Geena

“I’ve never been very good at ‘going with it’. I don’t think I ever fully immerse myself in anything. My body is in the stream, true, but I’ve always got my head a little above the water. I’m always looking down at myself, watching how my legs thrash about, and how the fish and weeds flow all around me.”
― Bea Setton, Berlin

“When I was a child, I loved old men, and I could tell that they also loved me. They loved how eager I was to please them, how much I wanted them to think well of me. They would wink at me, and find me precocious. I would encounter them at church, and at family gatherings, and as friends of my friends' parents. They were the husbands of my dance instructors, or my science or history teachers.”
― Julia May Jonas, Vladimir

“Nothing that will loom large in the retrospective of my life, nothing I will remember much longer – just the kind of routine negligence and behaviour that slowly taints everything. I was ruining my life a little every day, and although I see now that these things were redeemable, I’ve always found starting on a clean page more inviting than amending an imperfect first attempt.”
― Bea Setton, Berlin

“I worried that I didn’t know how to play the glorious possibilities of the hand I’d been dealt. Someone else would make great use of this characterful nose, the desire to please, would know what to do with my kind family, great education, and my sympathetic nature. All these gifts had gone largely wasted on me. But it was complicated, this feeling I had, as the sparks melted into a confusion of light – because while I did envy other people for being them, I pitied them for never getting to be me.”
― Bea Setton, Berlin