Nemesis

“Your judgment was really quite sound. It’s your sentiment that interfered.”

you hated that kind of competing, you said. And I thought, She doesn’t have the strength for it, that’s all.

Once you begin a certain action it’s necessary to complete it … bring it to an end.

Maggie could see that her friend’s youth had left him sometime this winter: his eyes were those of a man of middle age, and his graying-black hair, so crisply brushed back from his forehead, had begun quite visibly to recede

Calvin observed that it was a painful thing, a dangerous thing almost, for a pianist not to play the piano every day without fail. “It’s as if you lose touch with your very soul.”

And Bach was, said Calvin, for difficult phases of the soul

Calvin remarked that Bach had always been, for him, for the depth of winte

“Friends come and go, but enemies accumulate.

“The ultimate appeal is to the empty blue sky. See it up there, waiting?”

Simone de Beauvoir, One is not born a woman, one becomes one