02

"My cello is already on stage. It was carved in 1723 on a Sicilian hillside where the sea is very quiet. The strings vibrate when the bow is near, as though anticipating their lover."

"The road surface is slick. It reflects the world with a beautiful inaccuracy."

"Most people never get to hear this music. Music helps us understand where we have come from but, more importantly, what has happened to us."

"I firmly believe that while lies and deception destroy love, they can also build and defend it. Love requires imagination more than experience."

"Solitude and depression are like swimming and drowning. In school many years ago, I learned that flowers sometimes unfold inside themselves."

"The most significant conversations of our lives occur in silence."

"The most important notes in music are the ones that wait until sound has entered the ear before revealing their true nature. They are the spaces between the sounds that blow through the heart, knocking things over."

"All parks are beautiful when quiet and you see things like a book forgotten on a bench read by the wind."

"If there is such a thing as marriage, it takes place long before the ceremony: in a car on the way to the airport; or as a gray bedroom fills with dawn, one lover watching the other; or as two strangers stand together in the rain with no bus in sight, arms weighed down with shopping bags. You don't know then. But later you realize--that was the moment."

"Language is like looking at a map of somewhere. Love is living there and surviving on the land."

"I couldn't believe I was [...] allowing someone to trespass into my life, to climb over the gate and start across the farmland to the small cottage where I had been living for decades with just my music, my stones, my baguettes; a mitten."

"'Sometimes I think it's life that chooses us--and here we are thinking that we're steering the ship, when we're just vehicles for an elaborate division of life.'"