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

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.”
― Bernard M. Baruch

“Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“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