“She sighed heavily before whispering, “I’m still a bit confused as to what we are waiting for.” “We are waiting for one of the constants in our world, Miss Braun,” Wellington assured her. “At the end of every opera, there is the grand finale, where the music continues its gradual crescendo, the tenor and tempo rising ever so gradually for that pinnacle of dramatic tension, that moment of anticipation—” “Welly, are you talking about opera or about sex?” His next words caught in his throat. For a woman of higher tastes and seeming refinement, this woman could be utterly crass.”

“Now we sit and wait,” the woman said, and she settled into a chair, the gun on her lap.“What are we waiting for?” Jane asked.The woman stared at her. Said, calmly: “The end.”

“We all have to die a bit every now and then and usually it's so gradual that we end up more alive than ever. Infinitely old and infinitely alive.”

“One must learn to love.— This is what happens to us in music: first one has to learn to hear a figure and melody at all, to detect and distinguish it, to isolate it and delimit it as a separate life; then it requires some exertion and good will to tolerate it in spite of its strangeness, to be patient with its appearance and expression, and kindhearted about its oddity:—finally there comes a moment when we are used to it, when we wait for it, when we sense that we should miss it if it were missing: and now it continues to compel and enchant us relentlessly until we have become its humble and enraptured lovers who desire nothing better from the world than it and only it.— But that is what happens to us not only in music: that is how we have learned to love all things that we now love. In the end we are always rewarded for our good will, our patience, fairmindedness, and gentleness with what is strange; gradually, it sheds its veil and turns out to be a new and indescribable beauty:—that is its thanks for our hospitality. Even those who love themselves will have learned it in this way: for there is no other way. Love, too, has to be learned.”

“If you don't want to have sex, I don't want to talk about our feelings."He scrubbed his hand through his hair, looking confused. "Well, that's for damn sure the first time a woman's ever said that to me.”

“I’m turning into an old woman. Might as well start knitting and bitching about soap operas, gas prices, and rude drivers.” – Sundown”