The Ensemble Quotes

“Love is inexact, Henry said. It is not a science. It is barely a noun. It means one thing to one person, and one thing to another. It means one thing to one person at one point and then something else at another point. It doesn’t make sense. We are gathered here today to not make sense. We are gathered here today to listen to the ineffable. I’m supposed to be explaining it, but I can’t explain it. I love you, it’s a mystery. Because it’s a mystery, we have to take care of it. Feed it. It can go missing, but we can’t tie it up. We can only tie it to someone else. Other people. Then the world is like this: full of the geometry of my rope tied to you, and to you, and yours tied to him, and to her, and hers to someone else. I love you, it’s a mystery. A moment of silence.”
― Aja Gabel, The Ensemble

“I think that's what happens when you love people more, or more people. In here gets bigger.' Daniel tapped his hand on his own bullish chest. 'But out there has to get a little smaller,' he said, sweeping his hand around the room.”
― Aja Gabel, The Ensemble

“Henry did understand how they had become responsible for each other's well-being, each other's livelihood. When you were on your own, in whatever career, whatever you did affected only your own job. But with the quartet, they had to share a goal, distribute the dream between them, and trust that each of them had an appropriate sense of commitment. The commitment had a way of bleeding into their lives off stage, as well. There were so many ways to betray each other.”
― Aja Gabel, The Ensemble

“They’d chosen each other for the reason most people chose each other: to get closer to some quality they didn’t naturally possess.”
― Aja Gabel, The Ensemble

“It occurred to Jana perhaps for the first time why men loved Brit—why people loved Brit: she was able, in a way that most people weren’t, to give and receive goodwill. In Jana’s whole life, she could not recall ever having been hugged like this. This one was all-encompassing compassion.”
― Aja Gabel, The Ensemble

“She resigned herself to occupying the two ends of a wild oscillation...the raw, hungry desire to experience an inexplicable love, and the melancholic knowledge that she might never get to.”
― Aja Gabel, The Ensemble

“When he thought of this night, he always thought of Brit's sleeping body next to his awake one, always went back there, felt her heat, and wished with each recall that he'd chosen not to leave but to stay, to remain in that moment, to honor it as it constellated all their shared moments that came before it: that he'd waited, that he'd believed that from that single moment something remarkable could happen.”
― Aja Gabel, The Ensemble

“And when I think about it now, I don't feel bad. I don't feel bad at all. I feel nostalgic for that way of thinking. Not for the actual life. I'm just saying, it's okay to long for a different life. It doesn't mean you actually want it.”
― Aja Gabel, The Ensemble

“But he couldn't even see that he got from the quartet whatever other people got from their partners. Consistency, obligation, nonverbal understanding and misunderstanding - a deformed, ugly-pretty kind of love, knowledge that what was there wouldn't change, for better or worse.”
― Aja Gabel, The Ensemble

“What I’m saying is if I thought about all the ways I could be unhappy, I’d be . . . unhappy. Not to mention exhausted.”
― Aja Gabel, The Ensemble

“Being with her, next to her, inside her, it was like having the power to never be erased or lost or missing, though that had happened in life, erasure, and would continue to happen. But with her, no part of his past or her past went unknown.”
― Aja Gabel, The Ensemble

“Don't take a bath" Jana said, and they cracked up.
It was an inside joke. They'd been coached once by Jacob Liedel, the aging emeritus director of the conservatory, who sat with his saggy skin and liver spots in a chair inexplicably on the other side of the room, and shouted at them the whole time. He barely let them get through a phrase before waving his hands, interrupting them, correcting them. Brit admired his old-school edge, but she knew Jana found it upsetting, and the louder he yelled, the more strained her bow arm became, until Jacob finally yelled, "Don't take a bath!" and Jana stopped playing and said, "What?" Jacob repeated "Don't take a bath there. With that phrase."
None of them asked him what he meant, but he said it two, three more times during the coaching session; afterward, at dinner, the four of them sitting in a tired silence, Henry said, "What's taking a bath mean?" and Jana and Brit laughed so hard they cried into their cheese fries and slid under the booth. Now and again they still said it to each other with no consistency of context.”
― Aja Gabel, The Ensemble

