Bel Canto Quotes

It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.

Some people are born to make great art and others are born to appreciate it. Don't you think? It is a kind of talent in itself, to be an audience, whether you are the spectator in the gallery or you are listening to the voice of the world's greatest soprano. Not everyone can be the artist. There have to be those who witness the art, who love and appreciate what they have been privileged to see.

Love was action. It came to you. It was not a choice.

It was never the right time or it was always the right time, depending on how you looked at it.

There was such an incredible logic to kissing, such a metal-to-magnet pull between two people that it was a wonder that they found the strength to prevent themselves from succumbing every second. Rightfully, the world should be a whirlpool of kissing into which we sank and never found the strength to rise up again.

She sang as if she was saving the life of every person in the room.

There was no time for kissing but she wanted him to know that in the future there would be. A kiss in so much loneliness was like a hand pulling you up out of the water, scooping you up from a place of drowning and into the reckless abundance of air. A kiss, another kiss.

It was too much work to remember things you might not have again, and so one by one they opened up their hands and let them go.

For a man to know what he has when he had it, that is what makes him a fortunate man.

If what a person wants is his life, he tends to be quiet about wanting anything else. Once the life begins to seem secure, one feels the freedom to complain.

He doesn’t know to want for more because nothing in his life has been as much as this...on that night he thinks that no one has ever had so much and only later will he know he should have asked for more.

Maybe the private life wasn't forever. Maybe everyone got it for a little while and then spent the rest of their lives remembering.

The quality of gifts depends on the sincerity of the giver.

Love is a rebellious bird that no one can tame

The kind of love that offers its life so easily, so stupidly, is always the love that is not returned.

Carmen prayed hard. She prayed while standing near the priest in hopes it would give her request extra credibility. What she prayed for was nothing. She prayed that God would look on them and see the beauty of their existence and leave them alone.

Sleep was a country for which he could not obtain a visa.

The timing of the electrical failure seemed dramatic and perfectly correct, as if the lights had said, "You have no need for sight. Listen.

Maybe there would be a bad outcome for some of the others, but no one was going to shoot a soprano.

He believed that life, true life, was something that was stored in music. True life was kept safe in the lines of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin while you went out in the world and met the obligations required of you. Certainly he knew (though did not completely understand) that opera wasn't for everyone, but for everyone he hoped there was something. The records he cherished, the rare opportunities to see a live performance, those were the marks by which he gauged his ability to love.

Most of the time, we're loved for what we can do rather than for who we are. It's not such a bad thing, being loved for what you can do.' 'But the other is better.' 'Better. I hate to say better, but it is. If someone loves you for what you can do then it's flattering, but why do you love them? If someone loves you for who you are then they have to know you, which means you have to know them.

It's easier to love a woman when you can't understand a word she's saying.

But together they moved through the world quite easily, two small halves of courage making a brave whole.

The Swedish he knew was mostly from Bergman films. He had learned it as a college student, matching the subtitles to the sounds. In Swedish, he could only converse on the darkest of subjects.

He realized now he was only just beginning to see the full extent to which it was his destiny to follow, to walk blindly into fates he could never understand. In fate there was reward, in turning over one's heart to God there was a magnificence that lay beyond description. At the moment one is sure that all is lost, look at what is gained!

The light was cut to lace by the trees that had grown so thick with leaves in the last few months.

Wearing shoes in the house was barbaric. There was almost as much indignity in wearing shoes in the house as there was in being kidnapped.

...as if the world had become a giant train station in which everything was delayed until further notice.

When you think of love you think as an American. You must think like a Russian. It is a more expansive view.' 'Americans havea bad habbit of thinking like Americans,' Roxane said kindly.

If someone loves you for what you can do then it's flattering, but why do you love them? If someone loves you for who you are then they have to know you, which means you have to know them.

Instead, he was astonished by what he had: the chance to sit beside this woman in the late afternoon light while she read.

...it was a miraculous thing to be able to watch the person you love undetected,

A kiss in so much loneliness was like a hand pulling you up out of the water, scooping you up from a place of drowning and into the reckless abundance of air.

Well, you can't tell it from looking at him....It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.

