The Best Quartet Quotes

He gave her his best smile. His best I-almost-died-so-how-can-you-deny-me smile. Or at least that’s how he hoped it appeared. The truth was, he wasn’t a very accomplished flirt, and it might very well have come across as an Iam- mildly-deranged-so-it’s-in-all-of-our-best-interests-if-youpretend- to-agree-with-me smile.

And don’t worry.” Bob, Carter’s best man and colleague, held up a notebook computer. “I’ve got it handled on this end. And I memorized the vows just in case he needs me to throw him a line.” “You’re a treasure, Bob.” She waited until she was out of earshot to laugh.

Nodding, Parker ate. “He’s an exceptional kisser.” “He really is. He . . . How do you know?” When Parker just smiled, Emma’s jaw dropped. “You? You and Jack? When? How?” “I think it’s disgusting,” Mac muttered. “Yet another best pal moving on my imaginary ex.” “Two kisses, my first year at Yale, after we ran into each other at a party and he walked me back to the dorm. It was nice. Very nice. But as exceptional a kisser as he is, it was too much like kissing my brother. And as exceptional a kisser as I am, I believe he felt it was too much like kissing his sister. And that’s how we left it. I gather that wasn’t an issue for you and Jack.

She smelled like England, of soft rain and sun-kissed meadows. And she felt like the best kind of heaven. He wanted to wrap himself around, bury himself within her, and stay there for all of his days. He hadn’t had a drop to drink in three years, but he was intoxicated now, bubbling with a lightness he’d never thought to feel again.

What was to be the value of the long looked forward to, Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity And the wisdom of age? Had they deceived us Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders, Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit? The serenity only a deliberate hebetude, The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets Useless in the darkness into which they peered Or from which they turned their eyes. There is, it seems to us, At best, only a limited value In the knowledge derived from experience. The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies, For the pattern is new in every moment And every moment is a new and shocking Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.

It's a question of how we regard our situations, how we look and see where we are, and how we choose, if we can, when we are seeing undeceivedly, not to despair and, at the same time, how best to act. Hope is exactly that, that's all it is, a mater of how we deal with the negative acts towards human beings by other human beings in the world, remembering that they and we are all human, that nothing human is alien to us, the foul and the fair, and that most important of all we're here for a mere blink of the eyes, that's all.

Sometimes, he says, we don’t know why people do what they do. But we can only do our best, the best we can do, in response, and try to be as good-humoured as possible while we do it.

What about me?” Frances asked. “The butler,” Harriet replied without even a second of hesitation. Frances’s mouth immediately opened to protest. “No, no,” Harriet said. “It’s the best role, I promise. You get to do everything.” “Except be a unicorn,” Daniel murmured. Frances tilted her head to the side with a resigned expression. “The next play,” Harriet finally gave in. “I shall find a way to include a unicorn in the one I’m working on right now.” Frances pumped both fists in the air. “Huzzah!

It would be best to stride in with a cheer "hello!", but she wasn't the cheery sort; she was the "lurking in dark corners" sort. She found a dark corner, behind the Stalker-cases, and lurked.

The things I like best in T. S. Eliot’s poetry, especially in the Four Quartets, are the semicolons. You cannot hear them, but they are there, laying out the connections between the images and the ideas. Sometimes you get a glimpse of a semicolon coming, a few lines farther on, and it is like climbing a steep path through woods and seeing a wooden bench just at a bend in the road ahead, a place where you can expect to sit for a moment, catching your breath.

The briefest and slipperiest of the seasons, the one that won't be held to account - because summer won't be held at all, except in bits, fragments, moments, flashes of memory of so-called or imagined perfect summers, summers that never existed. Not even this one she's in exists. Even though it's apparently the best summer so far of the century. Not even when she's quite literally walking down a road as beautiful and archetypal as this through an actual perfect summer afternoon. So we mourn it while we're in it. Look at me walking down a road in summer thinking about the transience of summer. Even while I'm right at the heart of it I just can't get to the heart of it.

Then, with a cheeky quirk of his brows, he leaned forward and murmured, “Would it be improper of me to admit that I am inordinately flattered by your attention to the details of my face?” Anne snorted out a laugh. “Improper and ludicrous.” “It is true that I have never felt quite so colorful,” he said, with a clearly feigned sigh. “You are a veritable rainbow,” she agreed. “I see red and . . . well, no orange and yellow, but certainly green and blue and violet.” “You forgot indigo.” “I did not,” she said, with her very best governess voice. “I have always found it to be a foolish addition to the spectrum. Have you ever actually seen a rainbow?” “Once or twice,” he replied, looking rather amused by her rant.

that the best solutions to any mystery were the simplest ones, because simplicity was the source of nature's elegance, and mysteries were nothing more than nature unilluminated.

