Why do beautiful songs make you sad?' 'Because they aren't true.' 'Never?' 'Nothing is beautiful and true.

The exchange frames beauty as inseparable from longing: beautiful songs can wound because they gesture toward an ideal—love, harmony, meaning—that lived experience rarely fulfills. The reply “Because they aren’t true” suggests art’s power lies in its ability to imagine coherence more than to report reality. The final, bleak turn—“Nothing is beautiful and true”—pushes beyond ordinary cynicism into a philosophical refusal of consolation, implying that what is aesthetically moving is moving precisely because it is unattainable or fragile. Read this way, the dialogue dramatizes a tension central to modern literature: art as both refuge and indictment, offering glimpses of what should be while reminding us of what is.