Bel Canto

by Ann Patchett

What would it mean to kiss the lips that had held such a sound?

he believed that life, true life, was something that was stored in music.

Even those who saw her for the first time, before she had opened her mouth to sing, found her radiant, as if her talent could not be contained in her voice and so poured like light through her skin.

There was no putting one’s finger on it exactly, but it was as if there would be no point in shooting Messner. He seemed like someone who had been shot every day of his life and had simply had enough of it.

If what a person wants is his life, he tends to be quiet about wanting anything else. Once the life begins to seem secure, one feels the freedom to complain.

“Stand up,” is not a message that needed translation in the first place. People are sheep about certain things. When some begin to stand, the rest will follow.

Even in these uncharted circumstances the social order stood firm.

“The quality of the gift depends on the sincerity of the giver.

What she prayed for was nothing. She prayed that God would look on them and see the beauty of their existence and leave them alone.

“And English,” she whispered. She smiled. She could not contain it. She had managed to ask him for everything she wanted.

“Like our soprano, they have no capacity to understand authority. The bird doesn’t know enough to be afraid and the person holding the gun will only end up looking like a lunatic.”

Happiness, if he was right to use that word, was something that until now he had only experienced in music. He was still experiencing it in music. The difference was that now the music was a person.

The woman you love puts her gun beside a blue gravy boat at night so that you can teach her to read. She came into your life through an air-conditioning vent and how she will leave is the question that keeps you awake in the few free moments you have to sleep.

A kiss in so much loneliness was like a hand pulling you up out of the water, scooping you up from a place of drowning and into the reckless abundance of air.

I came to realize that what I had seen in the paintings I could see in the fields or a river. I could see it in people. All of that I attribute to this book.

The dead we can imagine to be anything at all.

Some people are born to make great art and others are born to appreciate it. Don’t you think? It is a kind of talent in itself, to be an audience, whether you are the spectator in the gallery or you are listening to the voice of the world’s greatest soprano.

This was what it felt like, to be a man with a woman. This was the thing Gen had missed in all the translation of language.

that she lived in a world with so many privileges that there was nothing to fight for.

“It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.”

How had he come to want to save all of them? The people who followed him around with loaded guns. How had he fallen in love with so many people?