Best listened to in a windowless room, better than best in an airless room—correctly speaking, a bunker sealed forever and enwrapped in tree-roots—the Eighth String Quartet of Shostakovich (Opus 110) is the living corpse of music, perfect in its horror. Call it the simultaneous asphyxiation and bleeding of melody. The soul strips itself of life in a dusty room.

She thumped her weapon (others might call it a cane, but he knew better) against the floor. “Fell off your horse?” “No, I—” “Tripped down the stairs? Dropped a bottle on your foot?” Her expression grew sly. “Or does it involve a woman?” He fought the urge to cross his arms. She was looking up at him with a bit of a smirk. She liked poking fun at her companions; she’d once told him that the best part of growing old was that she could say anything she wanted with impunity. He leaned down and said with great gravity, “Actually, I was stabbed by my valet.” It was, perhaps, the only time in his life he’d managed to stun her into silence. Her mouth fell open, her eyes grew wide, and he would have liked to have thought that she even went pale, but her skin had such an odd tone to begin with that it was hard to say. Then, after a moment of shock, she let out a bark of laughter and said, “No, really. What happened?” “Exactly as I said. I was stabbed.” He waited a moment, then added, “If we weren’t in the middle of a ballroom, I’d show you.” “You don’t say?” Now she was really interested. She leaned in, eyes alight with macabre curiosity. “Is it gruesome?” “It was,” he confirmed. She pressed her lips together, and her eyes narrowed as she asked, “And where is your valet now?” “At Chatteris House, likely nicking a glass of my best brandy.” She let out another one of her staccato barks of laughter.

I’ll tell anyone who will listen,” he said softly. “What I can’t figure out is why everybody doesn’t do it. Look for the best, I mean. It’s easy, and it makes life go easier.

Mallard, can you make nets?" "I made the best nets in Shelling," Duck said. Nothing will ever make Duck modest, but he does make good nets.

Did you just call me your second-best friend right to my face?” Yasen grinned. “Listen, I figure you’re lucky you made the list at all.

Uncle knows best. -All the Lost Boys

BY THE TIME SHE WAS EIGHT, MACKENSIE ELLIOT HAD BEEN married fourteen times. She’d married each of her three best friends—as both bride and groom—her best friend’s brother (under his protest), two dogs, three cats, and a rabbit. She’d served at countless other weddings as maid of honor, bridesmaid, groomsman, best man, and officiant.

These stories date from my Honorable Discharge from the Army at the end of World War II. Their order is, to the best of my memory, chronological and the most embarrassingly immature pieces have been dropped. These stories seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat.

No, my dear. Leave poor Hari Kumar to work out his own salvation, if he’s still alive to work it out and if there’s a salvation of any kind for a boy like him. He is the leftover, the loose end of our reign, the kind of person we created—I suppose with the best intentions. But for all Nehru’s current emergence as a potential moral force in world affairs, I see nothing in India that will withstand the pressure of the legacy of the division we English have allowed her to impose on herself, and are morally responsible for. In allowing it we created a precedent for partition just at the moment when the opposite was needed, allowed it—again with the best intentions—as a result of tiredness, and failing moral and physical pretensions that just wouldn’t stand the strain of looking into the future to see what abdication on India’s terms instead of ours was going to mean. Perhaps finally we had no terms of our own because we weren’t clever enough to formulate them in twentieth century dress, and so the world is going to divide itself into isolated little pockets of dogma and mutual resistance, and the promise that always seemed to lie behind even the worst aspects of our colonialism will just evaporate into history as imperial mystique, foolish glorification of a severely practical and greedy policy.

Music has no interior beacon that guarantees permanent meaning. Unlike truth, which is transcultural, absolute, and unchangeable, music can shift in meaning from place to place and time to time. Of all the art forms, music is inherently the most flexible. The music of Bach, as deeply fixed within the churchly contexts of his time and ours, can still shift meanings while remaining great music in its own right. For Lutherans it is church music, par excellence. For the young convert from Satanism, it was evil. In its original form, the tune “Austria” was the imperial national anthem, “Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser,” composed by Haydn. He then used it as the principal theme for the slow movement in his Emperor Quartet. In this guise it reflects the essentially secular contexts for which it was written and is perfectly at home in the concert hall. It is also the tune for “Deutschland über Alles,” the German national anthem. And for Jewish people, it is associated with the unspeakable horrors of the holocaust. And finally, it is the tune to which the hymn “Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken” is sung in virtually all American churches. To American Christians this tune’s primary meaning is “sacred.” To them, it carries virtually none of its first two meanings, unless one or the other was impressed first into their memories. There is no way to explain this phenomenon other than that music, as music, is completely relative.

