Steve Lopez Quotes & Sayings

Mental illness doesn't choose the most talented or the smartest or the richest or the poorest. It shows no mercy and often arrives like an unexpected storm, dropping an endless downpour on young dreams. — Steve Lopez

Your violin has only two strings," I say. "You're missing the other two."
Yes, he says. He's well aware.
"All I want to do is play music, and the crisis I'm having is right here. This one's gone," he says of the missing top string, "that one's gone, and this little guy's almost out of commission." His goal in life, Nathaniel tells me, is to figure out how to replace the strings. But he got used to playing imperfect instruments while taking music classes in Cleveland's public schools, and there's a lot you can do, he assures me, with just two strings — Steve Lopez

I don't want the concert to ever end. — Steve Lopez

Learning how to play an instrument has always been near the top of my to-do list, but what are the chances now? There's little downtime with a column and a two-year-old, and after reading Goldilocks and the three Bears and going through half a bottle of wine with dinner on an average evening, imagining a day when I join Nathaniel on the Elgar Cello Concerto is not a vision but a hallucination. I'm at the point where the things on your to-do list get transferred to a should-have-done list, and one reason I write a column is for the privilege of vicariously sampling other worlds, dropping in with my passport, my notebook and my curiosity. — Steve Lopez

You're only as good or bad as your latest attempt to make some connection with the world ... — Steve Lopez

Negativity is never an option — Steve Lopez

I feel jerked around. I feel sympathetic. I feel abused. It's almost harder to see Nathaniel on the good days than the bad, because you let yourself be deceived into thinking he's going to stay that way ... And I can't just walk away. Part of it is the desire to follow through on something that's become more important and meaningful in my life, and to satisfy the human instinct to help someone less fortunate. And maybe there's something more. — Steve Lopez

It's more interesting to be out in the world. than to see it reflected in the mirror. — Steve Lopez

I can't survive,' he once told me of his refusal to come indoors,'if I can't hear the orchestra the way I like to hear it. — Steve Lopez

Love is mental illness going in and mental illness coming out. In between, you do a lot of laundry. — Steve Lopez

Titled players appeared to be trotting out game after game in which the same old hoary opening sequences, memorized out to fifteen, twenty, or even more moves, were repeated endlessly. True novelties were becoming scarcer, and sometimes these 'opening' novelties didn't appear until well into the middlegame. (A master-level friend once proudly showed me a novelty he'd discovered at move twenty-seven of a very well-trodden chess opening, and it's said that even as far back as the 1950's Mikhail Botvinnik had some openings memorised past the thirtieth move). — Steve Lopez

Without a mission and a sense of whom you write for, you aren't worth reading. — Steve Lopez

It is possible to cause seemingly biochemical changes through human emotional involvement. You literally have changed his chemistry by being his friend. — Steve Lopez

Nurses quietly go about their work in a noble profession, uncelebrated soldiers toiling through the days and nights in service to the sick, the injured and the dying. — Steve Lopez

A friend is someone who inspires, who challenges, who sends you in search of some truer sense of yourself.. — Steve Lopez