Quotes from Frank Conroy

I could not resist the clarity of the world in books, the incredibly satisfying way in which life became weighty and accessible. Books were reality. I hadn't made up my own mind about my own life, a vague, dreamy affair, amorphous and dimly perceived, without beginning or end.

The author makes a tacit deal with the reader. You hand them a backpack. You ask them to place certain things in it — to remember, to keep in mind — as they make their way up the hill. If you hand them a yellow Volkswagen and they have to haul this to the top of the mountain — to the end of the story — and they find that this Volkswagen has nothing whatsoever to do with your story, you're going to have a very irritated reader on your hands.

The real world dissolved and I was free to drift in fantasy, living a thousand lives, each one more powerful, more accessible, and more real than my own

La mauvaise musique est jouée tous les jours, la bonne ignorée.

Sadness crept over me—a sadness I didn't question, a sadness so profound I understood it could not have come from life, or any source within my conceptual scope, but instead seeped into me from the very air, from the whole extant universe in which I was less than a speck, sadness that was not emotion but the awareness of vast emptinesses.

Musique, nourriture et femmes. Tels sont les grands plaisirs de la vie. Les plaisirs durables. Vous apprendrez cela, jeune moine. - J'ajouterais les livres, fit Claude, quelque peu embarassé. Vous savez, de bons livres. - Bien entendu! Vous êtes un amateur de livres! C'est parfait. - Ils ne vous laissent pas tomber.

If he was nothing, or almost nothing, with no idea of where he had come from or where he was going, why he was living or what he was supposed to be doing (the piano only an elusive hint), and if, further, he was buffeted by forces he could not name but which were loneliness, sadness, longing, anger, fear, and spiritual nausea, would he not deeply attend the infinite story of life? Would he not pay the fucking twenty-five cents to get into the cathedral and see the light?

Don't be afraid of it. Learn it. Work hard. Do it seriously and try to get what you can out of it. Keep an open mind, and if in the end you decide to throw it away, you'll be doing it from strength.

His ears opened as the applause faded. He took a deep, sighing breath and the music started, instantly there, like some enormous flower blossoming out of nothing in a nanosecond, big as a house. The air was thick with music.

Most writing is collective consciousness made manifest, tinged to some degree by the author's individuality. Great writing is a specific consciousness made manifest, illuminating the world in a way that we've never seen before and that yet makes sense. 222

Trading off with Fredericks, he felt almost outside himself, listening to the magic flow, the shift of colors, hearing the pulse, watching his hands do their amazing work. As he shaped the music in his mind and played it, he felt Fredericks shaping and playing right along with him, their souls joined in harmonious enterprise, like two old friends who can talk without words, who can communicate a thought even before it has fully emerged, because the same thought is nascent in the other.

They were playing the music, minds, bodies, and souls stretched near to the limit, but it was also true that the music was playing them. A balancing act of excruciating fragility, but to Claude sweet beyond words, sweet beyond imagining.

I'm angry. I just don't give in to it." He sipped his tea and then put it down. "Stuff happens all the time. What'd you call it? Outrageous. Outrageous stuff make you so mad you can just burn yourself up with it. You got to decide if the mad runs you, or you run the mad.

What you are looking for is authentication, Claude. But you're looking outside, to the system, and that's the wrong place to look. Bad music gets played every day and good music gets ignored. Everybody knows that. Forget about authentication. When it comes to writing music, all you can do is sign on for a way of life, and do the work. Do the work for its own sake.

Deathbed speeches in novels. The soprano bares her soul and collapses on the divan. Citizen Kane and his Rosebud. That's what we want, I guess. Some message, some meaning expressed in the last moments. What better time for it all to make sense than at the end? But it doesn't make sense." He opened his eyes. "The last moments are the same as any other moments. There is no special wisdom.

A large color plate of a cat statue caught my eye and I gazed at it for several moments, my mind empty of thought. Without an ego, one simply looks. The image of the cat, entirely whole and entirely static, is a signal to the mind to come to rest. There is no immediate sense of beauty, only the act of seeing.

Claude saw the orchestra. Mr. Dove came up behind him. Together, they waited a moment. Then, briskly, Claude stepped forward into the light.