“His compulsive precision made him an exceptional lover and a disastrous mate, an outstanding musician and an exhausting friend.”
― Aja Gabel, The Ensemble

“… you misunderstand ‘ease.’ I think whoever said that means joy, not the quality of being easy. And difficult things can bring joy. And joy can bring ease.”
― Aja Gabel, The Ensemble

“But maybe what they did trained them to be selfish. But they all couldn't walk around expecting everyone else to understand that there was this relationship in their lives that was superior to every other relationship, and they had to understand that other people valued other things, and well, but.”
― Aja Gabel, The Ensemble

“How were these terrible, beautiful people worth excluding entire sectors of living? Why were they - once unchosen, regular people, colliding in regular ways with other regular people - now linked to each other inextricably, tied by old binds, each breath wound around the breath of the three others, like a monster, like a miracle.”
― Aja Gabel, The Ensemble

“Being that attuned to each other's inner emotional lives was the sometimes unfortunate side effect of playing music together. ”
― Aja Gabel, The Ensemble

“But it was too taxing, those visits, pinging between her guilt for being a bad daughter and her hunger for a mother Catherine could never be.”
― Aja Gabel, The Ensemble

“They could share the same hurt, but in different ways. They bore the same wound, in different shapes.”
― Aja Gabel, The Ensemble

“He was not only playing now, but playing everything before now, that miracle of a concert at Esterhazy, the way they'd sung at Carnegie Hall the first time. Time rolled out through his arm in hot waves. And though he was still playing, he looked around (no longer bound by time, anyway.) Jana, wide-eyed and angular, only her parted lips betraying the glass-like fragility he loved in her. Brit, round-faced, still freckled, more freckled after all these years, not looking at him, giving him his space, which he appreciated. And Daniel, glancing at him with no expression at first and the subtlest of understanding, continuing to play his own rock-solid part, even leading a little extra, picking up whatever Henry had left behind.”
― Aja Gabel, The Ensemble

“The structure of landscape is infinitesimal, Like the structure of music, seamless, invisible. Even the rain has larger sutures. What holds the landscape together, and what holds music together, Is faith, it appears—faith of the eye, faith of the ear. —Charles Wright, “Body and Soul II”
― Aja Gabel, The Ensemble

“There was a sweltering silence where neither said anything about the $28 price tag that came with the zucchini foam appetizer. He didn't say it seemed like they should pay less if they were just getting the foam of something.”
― Aja Gabel, The Ensemble

“The famous violinist who had coached them - Fodorio, she could not bring herself to say his name - was sort of a hack anyway, at least when it came to teaching. Jana would never tell him to his face, but she enjoyed the solemn interior pleasure of her disdain.”
― Aja Gabel, The Ensemble

“Short pain was part of your body. Long pain was part of your life.”
― Aja Gabel, The Ensemble

“And now she was nearly forty, and it was about time she admitted that the life she was living was actually her life, not some precursor to her life, and that the reason she wasn't living another, perhaps better, life was that she'd met someone decent with whom she'd had something very important in common: a desire to be in love.”
― Aja Gabel, The Ensemble

“The story spanned the distance between their past and their future, and suddenly, briefly, they were two versions of themselves. And if they were two versions of themselves, they were also all the versions in between, and their entire shared life unfolded before them.”
― Aja Gabel, The Ensemble

“She was sad, and she was angry with herself for being sad. She didn’t like wanting what she hadn’t intended to want as much as she didn’t like being denied what she hadn’t really wanted in the first place. She thought there was enough to be sad about without adding on the unfulfilled wishes at the edge of your life.”
― Aja Gabel, The Ensemble