The Girl from the Savoy

Wonderful adventures await for those who dare to find them.

So I care for this restless fluttering in my heart as if it were a bird with a broken wing, in the hope that it will one day heal and fly.

Because that’s when we really learn, isn’t it? When it’s a struggle and we’re not sure. That’s when we find out whether we care at all. … It’s only by trying and failing, by losing something we really love, that we discover how much we want it.

…life is as fragile as a butterfly win and we must carry it lightly. Sometimes it will sit happily in our hands, sometimes it will fly away from us, but in the end---no matter the distance or the complications in between---the things we truly care for will always come back to us.

Dancing should be as natural to you as breathing in and out. It should be like reading a book; not spelling out each individual word, but becoming lost among the sentences and paragraphs and chapters until you are transported to another place entirely.

When you feel at ease with a person, you don’t need grand gestures or loud music or wild dancing. There is an undeniable truth in those companionable silences.

Sometimes I would happily swap the lonely peaks of stardom for the jolly camaraderie of the chorus.

With you beside me, this is all the world I will ever need.

There is a moment, Miss. Lane, between the end of one thing and the start of another. It is a most peculiar thing, like that strange light between night and dawn: not dark and not yet light. A sense of something other - something between... Sense the ending. Prepare for the new beginning.

My hesitation not only comes from my staunch denial that I am ill at all, but from the knowledge that as soon as I tell people, everything will change. I won’t be me anymore. I’ll be someone who is dying. People will look at me in that awful sympathetic way and nobody will know what to say. They’ll tell me how dreadfully sorry they are and we’ll all feel crushingly awkward until it is me consoling them. I cannot bear it, and so my illness remains as silent as an unplayed gramophone record.