An example is nothing without its implications.

'You're not dead yet, Bob.'

Snow, barely.

'His dedication is our reward.'

'Well where do you want the voice to come out?'

'… if the fortunes are the reverse of that, the ant will return to its colony for another day at dawn.'

'Songwriting is not about expressing something.'

'In the autumn and winter of that year, Schumann concerned himself especially with the drama of a certain transformation, a key liminal moment in the life of the human subject. His initiative had begun in the previous decade, but it crystallised with his change of venue and status. He began, more acutely than ever, to embody in music the process by which we form a private identity – by performing our public feelings.

That last sentence should sound odd. Doesn't it get things backwards? In the modern West, it is usually feelings that we regard as private. Feelings assume their public face through expression, not performance; the feeling we perform is not our own. Public performance is a medium in which feeling, the property of the private self, must be at least partly concealed or even entirely suppressed. The public persona is always a mistranslation of the private person.'

'Hurrah for the time man!'