But it is never about who has given what. That is not the way of gifts. This is not a business we are conducting.

It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we mght have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.

Time could barely pull the second hand forward on the clock...

They lived their lives only for the hour that lay ahead of them.

Gen, with his genius for languages, was often at a loss for what to say when left with only his own words.

People souldn't be allowed to decide that they wished to remain a hostage

Thank God Roxane Coss had not fallen in love with one of the Russians. She doubted they could make it up the stairs without stopping for a cigarette and telling at least one loud story that no one could understand.

She was his wife in every way that mattered and that would save her.

If want a person wants is his life, he tends to be quiet about wanting anything else.

As if music were a separate thing you could drive yourself into, make love to, fuck.

The President's unwavering devotion to his television set was so potentially embarrassing his cabinet would gladly have traded it in for an indiscreet mistress.

He was in love, and never had he felt such kindness towards another person.

You don't see many shy terrorists.

He was so close to her then that they owned every molecule of air in the tiny room and the air grew heavy with their desire and worked to move them together.

In the future, he will try to say her name enough, but he never can.

No one could see her objectively anyway. Even those who saw her for the first time, before she had opened her mouth to sing. Found her radiant, as if her talent could not be contained in her voice and so poured like light though her skin. Then all that could be seen was the weight and the gloss of her hair and the pale pink of her cheeks and her beautiful hands.

I could have had one life but insteads I had another because of this book my grandmother protected. What a miracle is that? I was taught to love beautiful things. I had a language in which to consider beauty. Later that extended to the opera, to the ballet, to architecture I saw, and even later still I came to realize that what I had seen in the paintings I could see in the fields or a river. I could see it in people. All of that I attribute to this book.

A pain exploded up high in her chest and spit her out of this terrible world.

...was an elegant woman in a city of so many thousands of elegant women...

It was nothing like Roxanne singing, where it seemed that everyone's heart would have to wait until she finished before it could beat again.

...that it was so completely their own that it would have been pointless to even try to speak of it to someone else.

It was not a musical voice, and yet it affected him like music.

From his endless work had come a great industry, great personal gain, but happiness? It was a word he would have puzzled over, unable to understand it's importance even while it's meaning was evident.

If we put a gun to her head she would sing all day. Try it first with a bird, General Benjamin said gently to Alfredo. Like our soprano, they have no capacity to understand authority. The bird doesn't know enough to be afraid and the person holding the gun will only end up looking like a lunatic.

For a man to know what he has when he has it, that is what makes him a fortunate man. Fyodorov

At least she was not a tall woman. She was a pixie, a pocket Venus.

Running, the music flew into him, became the wind that pushed back his hair and the slap of his own feet on the pavement.

Art is not sin. It’s not always good. But it is not a sin.

If what a person wants is his life, he tends to be quiet about wanting anything else. Once the life begins to seem secure, one feels the freedom to complain. Victor

Gen stopped and talked to Simon Thaibault, who was reading One Hundred Years Of Solutide in Spanish. 'This will take me forever,' Thaibault said to Gen in French, 'Maybe a hundred years. At least I know I have the time.' 'Who knew that being kidnapped was so much like attending university?' Gen said.

Simon Thibault would never die in a foolish gesture for Edith. On the contrary, he would take every cowardly recourse available to him to ensure that their lives were spent together.

When I hear Roxane sing I am still able to think well of the world," Gen said. "This is a world in which she can still sing that music with so much compassion. That's proof of something, isn't it?

For the guests of Mr. Hosokawa’s birthday party, most of the day was spent wandering from window to window, maybe playing a hand of cards or looking at a magazine, as if the world had become a giant train station in which everything was delayed until further notice.

You don't find strangers declaring themselves to you awkward?' But then she wouldn't, would she? People must fall in love with her hourly. She must keep a staff of translators to interpret the proposals of love and marriage. 'It's easier to love a woman when you can't understand a word she's saying,' Roxane said.

Must Thibault imagine the animal (who was long since dead but when and how? He couldn't remember) skinned and braised? Milou as dinner. Once something is named it can never be eaten. Once you have called it brother in your mind it should enjoy the freedoms of a brother.

