The Minimalist Quotes

“He had loved me, certainly; he loved me like a little bird, a baby bird he could crush to death with his hands.”
― Kailee Pedersen, The Minimalist

“Minimalism repeated itself. It could do nothing except repeat itself. Yet within this, there was formal daring, a crystalline purity to the structure of each piece, an a relentless intensity that could be almost unmatched.”
― Kailee Pedersen, The Minimalist

“Gender was another affliction I wanted nothing to do with.”
― Kailee Pedersen, The Minimalist

“My detachment was a selfish thing. I was indifferent to everything that happened to me, as a means of survival.”
― Kailee Pedersen, The Minimalist

“He thought it was strange I had no desire to pursue any of these things, that I remained indifferent to the circumstances of my adoption, that I could disregard my Asian-ness, my accident of birth, as merely a matter of appearance and not one of existence. For me, it all seemed so meaningless and depressing- I sense Oliver was angry, deeply angry at his birth mother for abandoning him, whereas I didn’t really feel anything at all. I had carefully cultivated my apathy, my intellectual discernment, as a way out of the whole affair.”
― Kailee Pedersen, The Minimalist

“Suffering is not a prerequisite for art.”
― Kailee Pedersen, The Minimalist

“It is the privilege of the young to choose assimilation. It is the misery of the old to be condemned for never having had the choice.”
― Kailee Pedersen, The Minimalist

“To surrender yourself to someone else, wholly and utterly, was its own delicious humiliation.”
― Kailee Pedersen, The Minimalist

“What inferno would I readily cast myself into to become the composer I’d always dreamed of?”
― Kailee Pedersen, The Minimalist

“When the music leaves the body, when the orchestra stops playing we are together again, at last, in the space of terrible beauty. That void of perfect silence.”
― Kailee Pedersen, The Minimalist

“I have no interest in correctness, Ryder said. Music is not correct, it is beautiful. Begin again—make it radiant. Make it rich and vulgar and expressive and terrifying. Make something that would rouse the skeletons from their very graves to dance among us. Make something that would drive even the most indifferent man to a ruinous obsession.”
― Kailee Pedersen, The Minimalist

“When it came to music, that was the eternal question. Who was the possessor, and who the possessed? Had all this striving, all this painstaking study been to master the art, or to facilitate the art’s mastery over me?”
― Kailee Pedersen, The Minimalist