"He had heard the names of the passions of love and hate pronounced solemnly on the stage and in the pulpit, had found them set forth solemnly in books and had wondered why his soul was unable to harbour them for any time or to force his lips to utter their names with conviction. A brief anger had often invested him but he had never been able to make it an abiding passion and had always felt himself passing out of it as if his very body were being divested with ease of some outer skin or peel. He had felt a subtle, dark and murmurous presence penetrate his being and fire him with a brief iniquitous lust: it too had slipped beyond his grasp leaving his mind lucid and indifferent. This, it seemed, was the only love and that the only hate his soul would harbour."

"The sad quiet greyblue glow of the dying day came through the window and the open door, covering over and allaying quietly a sudden instinct of remorse in Stephen's heart. All that had been denied them had been freely given to him, the eldest: but the quiet glow of evening showed him in their faces no sign of rancour."

It had been a while since he had done a free association; but for now, all that seemed necessary was to think about how the bitterness of the dark chocolate bar was an acquired taste.

This is what I'm apparently going to read for the speech conference that I'm going to this weekend. I took a little bit of material from what I had written earlier because it fit pretty well after a bit of editing.

" 'Big, black, odious looking.'
'Expensive, takes up half the room, and it’s loud.'
Such are my parents’ joking descriptions of the instrument in which I’ve invested so much of my life.
More accurate, or at least more poetically appropriate, are these quotes by Kenneth Miller:
'No other acoustic instrument can match the piano's expressive range, and no electric instrument can match its mystery.' 'The piano is able to communicate the subtlest universal truths by means of wood, metal and vibrating air.'
It requires a special kind of dedication to practice with all the necessary concentration and delay of gratification that are involved in the process of internalizing a piece of music. It also requires a special kind of exclusion. While practicing, you can’t go out with friends, you can’t read a book, you can’t learn about chemical equations or sociology or the history of Finnish mythology. Every hour of practice time is another hour of a small part of the expansiveness of life shut off from your grasp. It’s my pessimistic side saying so, but it’s a voracious appetite for books and learning and eclectic things that often gets in the way of the time it takes to perfect music. Ah, but that moment of climax, fruition, consummation, in the heat of stage lights and the intimacy of the keys, is the moment that makes the dedication at least a little comprehensible. Bathing in the joy of a playing a well-polished masterpiece is incomparable. You have to understand that, before you try to rationalize. Time spent practicing is not wasted time, or time I regret, because in the end, it opens up a whole new world to be my oyster."