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5b82dbd
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Three years is a long time." "It is to us. But in the scheme of things--not at all. I mean," said Andy reasonably, "look at some poor dumb bunny like Sabine Ingersoll or that idiot James Villiers. Forrest fucking Longstreet."
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Donna Tartt |
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ed1ca9e
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But while I have never considered myself a very good person, neither can I bring myself to believe that I am spectacularly bad one. Perhaps it's simply impossible to think of oneself in such a way.
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Donna Tartt |
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394c86d
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It seemed the best thing was just to come right out and say it. 'You know,' I said, 'I'm really not attracted to you. I mean, not that -' 'Isn't that interesting,' he said coolly. 'I'm really not attracted to you, either.' 'But -' 'You were there.
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Donna Tartt |
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66d260f
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It was as if I'd suffered a chemical change of the spirit: as if the acid balance of my psyche had shifted and leached the life out of me in aspects impossible to repair, or reverse, like a frond of living coral hardened to bone.
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Donna Tartt |
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5529c5c
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Pur: that one word contains for me the secret, the bright, terrible clarity of ancient Greek. How can I make you see it, this strange harsh light which pervades Homer's landscapes and illumines the dialogues of Plato, an alien light, inarticulable in our common tongue? Our shared language is a language of the intricate, the peculiar, the home of pumpkins and ragamuffins and bodkins and beer, the tongue of Ahab and Falstaff and Mrs Gamp; and..
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Donna Tartt |
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0c2ee87
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At home, my mother had known how to suffocate my dad's anger by growing silent, a low, unwavering flame of contempt that sucked all the oxygen out of the room and made everything he said and did seem ridiculous.
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Donna Tartt |
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17da826
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Adrift in an air of charged significance, doubt struck me: was it a real memory, had he really spoken those words to me, or was I dreaming?
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Donna Tartt |
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18ce0b1
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For humans--trapped in biology--there was no mercy: we lived a while, we fussed around for a bit and died, we rotted in the ground like garbage. Time destroyed us all soon enough. But to destroy, or lose, a deathless thing--to break bonds stronger than the temporal--was a metaphysical uncoupling all its own, a startling new flavor of despair. My
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Donna Tartt |
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4acaf95
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lights and moods and seasons was to see it a thousand different ways and to keep it shut in the dark--a thing made of light, that only lived in light--was wrong in more ways than I knew how to explain. More than wrong: it was crazy.
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Donna Tartt |
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855af0a
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The description of shock and grief hot so close to home: "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 illuminated 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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e674345
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to me, the hallmark of the modern mind is that it loves to wander from its subject) I
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Donna Tartt |
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ceff1fc
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the atmosphere it breathed was like the light-rinsed airiness of a wall opposite an open window.
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Donna Tartt |
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9fe6705
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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 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 he..
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Donna Tartt |
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83fdaa7
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But those sparkling blue shallows- so enticing at first glance- had not yet graded off into depths, so that sometimes I got the disconcerting sensation of wading around in knee-high waters hoping to step into a drop-off, a place deep enough to swim.
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Donna Tartt |
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78027a5
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he used to speak of how with very great paintings it's possible to know them deeply, inhabit them almost, even through copies. Even Proust -- there's a famous passage where Odette opens the door with a cold, she's sulky, her hair is loose and undone, her skin is patchy, and Swann, who has never cared about her until that moment, falls in love with her because she looks like a Botticelli girl from a slightly damaged fresco. Which Proust hims..
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Donna Tartt |
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dabb5b9
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Whatever teaches us to talk to ourselves is important: whatever teaches us to sing ourselves our of despair.
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Donna Tartt |
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74b58cb
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in whatever wink of consciousness that remained to me 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.
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Donna Tartt |
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01c0f78
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But the intimacy, the smallness, also made me feel shut out; and I found myself hurrying past the inviting little doorways with my head down, very aware of all the convivial Sunday-morning lives unrolling around me in private.
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Donna Tartt |
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6268578
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strenuous occasions where (jumpy, un-opiated, wracked to the last synapse),
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Donna Tartt |
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4f2e4a5
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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." Fingertip gliding over the faded-out photo--the conservator's touch, a touch-without-touching, a commun..
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Donna Tartt |
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6f3f51d
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Still with real 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.
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Donna Tartt |
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611e30a
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loose tendons; dance world's loss; performance art's gain
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dance
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Donna Tartt |
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60b93bc
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Goyen there. Sadly not for sale." "Van Goyen? I would have sworn that was a Corot." "From here, yes, you might." He was pleased at the comparison. "Very similar painters--Vincent"
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Donna Tartt |
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0e48e02
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how can I see so clearly that everything I love or care about is illusion, and yet--for me, anyway--all that's worth living for lies in that charm?
