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872492b
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Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.
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Donna Tartt |
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7e2e108
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I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.
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Donna Tartt |
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430d0d0
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Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only--if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn't it? And isn't the whole point of things--beautiful things--that they connect you to some larger beauty?
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Donna Tartt |
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3f8aae2
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Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.
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Donna Tartt |
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0f083d9
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Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.
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Donna Tartt |
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b2a40e6
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A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don't get to choose our own hearts. We can't make ourselves want what's good for us or what's good for other people. We don't get to choose the people we are.
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Donna Tartt |
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5e74bde
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That life - whatever else it is - is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn't mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we're not always so glad to be here, it's our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ig..
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meaning
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Donna Tartt |
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88e527d
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It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? Euripides speaks of the Maenads: head thrown I back, throat to the stars, "more like deer than human being." To be..
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Donna Tartt |
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66491c4
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You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life.
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Donna Tartt |
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ae81ffb
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Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you.
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Donna Tartt |
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d097c9b
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I look at the blanked-out faces of the other passengers--hoisting their briefcases, their backpacks, shuffling to disembark--and I think of what Hobie said: beauty alters the grain of reality. And I keep thinking too of the more conventional wisdom: namely, that the pursuit of pure beauty is a trap, a fast track to bitterness and sorrow, that beauty has to be wedded to something more meaningful. Only what is that thing? Why am I made the wa..
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Donna Tartt |
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484e723
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Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it's going to kill us.
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want
wanting
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Donna Tartt |
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23d5f05
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I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.
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Donna Tartt |
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d866eb1
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But how," said Charles, who was close to tears, "how can you possibly justify cold-blooded murder?' Henry lit a cigarette. "I prefer to think of it," he had said, "as redistribution of matter."
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Donna Tartt |
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f50b50f
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When you feel homesick,' he said, 'just look up. Because the moon is the same wherever you go.
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Donna Tartt |
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d314285
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But sometimes, unexpectedly, grief pounded over me in waves that left me gasping; and when the waves washed back, I found myself looking out over a brackish wreck which was illumined in a light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead.
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Donna Tartt |
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13fde80
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Well--I have to say I personally have never drawn such a sharp line between 'good' and 'bad' as you. For me: that line is often false. The two are never disconnected. One can't exist without the other. As long as I am acting out of love, I feel I am doing best I know how. But you--wrapped up in judgment, always regretting the past, cursing yourself, blaming yourself, asking 'what if,' 'what if.' 'Life is cruel.' 'I wish I had died instead o..
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Donna Tartt |
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9792567
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if a painting really works down in your heart and changes the way you see, and think, and feel, you don't think, 'oh, I love this picture because it's universal.' 'I love this painting because it speaks to all mankind.' That's not the reason anyone loves a piece of art. It's a secret whisper from an alleyway. Psst, you. Hey kid. Yes you.
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Donna Tartt |
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be7d429
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Because I don't care what anyone says or how often or winningly they say it: no one will ever, ever be able to persuade me that life is some awesome, rewarding treat. Because, here's the truth: life is a catastrophe. The basic fact of existence - of walking around trying to feed ourselves and find friends and whatever else we do - is a catastrophe. Forget all this ridiculous 'Our Town' nonsense everyone talks: the miracle of a newborn babe,..
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Donna Tartt |
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0e7d19e
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Are you happy here?" I said at last. He considered this for a moment. "Not particularly," he said. "But you're not very happy where you are, either." --
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richard
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Donna Tartt |
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2ef9b81
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Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones that I did not.
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the-secret-history
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Donna Tartt |
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7cd34f8
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And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.
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Donna Tartt |
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bd93fef
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It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.
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Donna Tartt |
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a27430e
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Could it be because it reminds us that we are alive, of our mortality, of our individual souls- which, after all, we are too afraid to surrender but yet make us feel more miserable than any other thing? But isn't it also pain that often makes us most aware of self? It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one's burned tongues and skinned knees, that one..
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Donna Tartt |
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9068ae9
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Some things are too terrible to grasp at once. Other things - naked, sputtering, indelible in their horror - are too terrible to really grasp ever at all. It is only later, in solitude, in memory that the realization dawns: when the ashes are cold; when the mourners have departed; when one looks around and finds oneself - quite to one's surprise - in an entirely different world.
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Donna Tartt |
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c280d4a
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Sometimes it's about playing a poor hand well.
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Donna Tartt |
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8e39c8c
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There are such things as ghosts. People everywhere have always known that. And we believe in them every bit as much as Homer did. Only now, we call them by different names. Memory. The unconscious.
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Donna Tartt |
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25918c1
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But depression wasn't the word. This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time. The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the g..
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Donna Tartt |
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c0d2488
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And as much as I'd like to believe there's a truth beyond illusion, I've come to believe that there's no truth beyond illusion. Because, between 'reality' on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there's a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic.
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Donna Tartt |
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9b8ad51
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One likes to think there's something in it, that old platitude amor vincit omnia. But if I've learned one thing in my short sad life, it is that that particular platitude is a lie. Love doesn't conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.
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Donna Tartt |
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e316125
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as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn't touch.
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Donna Tartt |
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c55b9bc
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Whatever teaches us to talk to ourselves is important: whatever teaches us to sing ourselves out of despair. But the painting has also taught me that we can speak to each other across time. And I feel I have something very serious and urgent to say to you, my non-existent reader, and I feel I should say it as urgently as if I were standing in the room with you. That life--whatever else it is--is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not rando..
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Donna Tartt |
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2010aee
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For if the modern mind is whimsical and discursive, the classical mind is narrow, unhesitating, relentless. It is not a quality of intelligence that one encounters frequently these days. But though I can digress with the best of them, I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.
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Donna Tartt |
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a42d467
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Every new event--everything I did for the rest of my life--would only separate us more and more: days she was no longer a part of, an ever-growing distance between us. Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away.
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Donna Tartt |
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c947cff
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In short: I felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way.
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secret-history
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Donna Tartt |
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d01ef95
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Love doesn't conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.
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Donna Tartt |
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a5fedbe
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To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole;
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Donna Tartt |
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4043664
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Once, over dinner, Henry was quite startled to learn from me than men had walked on the moon. "No," he said, putting down his fork. "It's true," chorused the rest, who had somehow managed to pick this up along the way. "I don't believe it." "I saw it," said Bunny. "It was on television." "
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Donna Tartt |
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d33f5dc
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We looked at each other. And it occurred to me that despite his faults, which were numerous and spectacular, the reason I'd liked Boris and felt happy around him from almost the moment I'd met him was that he was never afraid. You didn't meet many people who moved freely through the world with such a vigorous contempt for it and at the same time such oddball and unthwartable faith in what, in childhood, he had liked to call "the Planet of E..
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Donna Tartt |
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e13f055
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Death is the mother of beauty," said Henry. "And what is beauty?" "Terror."
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Donna Tartt |
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6cab512
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We are so customed to disguise ourselves to others that, in the end, we become disguised to ourselves.
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Donna Tartt |
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7b3f16a
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Who was it that said that coincidence was just God's way of remaining anonymous?
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Donna Tartt |
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091ac79
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Anything is grand if it's done on a large enough scale.
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Donna Tartt |
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f12531b
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All those layers of silence upon silence.
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Donna Tartt |