|
7f51baf
|
It's the place where reality strikes the ideal, where a joke becomes serious and anything serious is a joke. The magic point where every idea and its opposite are equally true.
|
|
|
Donna Tartt |
|
ab5ddae
|
does it make any sense at all to know that it ends badly for all of us, even the happiest of us, and that we all lose everything that matters in the end -- and yet to know as well, despite all this, as cruelly as the game is stacked, that it's possible to play it with a kind of joy? To try to make some meaning out of all this seems unbelievably quaint.
|
|
|
Donna Tartt |
|
78b1bf0
|
There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty - unless she is wed to something more meaningful - is always superficial.
|
|
|
Donna Tartt |
|
768c637
|
They took the wrong ones! Mistake was made! Everything is unfair! Who do we complain to, in this shitty place? Who is in charge here?"]" --
|
|
|
Donna Tartt |
|
e8540e2
|
It's not about outward appearances but inward significance. A grandeur in the world, but not of the world, a grandeur that the world doesn't understand. That first glimpse of pure otherness, in whose presence you bloom out and out and out.
|
|
|
Donna Tartt |
|
ee1df4c
|
She was breathing hard, and deep circles of red burned high on her bright cheeks; in all my life I had never seen anyone so maddeningly beautiful as she was at that moment. I stood blinking stupidly at her, the blood pounding in my veins, and my carefully rehearsed plans for a goodbye kiss forgotten, when unexpectedly she flew up and threw her arms around me. Her hoarse breath was loud in my ear and her cheek was like ice when she put it ag..
|
|
|
Donna Tartt |
|
2ab1828
|
he was about as erotic as an old football coach.
|
|
|
Donna Tartt |
|
a158b28
|
And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky - so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.
|
|
life
life-and-death
|
Donna Tartt |
|
201fb7d
|
Es una locura, pero seria feliz mirando los mismos seis cuadros el resto de mi vida. No se me ocurre una forma mejor de enloquecer.
|
|
cuadros
|
Donna Tartt |
|
64f53b6
|
harsh lights and narrow hallways, images which did not seem so much theatrical or foreign as imbued with the indelible quality of memory, of experience lived.
|
|
|
Donna Tartt |
|
833b035
|
Sometimes I wondered exactly what it might take to break Andy out of his math-nerd turret: a tidal wave? Decepticon invasion? Godzilla tromping down Fifth Avenue? He was a planet without an atmosphere.
|
|
|
Donna Tartt |
|
fdac4a5
|
it felt adult, sophisticated, slightly alcoholic.
|
|
|
Donna Tartt |
|
a6b5c40
|
it didn't matter what the books said, what the experts said, what similar items at Christie's had recently gone for. An object--any object--was worth whatever you could get somebody to pay for it.
|
|
|
Donna Tartt |
|
d8574cd
|
We stood looking at each other. It was raining. She looked at me with her rain-colored eyes.
|
|
|
Donna Tartt |
|
867aca1
|
A month or two before, I would have been appalled at the idea of any murder at all. But that Sunday afternoon, as I actually stood watching one, it seemed the easiest thing in the world.
|
|
|
Donna Tartt |
|
64380c3
|
Joan of Arc had led armies when she was hardly older than Harriet. Yet, for Christmas last year, Harriet's father had given Harriet an insulting board game for girls called What Shall I Be? It was a particularly flimsy game, meant to offer career guidance but no matter how well you played, it offered only four possible futures: teacher, ballerina, mother, or nurse.
|
|
|
Donna Tartt |
|
ad0f0e0
|
Te sorprenderia saber hasta que punto las pequenas cosas cotidianas pueden sacarnos de nuestra desesperacion.
|
|
|
Donna Tartt |
|
76e7cc1
|
What if all your actions and choices, good or bad, make no difference to God? What if the pattern is pre-set? No no--hang on--this is a question worth struggling with. What if our badness and mistakes are the very thing that set our fate and bring us round to good? What if, for some of us, we can't get there any other way
|
|
|
Donna Tartt |
|
a71366d
|
I never realized, you know, how much we rely on appearances," he said. "It's not that we're so smart, it's just that we don't look like we did it. We might as well be a bunch of Sunday-school teachers as far as everyone else is concerned. But these guys won't be taken in by that."
|
|
|
Donna Tartt |
|
d0eddab
|
Henry. Please." I was on the verge of tears. "What's the matter with you? Have you lost your mind? Don't you understand what's going on?" He stood up, dusted his hands on his trousers."
|
|
|
Donna Tartt |
|
deb7294
|
Hobie's presence below stairs was an anchor, a friendly weight...
|
|
|
Donna Tartt |
|
671dae4
|
and yet, whenever he started with the questions I froze stiff, as if I'd been pushed onstage in a play where I didn't know the lines.
|
|
theatre
speechless
lines
stage
|
Donna Tartt |
|
79bff0f
|
There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty--unless she is wed to something more meaningful--is always superficial. It is not that your Julian chooses solely to concentrate on certain, exalted things; it is that he chooses to ignore others equally as important.
|
|
|
Donna Tartt |
|
6d3fa5f
|
It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from all the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one's burned tongues and skinned knees, that one's aches and pains are all one's own. Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can never truly understand us. Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that's why we're so anxious to lose them, don't you think?
