Motswolo > Quotes

“Are you gonna tell me what colour I am now?" He asked. "And please don’t say white like a cloud.”
“Oh Moony,” Sirius sighed, “you’re the whole bloody sky.”
― motswolo, The Cadence of Part-time Poets

“And I... Well, I sort of missed having a poet for a boyfriend."
"I'm far from a poet."
"Part-time then.”
― Motswolo, The Cadence of Part-time Poets

“You told me your favourite colour was brown," Remus said. Sirius looked at him very sharply, and he nearly baulked.
"Brown?" James grimaced next to them. "Like what kind of brown?"
Sirius' eyes dipped, as though he were trying to scan Remus from head to toe. Finally they came to rest on his face again, looking him right in the eye.
"A very specific kind...”
― Motswolo, The Cadence of Part-time Poets

“you know i can have him whenever i want, yeah?”
― Motswolo, The Cadence of Part-time Poets

“Love forever, Tonya.”
― Motswolo, The Cadence of Part-time Poets

“What’s a musician?” Remus scoffed. “I say it’s anyone who makes sound with an instrument. Who says everyone’s got to be a Tchaikovsky or a Rachmaninoff.”
― Motswolo, The Cadence of Part-time Poets

“Sometimes, on the days he was feeling most daring, Remus wore the ring on his left.”
― Motswolo, The Cadence of Part-time Poets

“And I... Well, I sort of missed having a poet for a boyfriend.'
'I'm far from a poet.'
'Part-time then.”
― Motswolo

“Eventually he would came to learn that there was a technique in music that felt a lot like this, called ‘tempo rubato’. It involved speeding or slowing the traditional tempo of a song to invoke new feeling, as beautiful representation of freedom that relied completely on the discretion of the musician. If done incorrectly the technique could effectively butcher a thing of beauty—but if done right, it could award complete and utter freedom over the most expressive art known to man. That rubato was the thing one heard when an orchestra conductor briefly slowed a key moment in a classical piece. It was that breath at the end of a love ballad where your very heart felt as though it was shattering. It was responsible for every moment of emotion felt by conscious beings capable of hearing a music note played aloud.

Tempo rubato meant ‘robbed time’. That was the name humans gave to the concept. Like a word, time could not be captured, so people did the only thing they could, they attempted to defy it. They used surgeries to fix the physical flaws that came with age, and took photographs to help them remember a moment otherwise lost. People defied time by naming it. They called the past ‘memories’ and the future ‘what’s yet to pass’. They called hopelessness ‘rubato’, and in doing so, they granted themselves the illusion of controlling time.

At least, that's how he'd described it whenever someone cared enough to ask.

But still, it remained a comforting thought. If someone could speed up or slow down something as uncapturable as music—as pure emotion—then maybe time really was within their control. But everyone knew it wasn't possible. Not really. Whether as a conscious realisation or an inherent knowing, the answer was clear; time passed with or without people. With or without photographs or tempo. It always did, and it was easy to look back and desperately want to cling to it. Natural even, because what was behind was clear—it'd already been lived. It was the unknown ahead that scared people.

At sixteen Remus couldn’t have told anyone what a ‘tempo rubato’ was, but he’d been unknowingly experiencing it all his life. Being at school felt like the traditional, fast-moving tempo of the piece, and those few precious moments in the flat were his rubato. There he couldn’t play or make music, he could only listen and live. Conversations were without any real goal, the days blurred into one another, and the nights felt endless but not hopeless. There was very little action or adventure and that was how he liked it. The flat was rubato, one he’d never find anywhere else. There would be others, yes, but none the same. If he’d known then maybe he would’ve taken more pictures and less drugs so he could better commit them to memory.

But that’s the thing about memories—in the moment they’re not memories at all. They’re not even time.

They’re just life.”
― Motswolo, The Cadence of Part-time Poets

“You haven’t even met a fraction of the people that will love you in this life, Remus, and those people—those ones—they’re going to be so amazed by you.”
― Motswolo, The Cadence of Part-time Poets

“Remus had to stop. Not because the next song had interrupted him, or even because he’d realised that that moment was the first time he’d openly offered any information about his London friends; he had to stop because Sirius was crying.”
― motswolo, The Cadence of Part-time Poets