Bellweather Rhapsody Quotes

Though maybe that's all life ever is. Unimaginable, until it's happening to you.

There is only ever one afternoon, and it ends. But one afternoon can hold so much beauty and so much love.

Maybe that's what he reminds her of: they are both full of dark corners, odd places, possibly ghosts.

How many people has this hotel eaten?

This is why. This is _why_. This is why he plays, why he loves, why he listens. It isn't even a high--a high is too low--it is synchronicity with the universe. Physical proof of the three-part harmony between body and soul and song, all three living, dying, resonating.

The point is that it might open a part of you that's always been closed. The point is you might make yourself heard. You might find you have a beautiful and terrible - you have a power... We make music to - to find each other in the dark. And I have to believe the point is that we don't - we don't ever stop calling out.

Because my heart is running the show today.

Alice wonders if anyone has ever tended Jill, in any way, and if her intelligent ferocity is what happens when a girl has had to teach herself how to be human.

They filled his secret heart and made it less afraid.

What you felt, the beast that swallowed you all and spat you back out, that is the great big bloody point of all this. If you learn nothing else from this bizarre and awkward experience--this gathering of strangers to blow into horns and pluck catgut--remember that you have the power to feel that. The power to create that. With your hands. Your breath. You are gods, children, and you can make war.

Alice is horrified at the prospect of losing her grip on the most essential things in her life—her brother, her talent, her self—in the seismic shift known as life after graduation. She can’t imagine who she’ll be on the other side.

They're ghosts, surely, and Rabbit absolutely believes in them. There are things in the world, strange machinations of physics and chemistry,queer intersections of biology and theology, that Rabbit hasn't the slightest interest in assuming he'll ever understand or be able to solve. They're simply there to be believed in, and Rabbit is a born believer. He wants to believe. He has always thought of life as pregnant with possibility-- a freak twister or wardrobe the only thing separating him from another world-- so ghosts, spirits, aliens and supreme beings coexist within Rabbit with ease. There's a kind of beauty in accepting the possibility, if not the plausibility, of everything imaginable.

The desire to defer to a higher power is an old habit, and a powerful one. She wants to take everything she’s seen and felt and pass it off to someone older, wiser, someone designated for that kind of heavy lifting, who will take her in his arms and tell her not to worry. Not to think about it anymore. To

Rabbit had never understood music before as an agent of connection, as a way for people not only to feel within themselves but to feel among themselves, a language that brought common souls into conversation. Beethoven could talk to him and could talk to his father, and he and his father could talk Beethoven to each other.

She remembers how it feels to play. To play with your whole body, your fingers, your wrists, your forearms and elbows and shoulders, your neck nd your head, your legs, your feet. You are an orchestra entire. Your fingers are each a single instrument, your hands a section; point and counterpoint, melody and countermelody, concord and dissonance are born, sustained, resolved in your body. In your head and your heart.

In his earliest memories he was sitting on the floor in the family room, in front of the giant stereo his parents had bought themselves as a wedding present, his face pressed into the padded fabric of one speaker. The fabric was prickly against his forehead but his nose fit perfectly into a little groove, and he could feel music spilling like molten gold through his entire body. He'd sit back on his heels when the song was over and his father, an accountant and amateur drummer whose (still-unrealized) dream was to open a jazz club and coffee house, would say, "Order up!" and put another record on the turntable. Rabbit's favorite albums were by Earth, Wind & Fire (syncopation made his brain feel like it was laughing) and Also sprach Zarathustra, its opening rumbling like an earthquake. And he loved The White Album, and when his mother played ABBA on the piano and they'd sing together (though Alice couldn't do it without being a total showoff), and the Star Wars soundtrack, and of _course_ Zeppelin. For six months in 1984, he had asked his parents to play "Stairway to Heaven" instead of a bedtime story.

Even now, Hastings vists and remembers what it feels like to be in the right place with the right people.

Rabbit's parents, lapsed Protestants, had managed to pass along the big-ticket ideas of Christianity, but practically speaking, Rabbit had learned Judeo-Christian history from the school of Indiana Jones. Bambi's mother taught him about loss, and he was too in love with dinosaurs to entertain the idea of a literal seven-day Creation schedule. Charlie Brown (or rather, Linus) told him the Christmas story; Jesus Christ Superstar covered the crucifixion. He did not regret his secular education. He may have been baptized Presbyterian, but music was his true religion.

