Quotes on Quartets

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope, For hope would be hope for the wrong thing.

History may be servitude. History may be freedom. See, now they vanish. The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them, to become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.

Time present and time past / are both perhaps present in time future.

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

music heard so deeply That it is not heard at all, but you are the music While the music lasts.

For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

Not less of love, but expanding Of love beyond desire, and so liberation From the Future as well as the past.

To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not / You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.

I owe very, very much to Mozart; and if one studies, for instance, the way in which I write for string quartet, then one cannot deny that I have learned this directly from Mozart. And I am proud of it!

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.

There are three conditions which often look alike Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow: Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference, ... .

A condition of complete simplicity (Costing not less than everything)

Why should a novelist not also be a historian? To force unnatural divisions within the English language is to work against its capacious and accommodating nature. To expect a writer to produce only novels, or only histories, is equivalent to demanding from a composer that he or she write only string quartets or piano sonatas.

Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

There is no bad day that can’t be overcome by listening to a barbershop quartet. This is just truth, plain and simple.

Desire itself is movement_x000D_ _x000D_ Not in itself desirable;_x000D_ _x000D_ Love is itself unmoving,_x000D_ _x000D_ Only the cause and end of movement,_x000D_ _x000D_ Timeless, and undesiring_x000D_ _x000D_ Except in the aspect of time_x000D_ _x000D_ Caught in the form of limitation_x000D_ _x000D_ Between un-being and being.

time past and time future what might have been and what has been point to one end, which is always present.

Words move, music moves Only in time; but that which is only living Can only die. Words, after speech, reach Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern, Can words or music reach The stillness.