“How come Mom is crazy and I'm not? Well, it's possible my mom could stand up in front of this many people and talk about all the crap in her life and those people could have sat around and laughed with her, it would've meant nothing and she could have moved on cool. It's also possible she could have taken out the whole front row with a large-caliber weapon.”

“She could smell the pages. She could almost taste the words as they stacked up around her.”

“She was so quiet. So reflective. And she could erase herself, her spirit, with a swiftness that truly startled, when she knew the people around her could not respect it.”

“She understood what it was like to stand right in front of people you loved, even though they could not see you.”

“How could she feel nostalgia when he was right in front of her? How can you suffer from the absence of a person who is present?”

“Do you think she’ll catch him before he gets to the hall?”
“My mom’s spent her whole life chasing me around,” Clary said. “She moves fast.”

“She felt as if she bled her regret and loneliness from her very pores, and yet she could not shape those feelings into any sentiment she could imagine her parents could bear reading.”

“A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.”

“Then he left her there, standing alone, surrounded by word ghosts; things she could have said.”

“She talks about how Brahms baby sat them while her mother, Clara, was out earning a living, concertizing all over Europe. Brahms continued in their lives until his death. She also talks about her loving relationship with her mother; her usual sibling like relationships with the other Schumann children; and how she would get mad at Brahms when he would make her mother sad, even cry, but none of them could be mad at Brahms for very long.”