David Dunlap

“It's just one of those remarkable historical ironies that Haydn, superbly trained as a singer in the St. Stephens cathedral choir of Vienna, followed by several more years as apprentice/assistant to the renowned Italian singing teacher Porpora, ultimately became famous as a composer of instrumental music, whereas Mozart, the great piano virtuoso of his age, wrote the first important operas in the modern repertoire and is arguably most highly acclaimed as a writer for the voice.”
― David Hurwitz, Exploring Haydn: A Listener's Guide to Music's Boldest Innovator

“We do ourselves no favors by pretending American history is either cheerfully grand or unrelievedly bleak, for American history is a human undertaking and is as subject to selfishness and greed, to cruelty and injustice, as we are in our own lives. Yet it is also true that the United States of America has grown stronger, freer, and more just when it has opened its arms rather then clenched its fists; built bridges, not walls; and understood that the promise of the Declaration of Independence includes not some but all.”
― Jon Meacham, American Struggle: Democracy, Dissent, and the Pursuit of a More Perfect Union: An Anthology

“She [Emma] pretends to herself it is instant anger her mother provokes, and she ignores the hurt beneath the fury, the pain only a mother can inflict that never goes away.”
― Ilona Bannister, Five

“Children are the strongest antidote to grief, not because of their unconditional love or their joy or because they take pain away, nothing like that, nothing like an inspirational quote embroidered on a pillow for your sofa. Children are the antidote because of their unrelenting needs, their continuous, voracious, narcissistic, selfish insistence on living, their unceasing demands that those needs, no matter how trivial, be met immediately and urgently.”
― Ilona Bannister, Five