“What is this life but the sound of an appalling love.”

“What men call adventures usually consist of the stoical endurance of appalling daily misery.”

“The music was more than music- at least what we are used to hearing. The music was feeling itself. The sound connected instantly with something deep and joyous. Those powerful moments of true knowledge that we have to paper over with daily life. The music tapped the back of our terrors, too. Things we'd lived through and didn't want to ever repeat. Shredded imaginings, unadmitted longings, fear and also surprisingly pleasures. No, we can't live at that pitch. But every so often something shatters like ice and we are in the river of our existence. We are aware. And this realization was in the music, somehow, or in the way Shamengwa played it.”

“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up.”

“Old love, middle love, the kind of love that knows itself and knows that nothing lasts, is a desperate shared wildness.”

“A woman's body is the gate to this life. A man's body is the gate to the next life.”

“Love won't be tampered with, love won't go away. Push it to one side and it creeps to the other.”