There is nothing with which every man is so afraid as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of doing and becoming. Søren Kierkegaard

Every love story is a ghost story. David Foster Wallace

When her parents wake her to talk to the police, again she will scream and kick and fight like an animal, afraid to be awake in a world of so many monsters.

go, how the tables might be set up for the reception. Now Caroline was staying

more than a ghost, a spirit haunting herself. At last she is here in the world, the one girl who survived. But she

She is dressed entirely in black—black coat, black turtleneck visible beneath her collar, which makes her skin look white as bone and her hair bright as fire. A perfume of anger and desperate sadness follows in her wake as she crosses in front of Fisher to appraise his bike from all angles. He couldn’t fix her if he wanted to. He only wants to know what made her the way she is, what he can do to help her forget. He suspects it has everything to do with music, like everything else in his life. In her life. Their lives.

That was hours ago. Hours and hours ago, hours spent talking. Telling each other stories, their own and others’. It was easier to do in the dark, in a strange room that was home to neither of them, where there was nothing to hold but each other’s version of the truth.

Hollis steps closer, and Natalie is terrified. This feeling, this bright, whirling, too-alive feeling is terror, and she knows it; she’s never felt it before, but in her oldest, most animal brain, she recognizes this moment for what it is. Hollis is an arm’s length away, but he’s staring at her from across two years—two years that might have been different if she’d have let him take that drum kit, just for the night, he meant it when he said he would bring it back. Or even if she hadn’t let him take the drums, if she had let him go on believing he was any good at it. If only she’d let him keep the thing that he loved, the one thing in his whole rotten world that made him feel like himself, that made him feel special.

I need your help.” Minnie locks eyes with Alice. “To prove there’s something going on here, someone or something bad here in this hotel—that it isn’t just us, we’re not nuts and this isn’t our fault. When I was a little kid, what I saw here broke me. And I grew up around the broken parts but it wasn’t the right way to grow up. I’m all twisted and weird inside and I’m sick of bad dreams and horror stories. What happened here doesn’t get to dictate how I spend the rest of my life, or how you spend the rest of yours, and it’s no coincidence, us meeting last night in the room where it happened. We are the girls who survived. We are the girls who saw something awful and lived to talk about it, and now we have a chance to join forces and beat it. We can win. We can win this time, not just survive.

She gathers him in her arms. He curls tighter, smaller, pressing his head into her chest, and when he shudders she holds him as close as she can. This boy with his shaggy blond hair and fine-lashed eyes. His chipped-tooth grin. Whose future she took. She will hold this boy for the rest of her life.

Alice does wish their parents were here. Not that they could do anything. Not that they could take any of this back, make it better, or fix it. The desire to defer to a higher power is an old habit, and a powerful one. She wants to take everything she’s seen and felt and pass it off to someone older, wiser, someone designated for that kind of heavy lifting, who will take her in his arms and tell her not to worry. Not to think about it anymore. To go back to sleep.

He howls when the Bee Gees play on the radio, like he always has, though she’ll never know if this is a complete coincidence or if Gibb falsetto is the only frequency her deaf dog can discern. But that’s Auggie’s only real mystery, other than where he came from. Minnie knows her best friend. She knows his excited bark from his anxious bark, his I’m-hungry whine from his I-have-to-go-out whine. When he rolls on his back, he wants to be rubbed not on his belly but on the top of his head, and she shares his belief that the pizza delivery guy simply must be given a hero’s frenzied welcome every time. She’s given him food and shelter, walks and tossed Frisbees; he’s given her courage and strength by first giving her unconditional love. She never had to ask for it. It came into her life. All she had to do was trust it. Which is so much harder than it sounds.

So Rabbit left Fisher with his sister and the dog to seek out the closest Statewide-associated adult he could find and deliver the message that his chaperone had been shot. His conductor was comatose. He wanted to play Afternoon of a Faun on a bassoon.

Natalie wants to call after the nurse, to ask whether it makes her more or less heroic that she took a bullet for the man with whom she was committing adultery.

By the time Natalie realized what Viola was doing, it was too late. She was a senior in high school, and nothing whatsoever about music made her happy. Music was something to win, to be first and best at. She snapped at her parents and was too proud to apologize. She shrank from Uncle Kevin because it was easier than admitting the truth. She listened to all of Hunky Dory, to Ziggy Stardust and Heroes, and tried to feel lovely and strange and weightless, but she couldn’t; she played the piano, she listened to music, and nothing stirred, nothing sang inside. Natalie was earthbound and ordinary, marooned, alone.

