Favorite Musical Book Quotes?

I share with you a musical quote from the book Beyond the Robot:  The Life and Work of Colin Wilson by Gary Lachman who himself was a founding member of the rock group Blondie.  The book is a biography of Colin Wilson, the author of The New Existentialism - a book I previously quoted above, as well as other famous titles such as The Outsider.

Quote

          The society of free spirits gratuitously helping each other had yet to appear and Wilson had to find another job.  This time it was as a hospital porter in Fulham.  He received patients, wheeled them around on stretchers, fetched their meals, took dead patients to the mortuary, and emptied rubbish bins.  He was given a tiny cubicle to sleep in and meals.  Privacy was at a minimum.  For the first few weeks, Wilson was still speaking anarchically--representing the syndicalist workers--and he kept their soapbox with him at work, bicycling to Hyde Park Corner with it strapped to his back.  The work wasn't hard and the pay was decent but the long, empty hours, waiting to receive a patient, were demoralizing.  Cards, tea breaks, and football matches on the radio filled the void.  The stagnant atmosphere bred sexual chitchat; the porters reeled off exaggerated accounts of their success or drooled over pornography.  Death, too, was nearby.  Once Wilson saw the body of a young woman after the postmortem.  He had seen her alive a few days earlier; now her brains and intestines lying on the slab seemed to deny that humanity had any importance in the scheme of things.  He asked himself what seems a naive question, but one that would play an important part in his philosophy to come:  why do we die?  Are we so unimportant to nature?  Or do we, as Shaw believed, die because we are too lazy to make life worth living?

          The negation symbolized by the young woman's body was offset by a "near mystical experience."  Lying on his bed, he was listening to the "Liebestod" from Wagner's opera Tristan and Isolde on the radio.  For Wilson music ranks with sex and poetry as a reliable means of inducing what he would later call "the other mode of consciousness," and he would go on to write a book about it.  At the time he was fascinated with the life of the dancer Nijinsky--he would feature in both The Outsider and The Ritual in the Dark--and when the spirit grabbed him Wilson would improvise a dance to whatever music he was listening to.  He did so then.  He stood up and in his cubicle began to make slow movements with his arms.  He tensed his muscles and as the music reached a climax "it seemed to penetrate the depths of my being."  For a brief moment he was "above time" and could look down upon life from a height.  He had glimpsed some of mankind's evolutionary possibilities.  Sheer concentration, an effort of will, he believed, had induced the "timeless moment," and indicated that the relentless flow of time, from life to death, could be halted.

          Time may have stopped for a moment, but the relentless need to write remained ...