Gemma

“Theatre is a concentrate of life as normal. Theatre is a purified version of real life, an extraction, an essence of human behaviour that is stranger and more tragic and more perfect than everything that is ordinary about me and you.”
― Eleanor Catton, The Rehearsal

“Every ending is arbitrary, because the end is where you write The end. A period, a dot of punctuation, a point of stasis. A pinprick in the paper: you could put your eye to it and see through, to the other side, to the beginning of something else. Or, as Tony says to her students, Time is not a solid, like wood, but a fluid, like water or the wind. It doesn't come neatly cut into even-sized length, into decades and centuries. Nevertheless, for our purposes we have to pretend it does. The end of any history is a lie in which we all agree to conspire.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride

“--and yet, whenever he started with the questions I froze stiff, as if I'd been pushed onstage in a play where I didn't know the lines.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“We're neither pure, nor wise, nor good
We'll do the best we know.
We'll build our house and chop our wood
And make our garden grow.
And make our garden grow!”
― Leonard Bernstein, Candide - Vocal Selections: Revised Edition Vocal Selections