40 Quotes by Carolina De Robertis

That’s what happens to melodies: they get lost in the air. Just like memories. And the body. Memories and melodies and the body dissolve after we die. A musical instrument is not like the body, not at all: like the soul, it carries on.

She wondered why no one saw through her disguise. Perhaps people could see only what they expected, what fit inside their vision, as if human vision came in precut shapes more narrow than the world itself, and this allowed her to hide in plain sight.

Suffering has no measure. There are no scales to weigh it. There is only sorrow after sorrow.

Husbands. People crazy enough to think that washing their boxers and cooking their food and listening to their boring rants for the rest of your life would make you happy.

She didn’t mind the sacrifice. It seemed enough for a life, to give yourself to music the way nuns give themselves to God. To vow. To surrender. Only music, after all, made life bearable. Only with music did she feel – what was it? Free? Happy? No, it was something else. Awake.

I want to believe in prophecies more than policies. I want to listen to poets rather than pollsters.

As if music could be crushed like a condemned building or a stubborn anarchist. But it could not. It always rose and returned, vital, immense, fortified by new instruments, new shapes, new musicians crazy enough to give their lives to it like underground, unsanctioned priests.

A music born among children of slaves is like an orphan: it will never know its real parents, will never hear the full visceral story of its birth.

Maybe everyone bore the wounds, no matter what had or hadn’t happened to them; maybe they were all part of the same vast, bruised body in the shape of a nation. A body groping for the slightest illusions of safety.