Natalie

“Then she laughed out loud and hugged him tight with both arms. She smelled like pine trees and lichens and hot sand. How odd, thought Roger, that after all, this is what it took - not a flock of scarlet ibises or golden-crowned kinglets, but just the names of chicken, hovering in the air like the sulpher butterflies at the dump.”
― Bailey White, Quite a Year for Plums

“Sunshine - sunshine! tedious, changeless, monotonous. Not that discreet English Sunshine which varies its charm with clouds, with rainbows, with golden mist... here the sun has ceased trying to please so venerable a world.”
― Gertrude Bell, Persian Pictures: From the Mountains to the Sea

“Suddenly she aroused herself and exclaimed, "But I'll shake it off. Yes, I will shake it off! No one shall know my suffering. I'll be bitterly merry, and ironically gay, and I'll laugh in derision! - Eustacia Vye”
― Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native

“I don't think I ever met anyone more entirely civilized - T E Lawrence”
― Georgina Howell, Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations