And I always enjoy seeing sunlight play on the rocks, the water, the trees and plains. What variety of effects, what brilliance and what softness... … - Gabriel Fauré

Imagining is trying to formulate all one would wish to be better, all that surpasses reality.

Gabriel Fauré, repeating a thought he had often expressed to me, wrote in a letter on the 2nd August 1910: "In piano music one cannot use padding; one must pay in cash so that it is interesting all the time. It is perhaps the most difficult genre if you want to be as satisfying as possible," and he added modestly, "and I do my best." Then, as if in reply to some unjust reproach, "Only it cannot be done any faster."

It was not just in the Andante of the Second Quartet that I remembered having translated (almost involuntarily) the distant memory of bells which in the evening at Montgauzy — and this is some time ago — came to us from a village called Cadillac when the wind blew from the west. From this dull sound a vague dreaminess arose, which, like all vague dreams, is literally untranslatable. Only, does it not happen often that some exterior fact numbs us so that our thoughts become so imprecise that in reality they are not thoughts, and yet are nevertheless something in which we can take pleasure? The desire for things which do not exist perhaps, and this is indeed where music holds sway.