“Each piano is unique. Each feels different beneath your hand and yields a new geography of sound. Each room or hall accepts that sound in a completely different way, and if, within that room or hall, the piano is moved, the sound will change, as it will if the hall is full of people in thick winter coats, or half full of people in light summer dresses. You must adjust your touch, your tone, your range; you must LISTEN, for even the most familiar passages can become unfamiliar, challenging, strange.”

“Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen closely, you may need to silence everything in your own room, you can hear the sounds of that other room inside your head.”

“And it feels strange, almost sad, to walk through ther empty halls. Each step I take sounds so lonely.”

“The life of my people is to remember forever; each head granary is full. The life of your people is to forget: your thing granaries ("museums"), and not yourselves, are full.”

“Why be a dumb dud? Do your friends shun you? Do people cross the street when they see you approaching? Do they run up the steps of strange houses, pretend they live there and force their way into the hall while you are passing by? If this is the sort of person you are, you must avail yourself today of this new service. Otherwise, you might as well be dead.”

“I crossed the room, and what you did was to feel my hair over and over again and in different ways, touch it, with the palm of your hand... felt it, strands of hair, with your fingers, touched it as if it were cloth, the way a child touches its favorite surfaces.”