“If music can ever restore a lost past, then this was the moment. Redemption! We do crave it. But music is different: we tolerate songs without redemption.”

“But no, music lasted longer than anything it inspired. After LPs, cassettes, and CDs, when matrimony was about to decay into its component elements—alimony and acrimony—the songs startled him and regained all their previous, pre-Rachel meanings, as if they had not only conjured her but then dismissed her, as if she had been entirely their illusion. He listened to the old songs again, years later on that same dark promenade, when every CD he had ever owned sat nestled in that greatest of all human inventions, the iPod, dialed up and yielding to his fingertip’s tap. The songs now offered him, in exchange for all he had lost, the sensation that there was something still to long for, still, something still approaching, and all that had gone before was merely prologue to an unimaginably profound love yet to seize him. If there was any difference now, it was only that his hunger for music had become more urgent, less a daily pleasure than a daily craving.”

“But music is, at the very minimum, inflammatory, exclusionary, divisive, encouraging of snobbery and solipsism. ”

“No doctrine of Redemption that in any way casts the slightest shadow over the high mountain of Divine Sovereignty can be tolerated for a moment.”

“He fell in love with Manhattan's skyline, like a first-time brothel guest falling for a seasoned professional. He mused over her reflections in the black East River at dusk, dawn, or darkest night, and each haloed light-in a tower or strung along the jeweled and sprawling spider legs of the Brooklyn Bridge's spans-hinted at some meaning, which could be understood only when made audible by music and encoded in lyrics.”

“All of this vain heartbreak that we cling to as important or tragic would one day be revealed - by TV scientists - for what it is: just behavior.”

“All our skill at disproving things is like a wall we build between us and wonder. To jump that wall, you need a long running start.-The Tragedy of Arthur”