Quotes from Gael Baudino

The flowered trim on the hems [of the dress] seemed superfluous, even frivolous, but at the same time it comforted her, as though the idea that a seamstress had thought to adorn clothing so innocently implied that somewhere, innocence was safe.

Staring into the half light, the queen struggles with wants and needs to which she can give no names. It is not the willow she desires, nor the rose. It is something else…something that eludes her.

One might as soon court the sea or the Rockies as make overtures to Christa Cruitaire.

The old magic is returning, the powers of notes and intervals falling easily beneath her fingers.

Sin or sacrament, Kevin," she said. "Which is it? Which do you want to be?

Her hair was the color of an angry sunset, and it fell to her waist in ripples of copper and red. Her steps-deliberate, prideful, measured-took her eastward along Evans Avenue through clouds of dust raised by the summertime street repair. People stared at the small, wirestrung harp she carried tucked under her arm. She did not appear to notice.

What kind of guitar would he make for this pretty harper with her sweet voice and stranger manners, who appeared so young but who seemed at times so old? It would have to glow with all the luster of her hair, and he knew he would have to give to it the feeling of ancient forests, of standing stones, and misty downs. Nothing else would be appropriate. Noth else would fit.

You helped me with with that lullaby. I think I can help you with rock and roll.

This guitar had cried, wailed, wept when Frankie had played; and in the dim corners of smoky bars from Harlem to New Orleans, bars ripe with the odors of whiskey and cheap cologne, people had cried, wailed, and wept along with it, bright eyes, running down ebon cheeks.

Frankie had always played the same songs, but they had nonetheless always been different, changing in a thousand different ways that Kevin could scarcely name.

Your music is the music of death.

Her steps were light, youthful, as though she were, once again, the young woman who knew nothing of Sidh palaces or American cities, but only the green meadows and pastures of Eriu.

If your students are not your children, then you've no business touching harpstrings. There is a reason that our order is called Cruitreache, that the name takes the same plural suffix as mother. Think about it.

The sight of the apple and the yew, tokens of the two Gaedil lovers who were fated never to meet in life, but who had met, nonetheless, dimmed her smile and clouded her eyes.

Manly he had been, yet womanly too, as though Brigit, the order's Patroness, had given him something of Herself through the music he played.

Christa hardly recognized her student. Black spandex jeans gave way to boots that rattled with lengths of chain. Leather jacket. Studded belts. A T-shirt that had been deliberately slashed into a borderline state between legality and indecency. Bandannas fluttered from ankles, elbows, wrists. Melinda had added perhaps a good six inches to her height with a teasing comb and liberal application of hairspray. Her blue eyes sparkled at Christa from within dark walls of eyeliner and shadow.

Are you ready to rock and roll?" "Ah…does that include mortal combat?

She sensed youth, but also anger and rage, and a frantic grasping at power and release; the ability to scream…and be heard.

She was paying him for his ears and his experience, not for his lessons and he was coming to the conclusion that she was paying him too much, that perhaps he should have been paying her, for he was more her student than she had ever been his.