Crescendo Quotes

“The woman looks deep into the waters of the lake and listens to the melody of her body being formed. Her life will be filled with tension, for that is how the oak grows. Her life will be filled with lessons, for that is how the soul grows. Her life will be filled with love, for that is how we all grow. And her life, like all of our lives, will be filled with magic, for truly, what could be more magical than life? In time, we will lose these memories, as the water will wash them away. If only there were something to remind us of the music we’ve come here to play . .”
― Amy Weiss, Crescendo

“That is what grief does. It steals the breath out of you, turns you as cold and lifeless as the one you mourn.”
― Amy Weiss, Crescendo

“Death happens not the ones who have gone, but to the ones who remain.”
― Amy Weiss, Crescendo

“It was for the music, for the beautiful music. For the chance to become, for one brief and thrilling moment, a song.”
― Amy Weiss, Crescendo

“Sing me a love song", he says again, leaning down to nuzzle her, his head near that of his child's, and the woman has to laugh, because love songs are all that she knows.”
― Amy Weiss, Crescendo

“Nevertheless, the power inherent inside it—to accept the dark days, knowing that they are when transformation occurs; to honor the time it takes for one’s wings to dry; to slough off the weight of its past and fly, when all its life it has known only to crawl—is far more explosive than any firecracker. Soft can be so much stronger than hard.” “I know the power of my”
― Amy Weiss, Crescendo

“I am a lotus. It takes a century for my toes to reach for the ground beneath me, a century for my hands to reach for the sun. A dragonfly visits me one summer. We spend the long hours of the days together, locked in a quiet caress. They are the happiest months of my life. Through him I, anchored so tightly to the mud, come to know flight. I am his hammock and his refuge; his stained-glass wings are my church. He dies in my arms. I hold him for a thousand years.”
― Amy Weiss, Crescendo

“Music is a universe of sound, constantly expanding and dividing. Compositions are carved into movements and passages. A half note branches off into quarter notes, sixteenth notes—the same tone, yet held for a different duration, a different effect. A harmony of multiple notes, a counterpoint of multiple melodies, an orchestra of multiple instruments: separate spheres, playing in parallel.
“A composer must make order out of this hopeless profusion of noise. To play every note at once—one big, all-encompassing dot—would produce chaos. To play none would produce silence. But to space them out artfully on a staff of time: that would produce a masterpiece.
“And so the composer splits the piece into measures and meter. The notes are held tight within bar lines, told when to ring out and when to die out, when to attack and when to decay. They are given finite boundaries. *You will last for eight breaths, and no more.* To them, time is fixed; to the composer, it is fluid. She could speed it up, slow it down, change duple meter to triple meter or a march to a waltz. She knows that the beauty lies not in how long the note lasts, but in the sound that it makes while it does.
“Maybe, the woman thinks, our composer has done the same with us. Lest eternity seem too long and infinity too loud, she imposes measures on our existence, divides it into years, generations, incarnations. We count beats and birthdays. We emerge from the silence, and we fade back into it. This is not a punishment or a curse, any more than it is to assign a time signature to a song. After all, if there is no beat, how can there be a dance?
“She does not do this to make us suffer. She does this to make us music.”
― Amy Weiss, Crescendo