I could not know what it was I served, nor why, nor who, became nearly unendurable all at once

None of the young women who wanted her position knew what her position was.