The great love of his life, after God, lived only in dark vinyl.

She was as silent as light on the leaves of trees.

The early years he had spent building Nansei were like a hurricane in his memory, a huge, overbearing wind into which every loose thing was sucked.

I don't have any talent for vacations.

Gen was sleeping the sleep of the heavily drugged.

Wearing shoes in the house was barbaric. There was almost as much indignity in wearing shoes in the house as there was in being kidnapped.

One day was just the same as the next and so he reasoned there would never be exactly a right time or a wrong time

It was soaring, that voice, warm and complicated, utterly fearless.

What would it mean to kiss the lips that had held such a sound?

One boy took a peppermint from a woman’s satin evening clutch but first held it up discreetly for consent. She moved her head down and back, just a quarter of an inch, and he smiled and slipped off the cellophane.

His own daughters constantly presented him with a mathematical impossibility, one minute running around the house wearing pajamas covered in images of the blankly staring Hello, Kitty, the next minute announcing they had dates who would be picking them up at seven. He believed his daughters were not old enough to date and yet clearly by the standards of this country they were old enough to be members of a terrorist organization

He had lived his life as a good father but now Oscar Mendoza saw again his life as a boy. A daughter was a battle between fathers and boys in which the fathers fought valiantly and always lost. He knew that one by one each of his daughter would be lost, either honorably in the ceremony of marriage or, realistically, in a car pointed out towards the ocean well after dark. In his day, Oscar himself had made too many girls forget their better instincts and fine training by biting them with tender persistence at the base of their skull, just where the hairline grew in downy wisps. Girls were like kittens in this way, if you got them right at the nape of their neck, they went easily limp. Then he would whisper his suggestions, all the things they might do together, the wonderful dark explorations for which he was to be their guide. His voice traveled like a drug dripped down the spiraling canals of their ears until they had forgotten everything, until they had forgotten their own names, until they turned and offered themselves up to him, their bodies sweet and soft as marzipan.

Never had he thought, never once, that such a woman existed, one who stood so close to God that God's own voice poured from her. How far she must have gone inside herself to call up that voice. It was as if the voice came from the center part of the earth and by the sheer effort and diligence of her will she had pulled it up through the dirt and rock and through the floorboards of the house, up into her feet, where it pulled through her, reaching, lifting, warmed by her, and then out of the white lily of her throat and straight to God in heaven. It was a miracle and he wept for the gift of bearing witness.

He was a very small man, both in stature and girth, who had been chosen as a running mate as much for his size as for his political beliefs. The pervasive thinking in government was that a taller vice president would make the President appear weak, replaceable.

Shy Carmen, always hanging back from the others, who knew she could smile? But at the sight of that smile he would have promised her anything. He was just barely awake. Or maybe he was not awake at all. Had he wanted her and not known it? Had he wanted her so much that he dreamed she was lying beside him now? The things our minds keep from us, Gen thought. The secrets we keep even from ourselves.

These people who detain us so pleasantly may decide to shoot us after all. It is a possibility. And if that is the case, then why should I carry this love with me to the other world? Why not give to you what is yours?” "And what if there is nothing for me to give you?" She seemed to be interested in Fyodorov's argument. He shook his head. "What a thing to say, after all that you have given to me. But it is not about who has given what. That is not the way to think of gifts.

Perhaps you are right. In another setting it would be ridiculous, too grand. In another setting it would not happen because you are a famous woman and at best I would shake your famous hand for one second while you stepped into your car after a performance. But in this place I hear you sing every day. In this place I watch you eat your dinner, and what I feel in my heart is love. There is no point in not telling you that. These people who detain us so pleasantly may decide to shoot us after all. It is a possibility. And if that is the case, then why should I carry this love with me to the other world? Why not give to you what is yours?

His understanding that he would eventually lose every sweetness that had come to him only made him hold those very things closer to his chest.

Katsumi Hosokawa - (he) believed that life, true life, was something that was stored in music.

He wondered sometimes if it was love or just a lack of rest that had twisted such a longing in his heart.

Rubén Iglesias shrugged to indicate that he was philosophical about it all, having received the kinder end of the gun,

and while the Generals could care less about the requests of the other hostages they were quick to give in to her.

