The passions we cannot control are the ones that define us.
I want to do things for people they will never forget. Maybe that’s the best thing I can do in life.
Death is the most sophisticated form of beauty, and the most difficult to accept.
Actually, years mean nothing. It’s what’s inside them.
Sometimes, language is the sound of longing.
We see in others what we want and what we fear.
I think music is what language once aspired to be. Music allows us to face God on our own terms because it reaches beyond life.
I tried to convey to the boy how people’s lives are often altered by curved lines read slowly from paper, sand, or stone.
I think living with the absence of someone we love is like living in front of a mountain from which a person – a speck in the distance, on some distance ridge – is perpetually waving.
Where are people going? I wonder what they hope will happen and what they are afraid of? For me it’s the same thing and has to do with being loved.
When Bach died some of his children sold his scores to the butcher they had decided the paper was more useful for wrapping meat. In a small village in Germany a father brought home a limp goose wrapped in paper that was covered with strange and beautiful symbols.
Language is like looking at a map of somewhere. Love is living there and surviving on the land.
Even if you have loved only once in your life, you’re ruined.
It’s true the people we meet shape us. But the people we don’t meet shape us also, often more because we have imagined them so vividly. There are people we yearn for but never seem to meet.
Music is only a mystery to people who want it explained. Music and love are the same.
In the end I didn’t know who I was crying for, but it was something my body wanted to do, as though trying to digest grief.
Every day is a masterpiece, even if it crushes you.
Love requires imagination more than experience.
Language is like drinking from one’s own reflection in still water. We only take from it what we are at the time.
I want to feel it somehow happened like that because things happen for a reason. I want to believe this more than anything because if it were just an accident, then God must have died before he could finish the world.