When she had passed, it seemed like the ceasing of exquisite music.

"The melody rose, unprofitably magical. It broke; it was resumed broken, not marching once from the cradle to the grave. The sadness of the incomplete — the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art — throbbed in its disjected phrases, and made the nerves of the audience throb. Not thus had she played on the little draped piano at the Bertolini, and "Too much Schumann" was not the remark that Mr. Beebe had passed to himself when she returned."

And the most poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from the chorus.

A senior BBC music programmer smarmed up to me and took this opportunity to remind me of my diminished status in his petty universe, “Of course, you’d have had a lot more hits if you’d just taken out all the sevenths and minor chords.” I suppose I would have had even more, if I’d only taken out all of the music entirely and most of the words, too.

Without you this universe will lose some poetry, some beauty: A song will be missed, a note will be missed, there will be a gap — nobody has told you that.

The symphony orchestra had played poorly, so the conductor was in a bad mood. That night he beat his wife — because the music hadn't been beautiful enough.

From oriole to crow, note the decline
In music. Crow is realist. But, then,
Oriole, also, may be realist.

"Whether on Ida's shady brow,
Or in the chambers of the East,
The chambers of the sun, that now
From ancient melody have ceas'd;

Whether in Heav'n ye wander fair,
Or the green corners of the earth,
Or the blue regions of the air,
Where the melodious winds have birth;

Whether on crystal rocks ye rove,
Beneath the bosom of the sea
Wand'ring in many a coral grove,
Fair Nine, forsaking Poetry!

How have you left the ancient love
That bards of old enjoy'd in you!
The languid strings do scarcely move!
The sound is forc'd, the notes are few!

- "To the Muses

(The rhyme obliges me to this; sometimes
Monarchs are less imperative than rhymes)

The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between.

Your story is a symphony, not a note.

in a voice with half the steps missing.

"Andrei, did you like the opera?"
"Not particularly."
"Andrei, do you see what you're missing?"
"I don't think I do, Kira. It's all rather silly. And useless."
"Can't you enjoy things that are useless, merely because they are beautiful?"
"No. But I enjoyed it."
"The music?"
"No. The way you listened to it."

his speech may lack the brilliance of his hair.“ Cyrano to Roxanne