Ella Leya quotes:

Life is a desert of shifting sand dunes. Unpredictable. Erratic. Harmony changes into dissonance, the immediate outlives the profound, esoteric becomes cliched. And vice versa.

Playing Rachmaninoff was like walking on a rope bridge across a gorge with dreamy skies above and a raging, muddy river below.

A knife wound heals, but a tongue wound festers.

I desire to know you. Every breath of your heart, every fleeting look on your face, the rhythm of your joys, and the melancholy of your sorrows.

That's the power you possess as an artist. To find and express your own unique message.

Destiny is a stubborn maiden. She likes herself just the way she is.

The conversation ran as fluidly as the tea out of the samovar's crooked nose.

Leala's breath was "like a cello sawing away against the bouncing-bow contrabasses of her heartbeat.

Music is not in the notes but in what is between them.

The hurt is the place where the music enters you.

Jealousy knows neither morality nor empathy.

The music began, passages of immense technical complexity fluidly bridging Caravaggio's chiaroscuro with Renoir's impressionism. The gloom and shadows of claustrophobic chambers contrasting with the vibrant radiance of a wide-open landscape. The realism of humanity down to its dirty nails and rotten wounds combined with the fleeting sanguinity of the moment.