Ana

“And yet . . . after all my longing for this life, it felt strangely empty, beautiful but hollow. I did not want to admit that I found it boring, or that I was floundering in its shallows. How little they thought about anything but their own amusement. Their lives were so easy, so full of beauty and money. How much they could do with it, and how disappointing to find them so vacant.”
― Megan Chance, A Splendid Ruin

“It is a language we learn without even realizing it. We hear our first song and decipher its repetitions, its orderliness. The song teaches us what to expect and when to expect it. We learn to associate low notes with sadness”
― Frances de Pontes Peebles, The Air You Breathe

“We think we need words because it is in our nature to define, to decode, to try to understand by piecing things apart and labeling them, like specimens in a museum.”
― Frances de Pontes Peebles, The Air You Breathe

“when you have no power in this world you must create your own, you must adapt to your environment and try to foil the many dangers around you, so a woman’s pleasantness—her smile, her grace, her cheer, her sweetness, her perfumed body, her carefully made-up face—isn’t some silly by-product of fashions or tastes; it is a means of survival. The performance may cripple us, but it keeps us alive.”
― Frances de Pontes Peebles, The Air You Breathe