“We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.”

“Every day is lost in which we do not learn something useful. Man has no nobler or more valuable possession than time.”

“Septimus. When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be all alone, on an empty shore.

Thomasina. Then we will dance. Is this a waltz?”

“I think uh…we lost everyday Vietnamese life in fighting the Communists, you know, and and no progress, we have to do something else, you can, we cannot have a more of the same, you know, every, every day, so we, we must change, yes.”

“We wake up one day and find we have lost our dreams in order to protect our days.”

“Curious it is that every hour of our day is repeated from myriad chimes; and yet how rarely do we attend to the clock striking! Alas! how emblematic is this of the way in which we neglect the many signs of time! How terrible, when we think of what time may achieve, is the manner in which we waste it! At the end of every man's life, at least three-quarters of the mighty element of which that life was composed will be found void—lost—nay, utterly forgotten! And yet that time, laboured and husbanded, might have built palaces, gathered wealth, and, still greater, made an imperishable name.”

“The Lost Music was his way of talking about the way he believed that old wives' tales and dance tunes and folktales were just the tangled echoes of something that's not quite of this world … something we all knew once, but have forgotten since.”

“We dance for laughter, we dance for tears, we dance for madness, we dance for fears, we dance for hopes, we dance for screams, we are the dancers, we create the dreams.”

“Only what we have lost forever, we possess forever. Only where there are graves, are there resurrections. Only when we have drunk from the river of darkness, shall we truly see. Only when our legs have rotted off, shall we truly dance.”

“For we have thought the longer thoughts
And gone the shorter way.
And we have danced to devils' tunes, Shivering home to pray;
To serve one master in the night,
Another in the day.”