This is who we are as a species: We contain within ourselves both the possibility of murdering an old stranger for almost no reason — the capacity in… - Salman Rushdie

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.

We fell into the love that had been lying beneath our love like water below ice, and understood that while we had been having a lot of fun together we had only been skating on the surface, and now we were in as deep as we could go.

Why do we care about singers? Wherein lies the power of songs? Maybe it derives from the sheer strangeness of there being singing in the world. The note, the scale, the chord; melodies, harmonies, arrangements; symphonies, ragas, chinese operas,jazz, the blues: that such things should exist, that we should have discovered the magical intervals and distances that yield the poor cluster of notes, all within the span of a human hand from which we can build our cathedrals of sound, is alchemical a mystery as mathematics, or wine, or love. Maybe the birds taught us. Maybe not. Maybe we are just creatures in search of exaltation. We don't have much of it. Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many painful ways deficient. Song turns them into something else. Song shows us a world that is worthy of our yearning, it shows us our selves as they might be, if we were worthy of the world.