Her throat is full of everything. Everything she never even told Emmett. She tried to. She tried, she really did, in the hospital that very night. She had the whole truth all lined up in her mind, and then the first things Emmett said when he saw her weren’t questions—What happened? Are you okay? Instead he fed her statements, facts she didn’t have the heart to argue. What you did was self-defense. That was the bravest thing anyone could have done. And so she felt worse, sick down to her soul, and silent.

He rinses the washcloth in the sink, but it’s going to be pink forever.

Natalie had been going to her weekly lessons as if everything were normal, had betrayed no hatred toward her mentor for tainting the first pure love of her life, so there was no reason for Viola to suspect she was unwelcome. But unwelcome she was; here, in the backyard strung with pink and purple paper lanterns, in the house that had once echoed with David Bowie, Natalie watched this wicked big sister from across the lawn and wanted her to die. She was mortified to have borne Viola’s cruelty and considered it kindness, humiliated by the understanding that all the awards and accolades were a celebration of something sick and wrong, something ugly between them.

She didn’t think she would learn anything worse from Viola than that she was nothing more than an instrument, a toy to be tuned up and broken, but in her room on the night of her graduation party, Natalie learned that she was not the hero. Viola was not the villain. They were somewhere in between and nowhere at all, both of them alike.

She went straight to bed. She hadn’t told her family, but she had been dreaming of the Bellweather every single night for months. The reason she’d ceased to wake herself up, shaking and crying, was that she’d become too tired to fight; the fear had won. She had accepted that, in her dreams, she would always be afraid. Then The Shining—and no other movie would have done for this first, critical dosing—inoculated her. She had been exposed to the fear that was eating her, slowly but surely, in the light of day; she had confronted it in her waking hours and was rewarded with a night of black, dreamless peace. When she woke up the next morning, a kind of rested she’d forgotten she could feel, Minnie at last knew how to train herself to survive in the world. She would spend the rest of her life pouring the fear out of her dreams and into scary movies.

Look at Hatmaker here. The boy is wasted.” Fisher laughs. “Been to hell and back, have you?” Rabbit nods. “We can make other things, too,” he murmurs. “Not just war.” He flicks his eyes up in the tiniest of challenges. Fisher feels it like a barb hooked in his heart.

Yeah,” says Rabbit. “Yeah, that would be fun.” His mouth is saying the words while his brain is thinking that using Jill’s disappearance, her theoretical death, as an excuse to get tanked is in horrendously poor taste. Then his heart is feeling Pete Moretti tap his elbow. His heart is hearing Pete say he’ll see Bert later, whenever he wants to come up, they’ll be there from eight on.

Then he had a vision. He saw his body laid out before him, his bare, thin chest in the foreground, his long legs and feet receding to the horizon, and his heart burst out of his flesh like a bladder full of black paint, splashing warmth across his face. He lay supine and watched his body for days, his blood congealing as the sun rose and fell in the world outside. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them again he saw his toes pressed against the cold steel of a morgue drawer, and when he blinked, cold silver gave way to the hot brick walls of a crematorium. He burned. He felt hot and cold but he could not move and could not cry out. He dreamed of no others, no witnesses, no mourners, no morticians or undertakers. No one touched his body. It propelled itself through the stages of death as it had through life, of its own accord, alone.

The roads cut through open fields, through woods. An occasional lone house peers from a hill in the distance. Fisher and Natalie fly. He thinks of his Auntie. He knows this is exactly what she would have wanted for him. To fly. To be free. Free but not alone.

The worse the weather, the more inviting the glowing lights of the tower. The higher the drifts, the more they covered the patches on the foundation. Snow was kind to the Bellweather. It blurred her edges and made her beautiful.

Flutes, you've got to - what's the word. You've got to be disgusting. Revoltingly cute. You should be pretty good at that, being flutes.

Fisher has always hated clowns. From childhood, he’d found them smug and unfunny, and it makes perfect sense that he’s always disliked this movement, because “Jupiter” is, essentially, the soundtrack to a massive clown orgy. Oh ho-ho, say the violins, aren’t you a naughty jester! What, chirp the clarinets, you want to put that pie where?

he was eligible to sign up for lessons on an instrument of his choosing. Uncharacteristically for Rabbit, he didn’t worry that no such instrument existed. He trusted that it was out there, and that he would find it when it was ready to be found, and that through it, Rabbit Hatmaker would be able to talk. To his family, to his teachers, to people he’d never met. To animals. To the universe. Maybe to God.

What if letting my dream die makes me all bitter and angry and cranky—and if I never get to do and be the thing I love, how will anyone ever see me, or know me, or love me?