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Donna Tartt |
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98349b4
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It is here that the stilted mannequins of my initial acquaintance begin to yawn and stretch and come to life. It was months before the gloss and mystery of newness, which kept me from seeing them with much objectivity, would wear entirely off... it is here, in my memory, that they cease being totally foreign and begin to appear, for the first time, in shapes very like their bright old selves.
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Donna Tartt |
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fefc990
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That is to say: I wanted to maintain the illusion that their dealings with me were completely straightforward; that we were all friends, and no secrets, though the plain fact of it was that there were plenty of things they didn't let me in on and would not for some time. And though I tried to ignore this I was aware of it all the same.
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Donna Tartt |
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c686f12
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I was so haunted and stirred even by her plainness suggested - ominously - a love more binding than physical affection, some tar-pit of the soul where I might flop around and malinger for years.
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Donna Tartt |
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04d3a1d
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What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight towards a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster? Is Kitsey right? If your deepest self is singing and coaxing you straight toward the bonfire, is it better to turn away? Ignore..
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Donna Tartt |
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aad096a
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or rather, how strange to find that the present contained such a bright shard of the living past, damaged and eroded but not destroyed.
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Donna Tartt |
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5eabbd1
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One's thought patterns become different (...), when forced into the confines of a rigid and unfamiliar tongue. Certain common ideas become inexpressible; other, previously undreamt-of ones spring to life, finding miraculous new articulation.
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Donna Tartt |
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69fd74d
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She cast a charmed theatrical light about her so that to see anything through her eyes was to see it in brighter colors than ordinary.
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Donna Tartt |
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dcdcfbd
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real age, as I came to see from the genuine pieces that passed through my hands, was variable, crooked, capricious, singing here and sullen there, warm asymmetrical streaks on a rosewood cabinet from where a slant of sun had struck it while the other side was as dark as the day it was cut.
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beauty
ageing
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Donna Tartt |
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291e29e
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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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3e7ca6d
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A sunstruck instant that existed now and forever.
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Donna Tartt |
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400ad1c
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It is easy to see things in retrospect. But I was ignorant then of everything but my own happiness, and I don't know what else to say except that life itself seemed very magical in those days: a web of symbol, coincidence, premonition, omen. Everything, somehow, fit together; some sly and benevolent Providence was revealing itself by degrees and I felt myself trembling on the brink of a fabulous discovery, as though any morning it was all g..
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Donna Tartt |
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612f367
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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 spring to life, finding miraculous new articulation.
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Donna Tartt |
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889374d
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It was nothing I hadn't thought of, plenty, and in far less taxing circumstances; the urge shook me grandly and unpredictably, a poisonous whisper that never wholly left me, that on some days lingered just on the threshold of my hearing but on others roared up uncontrollably into a sort of lurid visionary frenzy, why I wasn't sure, sometimes even a bad movie or a gruesome dinner party could trigger it, short term boredom and long term pain,..
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Donna Tartt |
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16238c1
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They turned up the volume of the inner monologue, magnified qualities already present to great excess, made people so much themselves that they couldn't stand it. "And how can we lose this maddening"
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Donna Tartt |
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c6bb2a1
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By his own choice, he had so little contact with the outside world that he frequently considered the commonplace to be bizarre: an automatic-teller machine, for instance, or some new peculiarity in the supermarket--cereal shaped like vampires, or unrefrigerated yogurt sold in pop-top cans.
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Donna Tartt |
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f4f6b00
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My heart - which, thrilled at my daring, had held its breath for a moment or two - began suddenly to beat quite wildly
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Donna Tartt |
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47b68a3
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And it may be a superhuman effort to lose oneself so completely, but that's nothing compared to the effort of getting oneself back again.
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Donna Tartt |
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8c440d9
|
Something strangled them as they grew older, made them doubt their own powers--laziness? Habit? Their grip slackened; they stopped fighting and resigned themselves to what happened. "That's Life." That's what they all said. "That's Life, Harriet, that's just how it is, you'll see."
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Donna Tartt |
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82ab9e6
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And how can we lose this maddening self, lose it entirely? Love? Yes, but as old Cephalus once heard Sophocles say, the least of us know that love is a cruel and terrible master. One loses oneself for the sake of the other, but in doing so becomes enslaved and miserable to the most capricious of all the gods.
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Donna Tartt |
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872f756
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As much as I enjoyed her company I was slightly uneasy in her presence; not because of any lack of charm of kindness on her part, but because of a too-strong wish to impress her on mine,
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Donna Tartt |