V

“I do not consider her choice of a piece happy. Beethoven is so usually simple and direct in his appeal that it is sheer perversity to choose a thing like that, which, if anything, disturbs.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“Perhaps she was glass. But glass is only brittle until it breaks. Then it’s sharp.”
― V.E. Schwab, Vengeful

“Even on a personal level art is a
form of heightened living. It gives greater pleasures, it consumes faster. It stamps the features of its servants with the signs of imaginary and spiritual adventures,
and it produces, even in the most cloister-like atmosphere, a certain fastidiousness,
an over-refinement, an exhaustion and curiosity of the nerves, in a way even a life
of the most outrageous passions and delights could scarcely effect it.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

“she did lie
In her pavillion--cloth-of-gold of tissue--
O'er-picturing that Venus where we see
The fancy out-work nature”
― William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra