Bradford Morrow Quotes
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Artur Schnabel, one of the towering pianists of the twentieth century. Modified in tone but not spirit from Schnabel’s interview remarks in Chicago the same year Germany surrendered to the Allies. She also knew this was about as high a compliment as Paul Mandelbaum was capable of making. Schnabel’s performances of the thirty-two Beethoven sonatas were possibly the only thing her mentor was capable of carrying on about ad nauseam. You were never going to enter his pantheon of star pupils unless you gave yourself over, heart and soul, to Schnabel’s interpretation of Beethoven’s Klaviersonaten and the virtuoso’s idea that the greatest music was that which is “better than it can be performed.
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How often do we use other people as screens upon which to project our obsessions? Our discontents, dreams, desires, and fears? Well, I always thought, often enough that its a wonder the whole waking world isn't simply viewed as an endless improvised film. One with as many screenwriters, producers, and directors as there are actors.
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After a second pint, I entered a pocket of time in which life seemed good, secure, not threatened by the past or “things to come.” I knew I had been living on a kind of sine curve, a rolling wave of ups and downs, now hopeful now doomed, now asleep now insomniac, now cocksure now deeply uncertain. If such a roller coaster of moods and dispositions had taken its toll on me, I thought, imagine what it must have been like for.
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She knew her husband to be an understanding man. Allowing people their eccentricities, faults, and mess-ups was one of his virtues, something best learned early by anyone who would presume to work with animals.
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History is subjective. History is alterable. History is, finally, little more than modeling clay in a very warm room.
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...being a survivor meant that you lived to some degree in a chronic state of mourning, like a low-level fever that waxes and wanes but is never truly eliminated.
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I know the Commies were choirboys by comparison—the Nazis at least had a modicum of appreciation for the art they plundered during their days here.
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Books make us feel alive, and though we obviously won’t live forever, they make us feel as if we might.