Maybe I am naive about certain things. But I'm glad. I know all I want to know.
None will ever be a true Parisian who has not learned to wear a mask of gaiety over his sorrows and one of sadness, boredom, or indifference over his inward joy.
He stared dully at the desolate, cold road and the pale, dead night. Nothing was colder or more dead than his heart. He had loved an angel and now he despised a woman.
why do you condemn a man whom you have never met, whom no one knows and about whom even you yourself know nothing?
Look!You want to see? See! Feast your eyes, glut your soul on my cursed ugliness! Look at Erik's face! Now you know the face of the voice! You were not content to hear me, eh? You wanted to know what I looked like? Oh, you women are so inquisitive! Well, are you satisfied? I'm a good-looking fellow, eh?. . . When a woman has seen me, as you have, she belongs to me. She loves me forever! I am a kind of Don Juan, you know!. . . Look at me! I am Don Juan Triumphant! -Erik in The Phantom of the Opera
Sometimes, the Angel [of Music] leans over the cradle. . . and that is how there are little prodigies who play the fiddle at six better than men of fifty, which, you must admit is very wonderful. Sometimes, the Angel comes much later, because the children are naughty and won't learn their lessons or practice their scales. And sometimes, he does not come at all, because the children have a wicked heart or a bad conscience.
She's singing to-night to bring the chandelier down!
Comparison, a great teacher once told me, is the cardinal sin of modern life. It traps us in a game that we can't win. Once we define ourselves in terms of others, we lose the freedom to shape our own lives.
We have come tardily to the tremendous task of cleaning up our environment. We should have moved with similar zeal at least a decade ago. But no purpose is served by post-mortems. With visionary zeal but the greatest realism, we must now address ourselves to the vast problems that confront us.
The band's never taken a year off. Last August we decided to take one, and three months in I was bored to tears.
Somehow the past is a safe place to explore our collective cultural neuroses.