I want to be careful not to throw all this away. This is happiness. I think this is what happiness is. I haven't got it yet, but I can sense it out there. I feel I'm close to it. Some days, I'm so close I can almost smell it.

I breathed and breathed and did feel some calmness enter in, though it was, as always, shot with a sense of loss. Loss and fear.

The function of music is to liberate in the soul those feelings which normally we keep locked up in the heart.

I'd never chosen to be alone, but that was the way things had turned out, and I'd grown used to it.

If I could eat only one thing for the rest of my life, it would be rhubarb fool, which I make with ginger and a hint of elderflower cordial.

. . . she read with undifferentiated glee . . .

We're deaf men working as musicians; we play the music but we can't hear it.