Ella Leya Quotes
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That evening, I played piano for ten thousand barely-out-of-their-teens boys who filled the Kabul stadium. Boys with pimples and crew cuts in oversized military uniforms, holding on to their toy guns. Toy guns that killed. I played as if there was no tomorrow. Because for many of them there wouldn’t be, other than inside a coffin draped with a Soviet flag.
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Destiny is a stubborn maiden. She likes herself just the way she is.
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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.
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My fingers traced the melody on an invisible keyboard—my usual way to connect with the music, to feel its emotions on my fingertips. I touched the keys softly, as if gliding my hands through water, but the musical notes kept slipping between my fingers like bubbles, waltzing away in the blue radiance.
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A knife wound heals, but a tongue wound festers.
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The gusty wind Khazri swept through Baku, scouring every crevice, leaving behind air so pristine that it sparkled in the ginger sun like my mama’s favorite crystal vase.
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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.
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Mama, did you teach me to be honest, to keep my integrity no matter what? Why did you tell me that bad truths were better than good lies?
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The external evils are nothing compared to the evils that we harbor in our souls.
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Something flickered in the distance, dressing the darkness in a soft veil of blue. Out of the blue came an explosion of sounds followed by the seamlessly expressed melancholy of Chopin’s “Ballade no. 1.
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Playing Rachmaninoff was like walking on a rope bridge across a gorge with dreamy skies above and a raging, muddy river below.
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Once upon a time, when the evil spirit of darkness reigned over the Land of Azerbaijan, hiding the sun inside his underground caves, When the orphan sky peered at the Caucasus Mountains from the black dome of sorrow, When the rain shed its tears of ice upon the barren earth…
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My eyes still swelled with tears, but my heart was dancing the lazgi.
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How easy to be free. How strong we are when we have nothing to lose.
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Evil tempts every soul, but a weak soul tempts evil.
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But the connection between us was in the air, growing stronger with each stroke of his brush and with every cadenza of my piano performance as we struggled to find our unique voices. He by bringing musical tonality to his painting; me by unlocking my inner sluices, letting the palette of emotions spill freely into the art of my music.
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You can close the city gates, but you can’t close the people’s mouths.
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Leala's breath was "like a cello sawing away against the bouncing-bow contrabasses of her heartbeat.
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The hurt is the place where the music enters you.
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Jealousy knows neither morality nor empathy.
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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.
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Music is not in the notes but in what is between them.
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That’s the power you possess as an artist. To find and express your own unique message.
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Pushing the boundaries of my golden cage, searching for new ways of expression and freedom, unveiling the ambiguities between music and art, friendship and love—that was my summer of 1979.