Elena

“No outsider was allowed to glimpse the mansion when Elisabeth was in residence. She could go walking for hours, observing the deer (she always carried wooden rattles with her to protect her from wild boars, who were afraid of the noise) or composing poems.”
― Brigitte Hamann, The Reluctant Empress

“Same-sex contact between men was part of the fabric of everyday life. But to raise a hue and cry about such contact was also a weapon in the arsenal of the slanderer, the fabulist and the blackmailer.”
― Will Tosh, Male Friendship and Testimonies of Love in Shakespeare's England

“Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds. Under certain emotional circumstances I can stand the spasms of a rich violin, but the concert piano and all wind instruments bore me in small doses and flay me in larger ones.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited

“Is this the part where you start tearing off strips of your shirt to bind my wounds?"
"If you wanted me to rip my clothes off, you should have just asked.”
― Cassandra Clare, City of Bones