William Maxwell Quote

The music of Beethoven's Fidelio always rises up in my mind when I think of that meeting in the forest, and my throat constricts with an emotion that is, I'm afraid, purely factitious--unless feelings are more a part of our physical inheritance than is commonly believed, in which case it is Mary Edie's joy, unquenchable, passed on, and then passed on again, generation after generation, along with the color of eyes and the shape of hands and characteristic habits of mind and temperament.