Status Updates From Birdsong

“But he knew what Weir was feeling because he had felt it himself. As he listened to the soil protesting, he heard the sound of a new world. If he did not fight to control himself, he might never return to the reality in which he had lived.”

“I don’t know your life history, but I think children need to believe in powers outside themselves. That’s why they read books about witches and wizards and God knows what. There is a human need for that which childhood normally exhausts. But if a child’s world is broken up by too much reality, that needs to go underground.”

“He would fall like the millions of the dead who had gone down into the mud: baker’s boys from Saxony, farm laborers from France, and factory workers from Lancashire, so much muscle and blood in the earth.”

“The function of music is to liberate in the soul those feelings that normally we keep locked up the heart.”