Melody

“Her room felt wonderful to her, as usual. She looked around with satisfaction… She imagined to herself that she would always live this way, even after she had grown up and moved away from her family. She planned to have exactly the same room wherever she was, because this room was her. No matter what happened out there in the rest of the world, she felt totally comfortable once she got into this room and closed the door.”
― Louise Fitzhugh, Nobody's Family Is Going to Change

“Madame Bovary, c'est moi. Emma Bovary. She was the first. The first to thrash around in the space between a packaged wonder and reality, trying to reconcile the two in her enormous, inarticulate heart. Madame Bovary, c'est toi, perhaps, dear reader. Madame Bovary, c'est tout le monde.”
― Antonia Quirke, Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers

“The truth was not always pleasant. It did not always have good manners and clean its fingernails. Sometimes it was in the eyes of a child or in a bird on a treetop, sometimes in a gutter, on a gallows, in a barracks latrine; and it was no less the truth in one place than in another. The dedication was to find it in all places - everywhere. To face it, know it, and be unafraid. Without evil, there could be no good; without filth, no purity, without hell, no heaven; without Satan, no God.”
― James Ramsey Ullman, Day on Fire

“Life's a struggle against acting, which claims more lives than all the other drugs of the world put together.”
― Antonia Quirke, Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers