She listened to him all night and he found her fascinating.

She woke to the sound of his heart knocking against his chest. As though it was searching for a way out.

He repeated himself so often that some of what he said seeped into the ears. (p190)

After a while he stopped listening. His ears took in only the rise and fall of her voice, the elaborate, familiar, endless rhythm of it; but from long experience he was able to say "Oh yes" or "Of course," in all the right places.

It was the other music that he was hearing: the feeling that, while she was telling him one story, he was listening to a different one, and so was she.

From daydreams on the road there was no waking. He plodded on. He could remember everything of her save her scent. Seated in a theatre with her beside him leaning forward listening to the music. Gold scrollwork and sconces and the tall columnar folds of the drapes at either side of the stage. She held his hand in her lap and he could feel the tops of her stockings through the thin stuff of her summer dress. Freeze this frame. Now call down your dark and your cold and be damned.

A song called 'Earth Angel' played in her head all morning—also three trumpets and a piano.

The pervasive rhythm
of her mother’s heartbeat is a ghostly track
that follows her.

It was obvious that he was a man who marched through life to the rhythms of some drum I would never hear.

I can feel a something pounding in my brain
Just any time that someone speaks your name
Trumpets sound and I hear thunder boom
Every time that you walk in the room.

I know she ain't you, but she's here, and she's got that dark rhythm in her soul.

Her voice had a peculiarly engaging quality; it was deep, a little husky, and one always heard the breath vibrating behind it. Everything she said seemed to come right out of her heart.

His life rushes onward in such torrential rhythm that...only angels and devils can catch the tempo of it.

I have always heard in the music what I am finding out from the books: the man was a tyrant who beat his musicians with insults and temper tantrums. He never smiled when conducting (not even in rehearsals!) never thanked or complimented his men, never made them feel they were valuable partners or had even done a creditable job. He would fail to give them cues, then blame them with curses and insults for needing them! Besides being a compulsive perfectionist, he was childish, petulant, inconsiderate, monomaniacal, and monstrously self-centered. His technique was fear, and I always heard that fear in his music...Reading about him - especially books by people who worked with him - strongly confirmed what I had felt in my bones"