Gracie sat quietly while Justin and Danielle talked. She eavesdropped halfheartedly, absorbed with re-creating the incident up at the latrine that Danielle seemed to have already forgotten. Something had happened up there that bothered her, because it suggested someone on the trip had an agenda besides the adventure itself. It reminded her that people could be evil, something she believed more and more the older she got. Danielle, however, was at her charming best. Subjects ranged from their schools to Facebook pages to sports, television shows, and bands. Gracie found herself rolling her eyes each time Danielle and Justin discovered more and more common bonds. When Danielle mentioned their parents were divorced, Justin said, “Shit, mine too.

Danielle narrowed her eyes at her sister and said, “This time I’m not going up to that stupid toilet. I’ll be back in a second. Don’t try to steal Justin away, as if you could.” After she was gone, Gracie and Justin sat together uncomfortably. Or at least Gracie did. Justin said, “Your sister seems nice.” “She isn’t.” Justin chuckled. “I guess what I mean is she could be nice, if she tried.” “Don’t count on it,” Gracie said, warming to him. “I know her.” “There’s good in everybody, Gracie.” She looked over to see if he was serious. He was. He said, “I always expect the best out of people. I think when you do that, you get the best most of the time. I just kind of bump along, expecting the best, and good things just happen. That’s my secret.

It was late. Had he gone out in the dark? Just to pick her a flower? “Thank you,” she said. Because sometimes it was best not to question a gift. Sometimes one simply had to be glad for it without knowing why.

Then there was his dad. He wouldn’t be as emotional or judgmental about the situation. After all, he’d saved all their lives. But his dad was at best unpredictable. When Cody Hoyt had his fuse lit, anything could happen. Justin wasn’t sure he wanted to be the one holding the match.

Nor is it only the natures of great men that Whittemore reveals. Like Dickens, he understands the tragedy of great souls with small destinies. And so we’re given Halim’s closest friend, Ziad, the hack-journalist and Baath party hanger-on, of whom Tajar remarks, “I wouldn’t imagine he’ll go very far. But then most people don’t … anywhere, do they?” The ellipses are Whittemore’s—and Tajar’s. The simple truth is that Ted Whittemore was one of the best and least-known writers of a lowdown, dark, and dishonest age. The books that he’s given us, beginning with Quin’s Shanghai Circus, are among the great “war novels” of our time as luminous as The Red Badge of Courage, as chastening as The Naked and the Dead. That the wars are fought without “lines” or uniforms hardly matters: the wounds go just as deep, and sometimes deeper than, bullets.

That her best talent wasn’t defeating monsters…it was pretending.

The Blasters proved to be the most prominent and popular of these acts by far. Originally a quartet, the band was bred in Downey, just down the freeway from East L.A. In their teens, brothers Phil and Dave Alvin were bitten by the blues bug; they became habitués of the L.A. club the Ash Grove, where many of the best-known folk and electric blues performers played, and they sought out the local musicians who could teach them their craft, learning firsthand from such icons as Big Joe Turner, T-Bone Walker, and Little Richard’s saxophonist Lee Allen (who would ultimately join the band in the ’80s). But the Blasters’ style was multidimensional: they could play R&B, they loved country music, and they were also dyed-in-the-wool rockabilly fans who were initially embraced by the music’s fervent L.A. cultists. Their debut album, 1980’s American Music, was recorded in a Van Nuys garage by the Milan, Italy–born rockabilly fanatic Rockin’ Ronnie Weiser, and released on his indie label Rollin’ Rock Records, which also issued LPs by such first-generation rockabilly elders as Gene Vincent, Mac Curtis, Jackie Waukeen Cochran, and Ray Campi. By virtue of Phil Alvin’s powerful, unmannered singing and Dave Alvin’s adept guitar playing and original songwriting, the Blasters swiftly rose to the top of a pack of greasy local bands that also included Levi and the Rockats (a unit fronted by English singer Levi Dexter) and the Rockabilly Rebels (who frequently backed Ray Campi). Los Lobos were early Blasters fans, and often listened to American Music in their van on the way to their own (still acoustic) gigs. Rosas says, “We loved their first record, man. We used to play the shit out of that record. Dave [Hidalgo] was the one who got a copy of it, and he put it on cassette.

I wish you the best of luck with that vulture.

But to take these words which had lasted longer than the civilization that created them, to slaughter history was a task best done by the ignorant. Only a man who did not understand his actions would be callous enough to destroy these without qualm.

I hope you found pleasure in it at least. I have always thought impulsive pleasure was the best kind.

Thank you,” she said. Because sometimes it was best not to question a gift. Sometimes one simply had to be glad for it without knowing why.

We do not need them. They would hinder rather than help our praise. Sing unto him. This is the sweetest and best music. No instrument like the human voice. What a degradation to supplant the intelligent song of the whole congregation by the theatrical prettiness of a quartet, bellows, and pipes! We might as well pray by machinery as praise by it.

The Raven Boys is the first of the novels that make up the quartet of The Raven Cycle, with the final book released in April, 2016.

Django Reinhardt was always good, but he was at his best with Stéphane Grappelli.