Breaking Measures Quotes

“To stand on stage means to have arrogance. Faith! You must believe in it."
"In what?"
"In the audience. If you succeed, they will love you like never before. If you fail, the audience will hate you at first. But," he lifted his index finger, "they will still love you because you had the courage to sacrifice yourself for art. Respect, you see. If you play from fear," he shrugged, "you have lost them before you have even begun.”
― Emma Raveling, Breaking Measures

“What happened to your face?”
“Dentist.”
“They’re all con artists.”
― Emma Raveling, Breaking Measures

“The ground shifted again into an ocean of unknowns, a dark current yanking at a fundamental law she'd forgotten: there was no truth without a lie.”
― Emma Raveling, Breaking Measures

“The piano entered the story, bringing a new voice to the narrative. Her fingers brushed the keys, her heart straining to find satisfaction in the harmonic shifts and subtle colorings.

It wasn't there.

Leila closed her eyes, tried new ways of speaking a phrase - holding back, pushing forward, adding an unexpected accent, waiting a breath before the harmonic resolution.

But she couldn't find it.

She pushed the music forward with frantic exhilaration, dragging the orchestra behind her. 
René shot her a warning look.
Leila drove hard, demanding they follow, viciously attacking the finale as she searched for what eluded her.

But when the last chord exploded, ringing with a rage composed of love and longing, Leila felt nothing but a drained emptiness.

It was as if the reins keeping her in control, in the carefully constructed environment where she'd always created music, had snapped and broken away. 
Everything had felt just beyond reach. The notes had danced before her but she'd been unable to grasp them, to own and mold them into what she wanted to say.

"Brava!"

Leila blinked.

People stood, flooding the hall with a deluge of approval for her sacrifice on stage.”
― Emma Raveling, Breaking Measures

“Fast food, fast money, shallow thinking, shallow interpretations. This is now what I deal with everyday. Art was meant to be about freedom, about having the courage to explore what it means to be human.”
― Emma Raveling, Breaking Measures

“Some deaths were long, the decay so gradual the rotted end was nothing more than a sigh disappearing in the wind.

Others were quick, the abrupt cut of a life in mid-phrase leaving unanswered questions lingering like an unresolved harmony.”
― Emma Raveling, Breaking Measures

“It was the lie of the American Dream -work hard and you'll win, that poisonous mantra poured down the throat of every child, every teacher, every adult who wondered why they were still stuck in the same place after forty years of overtime, with nothing to show but bone-weary exhaustion, shitty health, and a pile of bills.”
― Emma Raveling, Breaking Measures

“In music, she'd found a perfect language, a way of expressing the inexpressible.”
― Emma Raveling, Breaking Measures

“An artist's domain was private, a haven for practicing and experimenting, the one place where failure was still allowed.”
― Emma Raveling, Breaking Measures