Bellweather Rhapsody Quotes

“Though maybe that's all life ever is. Unimaginable, until it's happening to you.”
― Kate Racculia, Bellweather Rhapsody

“There is only ever one afternoon, and it ends. But one afternoon can hold so much beauty and so much love.”
― Kate Racculia, Bellweather Rhapsody

“This is why. This is _why_. This is why he plays, why he loves, why he listens. It isn't even a high--a high is too low--it is synchronicity with the universe. Physical proof of the three-part harmony between body and soul and song, all three living, dying, resonating.”
― Kate Racculia, Bellweather Rhapsody

“Maybe that's what he reminds her of: they are both full of dark corners, odd places, possibly ghosts.”
― Kate Racculia, Bellweather Rhapsody

“The point is that it might open a part of you that's always been closed. The point is you might make yourself heard. You might find you have a beautiful and terrible - you have a power... We make music to - to find each other in the dark. And I have to believe the point is that we don't - we don't ever stop calling out.”
― Kate Racculia, Bellweather Rhapsody

“How many people has this hotel eaten?”
― Kate Racculia, Bellweather Rhapsody

“They're ghosts, surely, and Rabbit absolutely believes in them. There are things in the world, strange machinations of physics and chemistry,queer intersections of biology and theology, that Rabbit hasn't the slightest interest in assuming he'll ever understand or be able to solve. They're simply there to be believed in, and Rabbit is a born believer. He wants to believe. He has always thought of life as pregnant with possibility-- a freak twister or wardrobe the only thing separating him from another world-- so ghosts, spirits, aliens and supreme beings coexist within Rabbit with ease. There's a kind of beauty in accepting the possibility, if not the plausibility, of everything imaginable.”
― Kate Racculia, Bellweather Rhapsody

“What you felt, the beast that swallowed you all and spat you back out, that is the great big bloody point of all this. If you learn nothing else from this bizarre and awkward experience--this gathering of strangers to blow into horns and pluck catgut--remember that you have the power to feel that. The power to create that. With your hands. Your breath. You are gods, children, and you can make war.”
― Kate Racculia, Bellweather Rhapsody

“Because my heart is running the show today.”
― Kate Racculia, Bellweather Rhapsody

“Alice wonders if anyone has ever tended Jill, in any way, and if her intelligent ferocity is what happens when a girl has had to teach herself how to be human.”
― Kate Racculia, Bellweather Rhapsody

“She remembers how it feels to play. To play with your whole body, your fingers, your wrists, your forearms and elbows and shoulders, your neck nd your head, your legs, your feet. You are an orchestra entire. Your fingers are each a single instrument, your hands a section; point and counterpoint, melody and countermelody, concord and dissonance are born, sustained, resolved in your body. In your head and your heart.”
― Kate Racculia, Bellweather Rhapsody

“Rabbit had never understood music before as an agent of connection, as a way for people not only to feel within themselves but to feel among themselves, a language that brought common souls into conversation. Beethoven could talk to him and could talk to his father, and he and his father could talk Beethoven to each other.”
― Kate Racculia, Bellweather Rhapsody

“The desire to defer to a higher power is an old habit, and a powerful one. She wants to take everything she’s seen and felt and pass it off to someone older, wiser, someone designated for that kind of heavy lifting, who will take her in his arms and tell her not to worry. Not to think about it anymore. To”
― Kate Racculia, Bellweather Rhapsody

“They filled his secret heart and made it less afraid.”
― Kate Racculia, Bellweather Rhapsody

“In his earliest memories he was sitting on the floor in the family room, in front of the giant stereo his parents had bought themselves as a wedding present, his face pressed into the padded fabric of one speaker. The fabric was prickly against his forehead but his nose fit perfectly into a little groove, and he could feel music spilling like molten gold through his entire body. He'd sit back on his heels when the song was over and his father, an accountant and amateur drummer whose (still-unrealized) dream was to open a jazz club and coffee house, would say, "Order up!" and put another record on the turntable. Rabbit's favorite albums were by Earth, Wind & Fire (syncopation made his brain feel like it was laughing) and Also sprach Zarathustra, its opening rumbling like an earthquake. And he loved The White Album, and when his mother played ABBA on the piano and they'd sing together (though Alice couldn't do it without being a total showoff), and the Star Wars soundtrack, and of _course_ Zeppelin. For six months in 1984, he had asked his parents to play "Stairway to Heaven" instead of a bedtime story.”
― Kate Racculia, Bellweather Rhapsody

“Alice is horrified at the prospect of losing her grip on the most essential things in her life—her brother, her talent, her self—in the seismic shift known as life after graduation. She can’t imagine who she’ll be on the other side.”
― Kate Racculia, Bellweather Rhapsody

“What if letting my dream die makes me all bitter and angry and cranky—and if I never get to do and be the thing I love, how will anyone ever see me, or know me, or love me?”
― Kate Racculia, Bellweather Rhapsody

“Flutes, you've got to - what's the word. You've got to be disgusting. Revoltingly cute. You should be pretty good at that, being flutes.”
― Kate Racculia, Bellweather Rhapsody

“Fisher has always hated clowns. From childhood, he’d found them smug and unfunny, and it makes perfect sense that he’s always disliked this movement, because “Jupiter” is, essentially, the soundtrack to a massive clown orgy. Oh ho-ho, say the violins, aren’t you a naughty jester! What, chirp the clarinets, you want to put that pie where?”
― Kate Racculia, Bellweather Rhapsody

“Natalie wants to call after the nurse, to ask whether it makes her more or less heroic that she took a bullet for the man with whom she was committing adultery.”
― Kate Racculia, Bellweather Rhapsody

“So Rabbit left Fisher with his sister and the dog to seek out the closest Statewide-associated adult he could find and deliver the message that his chaperone had been shot. His conductor was comatose. He wanted to play Afternoon of a Faun on a bassoon.”
― Kate Racculia, Bellweather Rhapsody

“He howls when the Bee Gees play on the radio, like he always has, though she’ll never know if this is a complete coincidence or if Gibb falsetto is the only frequency her deaf dog can discern. But that’s Auggie’s only real mystery, other than where he came from. Minnie knows her best friend. She knows his excited bark from his anxious bark, his I’m-hungry whine from his I-have-to-go-out whine. When he rolls on his back, he wants to be rubbed not on his belly but on the top of his head, and she shares his belief that the pizza delivery guy simply must be given a hero’s frenzied welcome every time. She’s given him food and shelter, walks and tossed Frisbees; he’s given her courage and strength by first giving her unconditional love. She never had to ask for it. It came into her life. All she had to do was trust it.

Which is so much harder than it sounds.”
― Kate Racculia, Bellweather Rhapsody

“He rinses the washcloth in the sink, but it’s going to be pink forever.”
― Kate Racculia, Bellweather Rhapsody

“Alice does wish their parents were here. Not that they could do anything. Not that they could take any of this back, make it better, or fix it. The desire to defer to a higher power is an old habit, and a powerful one. She wants to take everything she’s seen and felt and pass it off to someone older, wiser, someone designated for that kind of heavy lifting, who will take her in his arms and tell her not to worry. Not to think about it anymore. To go back to sleep.”
― Kate Racculia, Bellweather Rhapsody

“She gathers him in her arms. He curls tighter, smaller, pressing his head into her chest, and when he shudders she holds him as close as she can. This boy with his shaggy blond hair and fine-lashed eyes. His chipped-tooth grin. Whose future she took. She will hold this boy for the rest of her life.”
― Kate Racculia, Bellweather Rhapsody

“I need your help.” Minnie locks eyes with Alice. “To prove there’s something going on here, someone or something bad here in this hotel—that it isn’t just us, we’re not nuts and this isn’t our fault. When I was a little kid, what I saw here broke me. And I grew up around the broken parts but it wasn’t the right way to grow up. I’m all twisted and weird inside and I’m sick of bad dreams and horror stories. What happened here doesn’t get to dictate how I spend the rest of my life, or how you spend the rest of yours, and it’s no coincidence, us meeting last night in the room where it happened. We are the girls who survived. We are the girls who saw something awful and lived to talk about it, and now we have a chance to join forces and beat it. We can win. We can win this time, not just survive.”
― Kate Racculia, Bellweather Rhapsody

“Hollis steps closer, and Natalie is terrified. This feeling, this bright, whirling, too-alive feeling is terror, and she knows it; she’s never felt it before, but in her oldest, most animal brain, she recognizes this moment for what it is. Hollis is an arm’s length away, but he’s staring at her from across two years—two years that might have been different if she’d have let him take that drum kit, just for the night, he meant it when he said he would bring it back. Or even if she hadn’t let him take the drums, if she had let him go on believing he was any good at it. If only she’d let him keep the thing that he loved, the one thing in his whole rotten world that made him feel like himself, that made him feel special.”
― Kate Racculia, Bellweather Rhapsody

“Her throat is full of everything. Everything she never even told Emmett. She tried to. She tried, she really did, in the hospital that very night. She had the whole truth all lined up in her mind, and then the first things Emmett said when he saw her weren’t questions—What happened? Are you okay? Instead he fed her statements, facts she didn’t have the heart to argue. What you did was self-defense. That was the bravest thing anyone could have done. And so she felt worse, sick down to her soul, and silent.”
― Kate Racculia, Bellweather Rhapsody

“That was hours ago. Hours and hours ago, hours spent talking. Telling each other stories, their own and others’. It was easier to do in the dark, in a strange room that was home to neither of them, where there was nothing to hold but each other’s version of the truth.”
― Kate Racculia, Bellweather Rhapsody

“The worse the weather, the more inviting the glowing lights of the tower. The higher the drifts, the more they covered the patches on the foundation. Snow was kind to the Bellweather. It blurred her edges and made her beautiful.”
― Kate Racculia, Bellweather Rhapsody