“She taught me to play the piano, and what it meant to miss somebody.”

“Somebody like you taught somebody like me.”

“What had I seen? Too much. What did I know? Only that knowledge carries a damned high price. Miss Wilcox, my teacher, had taught me so much. Why had she never taught me that?”

“Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody's piano playing in my living room has to the book I am reading.”

“To me, life is sad, like a piano with no pedals being played by a person with no fingers.
”

“As his widow, she knew who she was and what she had inherited. She had loved him in her way and sometimes missed him. She knew what words like "loved" and "missed" meant when she thought of her husband. When she thought of Blunt, on the other hand, she was unsure what anything meant except the sonnets she had written about their love affair.”