He could see in his face a love so obviously displayed that she must already know everything there was to know about it. He was so close to her then that they owned every molecule of air in the tiny room and the air grew heavy with their desire and worked to move them together. It was with the smallest step forward that his face was in her hair and then her arms were around his back and they were holding each other. It seemed so simple to get to this place, such a magnificent relief, that he couldn't imagine why he had not been holding her every minute since they first met.

You keep someone always for what he or she is worth to you, for what you can trade her for, money or freedom or somebody else you want more. Any person can be a kind of trading chip when you find a way to hold her.

It was already in place, without him seeing any of it, the web was spun and snug around the house, and while his first impulse, the natural impulse, was to press ahead anyway and see if he might beat out the odds, clear logic held him.

But these last months had turned him around and now Gen saw there could be as much virtue in letting go of what you knew as there had ever been in gathering new information. He worked as hard at forgetting as he had ever worked to learn.

Carmen prayed hard. She prayed while standing near the priest in hopes it would give her request extra credibility. What she prayed for was nothing. She prayed that God would look on them and see the beauty of their existence and leave them alone.

He had never sought her out or made himself to be anything more than any other member of the audience. He did not assume his appreciation for her talent exceeded anyone else’s. He was more inclined to believe that only a fool would not feel about her exactly how he felt. There was nothing more to want than the privilege to sit and listen.

Ma Gonzalo? Oh, il bel nome della vita! una continuità che s'adempie. Di nuovo le sembrò, dal terrazzo, di scorgere la curva del mondo: la spera dei lumi, a rivolversi; tra brume color pervinca disparivano incontro al sopore della notte. Sul mondo portatore di frumenti, e d'un canto, le quiete luminarie di mezza estate. Le sembrò di assistervi ancora, dalla terrazza di sua vita, oh!, ancora per un attimo, di far parte della calma sera. Una levità dolce. E, nel cielo alto, lo zaffiro dell'oceano: che avevano rimirato l'Alvise, a tremare, e Antoniotto di Noli, doppiando capi dalla realità senza nome incontro al sogno apparito degli arcipelaghi. Si sentì ripresa nell'evento, nel flusso antico della possibilità, della continuazione: come tutti, vicina a tutti.

Most of the time we’re loved for what we can do rather than for who we are. It’s not such a bad thing, being loved for what you can do.” “But the other is better,” Gen said. Roxane pulled her feet into her chair and hugged her knees to her chest. “Better. I hate to say better, but it is. If someone loves you for what you can do then it’s flat- tering, but why do you love them? If someone loves you for who you are then they have to know you, which means you have to know them.

In Paris, Simon Thibault had loved his wife, though not always faithfully or with a great deal of attention. They had been married for twenty-five years. There had been two children, a summer month spent every year at the sea with friends, various jobs, various family dogs, large family Christmases that included many elderly relatives. Edith Thibault was an elegant woman in a city of so many thousands of elegant women that often over the course of years he forgot about her. Entire days would pass when she never once crossed his mind. He did not stop to think what she might be doing or wonder if she was happy, at least not Edith by herself, Edith as his wife. Then, in a wave of government promises made and retracted, they were sent to this country, which, between the two of them was always referred to as ce pays maudit, “this godforsaken country.” Both of them faced the appointment with dread and stoic practicality, but within a matter of days after their arrival a most remarkable thing happened: he found her again, like something he never knew was missing, like a song he had memorized in his youth and had then forgotten. Suddenly, clearly, he could see her, the way he had been able to see her at twenty, not her physical self at twenty, because in every sense she was more beautiful to him now, but he felt that old sensation, the leaping of his heart, the reckless flush of desire. He would find her in the house, cutting fresh paper to line the shelves or lying across their bed on her stomach writing letters to their daughters who were attending university in Paris, and he was breathless. Had she always been like this, had he never known? Had he known and then somehow, carelessly, forgotten? In this country with its dirt roads and yellow rice he discovered he loved her, he was her. Perhaps this would not have been true if he had been the ambassador to Spain. Without these particular circumstances, this specific and horrible place, he might never have realized that the only true love of his life was his wife.