|
|
|
Donna Tartt |
|
d723727
|
But just when I thought I was going to get away, the creaky machinery of his face began to grind and a cardboard dawn of recognition was lowered, with jerks, from the dusty proscenium.
|
|
|
Donna Tartt |
|
ec82b9c
|
The value of Greek prose composition, he said, was not that it gave one any particular facility in the language that could not be gained as easily by other methods but that if done properly, off the top of one's head, it taught one to think in Greek. One's thought patterns become different, he said, when forced into the confines of a rigid and unfamiliar tongue. Certain common ideas become inexpressible; other, previously undreamt-of ones s..
|
|
language
|
Donna Tartt |
|
caade1a
|
In my light-headedness and fatigue, which made me feel drastically cut off from myself and as if I were observing it all at a remove, I walked past candy shops and coffee shops and shops with antique toys and Delft tiles from the 1800s, old mirrors and silver glinting in the rich, cognac-colored light, inlaid French cabinets and tables in the French court style with garlanded carvings and veneerwork that would have made Hobie gasp with admi..
|
|
|
Donna Tartt |
|
524aeb6
|
After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great. To escape the cognitive mode of experience, to transcend the accident of one's moment of being.
|
|
|
Donna Tartt |
|
81c7fb9
|
distracted themselves with all kinds of gadgets and devices, flooding themselves incessantly with information and texts and communication and entertainment from every direction to try to make themselves forget it: where we were, what we were.
|
|
|
Donna Tartt |
|
2e08f34
|
All those years I'd drifted along too glassy and insulated for any kind of reality to push through: a delirium which had spun me along on its slow, relaxed wave since childhood, high and lying on the shag carpet in Vegas laughing at the ceiling fan, only I wasn't laughing any more, Rip van Winkle wincing and holding his head on the ground about a hundred years too late.
|
|
|
Donna Tartt |
|
80da100
|
Because--the line of beauty is the line of beauty. It doesn't matter if it's been through the Xerox machine a hundred times ... Still with greatness, there's a jolt at the end of the wire. It doesn't matter how often you grab hold of the line, or how many people have grabbed hold of it before you. It's the same line. Fallen from a higher life. It still carries some of the same shock.
|
|
|
Donna Tartt |
|
ff6a856
|
You see one painting, I see another, the art book puts it at another remove still, the lady buying the greeting card at the museum gift shop sees something else entire, and that's not even to mention the people separated from us by time--four hundred years before us, four hundred years after we're gone--it'll never strike anybody the same way and the great majority of people it'll never strike in any deep way at all but--a really great pain..
|
|
|
Donna Tartt |
|
29bbb9a
|
really great painting is fluid enough to work its way into the mind and heart through all kinds of different angles, in ways that are unique and very particular.
|
|
|
Donna Tartt |
|
a4a19ea
|
Now searchers have departed, and life has grown quiet around me, I have come to realize that while for years I might have imagined myself to be somewhere else, in reality I have been there all the time: up at the the top by the muddy wheel-ruts in the new grass, where the sky is dark over the shivering apple blossoms and the first chill of the snow that will fall that night is already in the air.
|
|
|
Donna Tartt |
|
51dbb53
|
I'd felt drowned and extinguished by vastness--not just the predictable vastness of time, and space, but the impassable distances between people even when they were within arm's reach of each other, and with a swell of vertigo I thought of all the places I'd been and all the places I hadn't, a world lost and vast and unknowable, dingy maze of cities and alleyways, far-drifting ash and hostile immensities, connections missed, things lost and..
|
|
|
Donna Tartt |
|
5a84d84
|
And that's why I've chosen to write these pages as I've written them. For only by stepping into the middle zone, the polychrome edge between truth and untruth, is it tolerable to be here and writing this at all.
|
|
|
Donna Tartt |
|
2d43b18
|
Maybe that's why I tend to equate physical beauty with qualities with which it has absolutely nothing to do. I see a pretty mouth or a moody pair of eyes and imagine all sorts of deep affinities, private kinships.
|
|
|
Donna Tartt |
|
659c721
|
I felt I understood the secret grandeur of dying, all the knowledge held back from all humankind until the very end: no pain, no fear, magnificent detachment, lying in state upon the death barge and receding into the grand immensities like an emperor, gone, gone, observing all the distant scurryers on shore, freed from all the old human pettiness of love and fear and grief and death.
|
|
|
Donna Tartt |
|
7ddcbba
|
In short: I felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way. I
|
|
|
Donna Tartt |
|
db9ad08
|
Did she ever have the sense of observing herself from afar, as I often did, as if the explosion had knocked my body and my soul into two separate entities that remained about six feet apart from one another?
|
|
|
Donna Tartt |
|
ed76d08
|
And someplace, if there is a place where lists are kept, and credit given, I am sure there is a gold star by his name.
|
|
|
Donna Tartt |
|
2843c03
|
a love more binding than physical affection, some tar-pit of the soul where I might flop around and malinger for years.
|
|
passion
|
Donna Tartt |
|
0e560dd
|
The absurd does not liberate; it binds. --ALBERT CAMUS
|
|
|
Donna Tartt |
|
9db4913
|
Worse: the thought of returning to any kind of normal routine seemed disloyal, wrong. It kept being a shock every time I remembered it, a fresh slap: she was gone. 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.
|
|
|
Donna Tartt |