“The true violin did not appear until about the year 1550. It did not reach its eminent position in the musical world until the late seventeenth century.”

“Spent the fortnight gone in the music room reworking my year's fragments into a 'sextet for overlapping soloists': piano, clarinet, 'cello, flute, oboe, and violin, each in its own language of key, scale, and color. In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor; in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan't know until it's finished, and by then it'll be too late.”

“No seventeenth-century pedagogue would have publicly advised his disciple, as did Erasmus in his Dialogues, on the choice of a good prostitute.”

“I did not realize what a gift I had been given until it was too late, forever too late. Must life always be that way?”

“Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attibutable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.”

“Did you know I have always suspected that men were idiots," Daphne ground out, "but I was never positive until today.”