Orfeo Quotes

“The job of taste was to thin the insane torrent of human creativity down to manageable levels. But the job of appetite was never to be happy with taste.”
― Richard Powers, Orfeo

“Only keep still, wait, and hear, and the world will open.”
― Richard Powers, Orfeo

“Listen deep down: most life happens on scales a million times smaller than ours.”
― Richard Powers, Orfeo

“Be grateful for anything that still cuts. Dissonance is a beauty that familiarity hasn't destroyed yet.”
― Richard Powers, Orfeo

“Music forecasts the past, recalls the future. Now and then the difference falls away, and in one simple gift of circling sound, the ear solves the scrambled cryptogram. One abiding rhythm, present and always, and you're free. But a few measures more, and the cloak of time closes back around you.”
― Richard Powers, Orfeo

“Chance was just an order that you hadn't yet perceived.”
― Richard Powers, Orfeo

“Music is a system of proportions in the service of a spiritual impulse.”
― Richard Powers, Orfeo

“Music forecasts the past, recalls the future. Now and then the difference falls away, and in one simple gift of circling sound, the ear solves the scrambled cryptogram. One abiding rhythm, present and always, and you’re free.”
― Richard Powers, Orfeo

“Zag when they think you'll zig.”
― Richard Powers, Orfeo

“He will love this music to death. In a few more years, he’ll snort at its sentiment and mock its stirring progressions. Once you’ve loved like that, the only safe haven is resentment.”
― Richard Powers, Orfeo

“Music wasn't about learning how to love. It was about learning what to disown and when to disown it. Even the most magnificent piece would end up as collateral damage in the endless war over taste.”
― Richard Powers, Orfeo

“Listen closer, listen smaller, listen lighter, to any noise at all, and hear what the world will still sound like, long after your concert ends.”
― Richard Powers, Orfeo

“We are made for art . . . The moment Maddy took up the tendril phrase, Els knew she was as dear to him as his own life. Talons gripped his ribs, and he felt a joy bordering on panic. He needed to know how this woman would unfold. He needed to write music that would settle into her range like frost on fields. They’d spend their years together, grow old, get sick, die in shared bewilderment.”
― Richard Powers, Orfeo

“The thing about music was that you never knew the shape of anyone’s desire.”
― Richard Powers, Orfeo

“It seemed to me that half of life’s problems would be solved if one of us had a vagina.”
― Richard Powers, Orfeo

“The oldest principle of composition: repeat everything.”
― Richard Powers, Orfeo

“Was tonality out there – God-given? Or were those magic ratios, like everything human, makeshift rules to be broken on the way to a more merciless freedom?”
― Richard Powers, Orfeo

“There was nothing more pressing to do all day, every day, except think about the question that his whole life had failed to answer: How did music trick the body into thinking it had a soul?”
― Richard Powers, Orfeo

“Insecurity will always be a growth industry. The economy now depends on fear.”
― Richard Powers, Orfeo

“Isn't the point of music to move listeners?"
Mattison smiled. "No. The point of music is to wake listeners up. To break all our ready-made habits."
"And tradition?"
"Real composers make their own.”
― Richard Powers, Orfeo

“Do you run away or toward?”
― Richard Powers, Orfeo

“Reckless archaism. Arpeggiating under the influence. Presto in an andante zone.”
― Richard Powers, Orfeo

“Life is nothing but mutual infection.”
― Richard Powers, Orfeo

“There is no safety. There is only forgetfulness.”
― Richard Powers, Orfeo

“What do you think has become of the young and old men? And what do you think has become of the women and children? They are alive and well somewhere, The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, And ceas’d the moment life appear’d. All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.”
― Richard Powers, Orfeo

“Maybe the key to acclaim is simply to live long enough.
But then, maybe acclaim is the foyer to death.”
― Richard Powers, Orfeo

“Way too late in life, Els learned that the time to concentrate yourself was right before sunrise.”
― Richard Powers, Orfeo

“Bonner leans his forehead against hers. Zig when they think you’ll zag. Creation’s Rule Number Two.
What’s Number One? Els asks, willing to be this bent soul’s straight man.
Zag when they think you’ll zig.”
― Richard Powers, Orfeo

“Art is not a mobocracy. It’s a republic.”
― Richard Powers, Orfeo

“JO: A refrain I like throughout the book is, “Music doesn’t mean things. It is things.” RP: Yes. The struggle for composers, which Els goes through in different stages over the course of his seventy years, is precisely that battle between a music that might be a matter of life and death, as it is for Shostakovich, or a way of surviving the evils of human history, as it is for Messiaen. You align yourself to a kind of music in the service of one or another of all the different kinds of things that the human mind might want. And at the end of the day, you have this reflective feeling of saying, it’s very possible that in pursuing a kind of music that you wanted to serve a certain function, to create a certain social urgency, to solve the problems of your historical time and place, that it might also have been worthwhile to make a music that simply moves people in the most etymological sense of that word—actually just makes their bodies want to move. It’s that tension—between the music of pattern, the music of the cognitive brain; and the music of body, the music of pure spirit—that infects his life at every turn. Music is both those things! And human beings are both thinking creatures and feeling creatures. And the art that hits on all cylinders, the art that moves us intellectually and bodily and spiritually, is what we’re after. But to capture all those things in the same vessel is a very, very difficult task. And it’s a very difficult one for Els until the very end.”
― Richard Powers, Orfeo