WILDALONE - KRASSI ZOURKOVA

Wildalone - Pg 266

   I realized that the cultural gap between me and my friends had just taken on an entirely new dimension. They would continue their normal lives, shocked when someone quit a job in finance to pursue a hobby. Whereas my own life had now veered into off-the-charts crazy. The kind of crazy where I should have looked Ben in the eyes, smiled casually, and said: "I know exactly what you mean. A few years back, my sister announced she was quitting her human life to go tear men to pieces in the Balkan mountains."

Wildalone - Pg 241

   I lay down on the grass. The gravel path had ended and I stayed there, letting the moonlight curve around my body and take its shape--a last blueprint from which to re-create me and bring me back, on some future night like this, if I decided to pay those hills another visit. I would be a different creature then. Untamed. Ethereal. Affected by nothing except the moon.

Wildalone - Pg 220

   Don't bother sitting down at the piano unless you're ready to become a wound, Rhys had warned me. The music, the song, the dance--everything bleeds.

Wildalone - Pg 155

   While we walked, he spoke to me about darkness. About his perpetual darkness and how he wanted to take me, the way a heavy night sweeps the earth: storming it, bursting through each of its crevices and hard, hard as a root from which we would both fall toward each other, madly, irreversibly, without even knowing it--

Wildalone - Pg 126

   It was always Princeton's arches that took the breath away. A world of fuss left behind. Ahead--distant lattice windows, a tree, perhaps a patch of sky. But in between, you felt on the cusp of miracles. The low ceiling would close overhead, ready to keep your secrets. Feeble light would stretch your shadow across the walls. Your steps would turn into music. And for a few seconds, as you made your way down the eerie passageway, there would be only you and the stone. Nothing else.

Wildalone - Pg 98

   Part of me still missed Rhys. Not him exactly--the fantasy of him. Of our few moments by the Greek vases, when he had spoken to me in riddles about love.
   The place turned out to be the opposite of what I remembered: no magic, no ghosts, just an unremarkable room with a few cluttered cabinets.

Wildalone - Pg 65

   The airport in Sofia looked like any other: white marble, steel everything drenched with light through a glass ceiling, as if the entire terminal was designed to give those who stayed behind the illusion of being headed somewhere, into a sky of their own.

Wildalone - Pg 63

   She had been ethereal, a dandelion: the flower of wishes. Of all flowers, this was the only one that began bright and ripe (like the sun), then paled to a weightless silver (like the moon), letting you blow it off into the wind--a constellation of scattered seeds--so that your wish would come true.

Wildalone - Pg 62

   The two of them locked eyes--accomplices for life, trying to outwit grief. Then the vast quiet of their sadness poured out, the dam suddenly released after so many years.

Wildalone - Pg 40

   The birds, lamenting, wept for Orpheus; the beasts gathered in despair one last time for him; the trees, shedding their leaves, mourned him with bared crowns. They say the rivers wept too, swollen with their own tears; and the water nymphs--the naiads--with disheveled hair, put on somber clothes.

Wildalone - Pg 36

   I had wanted to be there alone so I could look for the vase undisturbed, but now wished I had come earlier, with the others. There was too much silence. It rose from the gray carpets and crawled up the walls, leaving its invisible imprint on everything.

Wildalone - Pg 22

   My fingers fell on the keys and disappeared in the music, in its dark anguish. I had to concentrate on the piano and could no longer see him. But every nerve in my body felt his presence, felt watched by him--the only person in the hall still standing--as if he wanted me to notice him. To know he was there. And to play the last nocturne only for him.

Wildalone - Pg 20

   I didn't argue with him back then, but now wished that I had asked him questions--about that elusive age at which one stopped being a child and became worthy of the cosmic ear. Did eighteen cut it? It'd better. Because, with my first concert in America only days away, I dreaded finding out what might happen if the universe decided to listen before you were ready.

Wildalone - Pg 20

   "You are restless, you want answers. But music is not something a child can fully understand," my piano teacher warned me, being the only one to sense that something was wrong. "So don't expect to fall in love with it quite yet. For now just master the technique. Tame the keys, teach instinct to your fingers. One day you'll begin to hear the music. To really hear it. Then the universe, too, will begin to listen."

Wildalone - Pg 16

   Only Chopin managed to bring out the piano's full ability to create extraordinary sound. He considered grandiosity vulgar. Loud playing--offensive. A frail man with a velvet touch, he devoted his life to a single instrument. And the result was phenomenal. Everything I hear now seems so insignificant that I would rather not hear it at all, wrote a well-known pianist after hearing Chopin play live. That was beyond all words. My senses have left me.

Wildalone - Pg 3

   I shall grow old in darkness and in darkness I shall leave this earth, all its treasures still vivid inside my scarred eyelids. But until then, every night, within that same darkness she dances for me--breathtaking as she was back then--and she abandons her beauty to my madly aching heart, the heart which her fingers failed to reach but which she stole, she stole nonetheless...

Wildalone - Pg 2

   I had tasted beauty on my travels--beauty as rare in the darkness of our world as a man without regrets among the dying.