Quotes from book

The Piano Teacher

“I have a feeling that you despise your body and that you only value art, you only value your argent needs, but eating and sleeping aren’t enough. You believe that your appearance is your enemy, and the only friend you have is music. Why look just in the mirror, look at your reflection, you’ll never find a better friend that yourself.”

“The criteria of art are the imponderable, the immeasurable.”

“Of course, art turns many people away for there has to be a limit. The limits between the gifted and the ungifted.”

“For the first thing a proprietor learns, and painfully at that, is: Trust is fine, but control is better.”

“A sensitive person gets burned, like a delicate moth.”

“There are no holidays for art; and that’s just fine with the artist.”

“First the masters died, now their music is dying, because people only want to listen to pop, rock, and punk.”

“Better to wear worn shoes than to polish the boots of shop owner.”

“Art is not a Trojan horse.”

“Every child instinctively heads toward dirt and filth unless you pull it back.”

“The artist is lonesome and admits his solitude.”

“Just keep following my tears, and the brook will take you in.”

“Beethoven’s sonatas, whether show so much variety that one has to ask oneself the fundamental question of what the much vilified word ‘sonata means. Perhaps Beethoven applied the word to entities that are not even sonatas in the strict sense of the term. One has to perceive new law in the highly dramatic musical form. Often in the sonata, feeling eludes form. In Beethoven, that is not the case, for here the two go hand in hand; feeling makes form aware of a hole in the ground and vice versa.”

“After all, people with a herd instinct hold mediocrity in high esteem. They praise it as having great value. They believe they are strong because they are the majority. The middling level has no terrors, no anxieties. They huddle together, indulging in the illusion of warmth. If you’re alone with nothing, and certainly not yourself. And how content they are with that state of affairs!”

“When discussing Bach’s six Brandenburg concertos, the artistically aware person usually states, among other things, that when these masterpieces were composed, the stars were dancing in heavens. God and his dwelling place are always involved whenever these people talk about Bach.”

“Pain itself is merely a consequence of the desire for pleasure, the desire t destroy, to annihilate; in its supreme form, pain is a variety of pleasure.”

“Don’t start anything you can’t finish.”

“Art and order, the relative that refuse to relate.”