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6956fe2
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All right," said Julian, looking around the table. "I hope we're all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?"
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Donna Tartt |
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0325c09
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Son nuestros secretos los que nos definen, y no la cara que mostramos al mundo.
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Donna Tartt |
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b2593aa
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It is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.
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Donna Tartt |
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7df7666
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It was one of the reasons I loved him: for that flattering light in which he saw me, for the person I was when I was with him, for what it was he allowed me to be.
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Donna Tartt |
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25674c2
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The vitality of the act was entirely obfuscated, the beauty, the terror, the sacrifice.' He took one last drag of this cigarette and put it out. 'Quite simply,' he said, 'we didn't believe. And belief was the one condition which was absolutely necessary. Belief, and absolute surrender.
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Donna Tartt |
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ee59899
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Birds can sing and fish can swim and I can do this.
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imagination
inspirational
harriet
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Donna Tartt |
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97854a5
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While I was still in Amsterdam, I dreamed about my mother for the first time in years.
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opening-lines
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Donna Tartt |
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de61edf
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and felt the strangeness of the city pressing in all around me, smells of tobacco and malt and nutmeg, cafe walls the melancholy brown of an old leather-bound book and then beyond, dark passages and brackish water lapping, low skies and old buildings all leaning against each other with a moody, poetic, edge-of-destruction feel, the cobblestoned loneliness of a city that felt--to me, anyway--like a place where you might come to let the water..
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Donna Tartt |
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04f4ec2
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Perche se e vero che il male puo discendere dalle buone azioni... dove sta scritto che da quelle cattive puo venire solo il male? Magari a volte - il modo sbagliato e quello giusto? Magari prendi la strada sbagliata e ti porta comunque dove volevi? O vedila in un altro modo, certe volte puoi sbagliare tutto, e alla fine viene fuori che andava bene?
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Donna Tartt |
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e111c9d
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Non m'interessa quello che dice la gente, quanto spesso lo dice ne con quanto entusiasmo: nessuno mi convincera mai che la vita e una sorpresa stupenda e appagante. Perche questa e la verita: la vita e una catastrofe. Il fatto fondamentale dell'esistenza - il nostro vagare in cerca di cibo, o di veri amici o di qualunque altra cosa - e una catastrofe. [...] meglio non nascere, che nascere in questa fogna. [...] che senso ha sapere che andra..
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Donna Tartt |
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50ba61f
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Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that's why we're so anxious to lose them, don't you think? Remember
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Donna Tartt |
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ab5992b
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She was wearing a man's nightshirt, much too big for her, and I found myself staring at her bare legs--tawny calves, slender ankles, lovely, dusty-soled boyfeet.
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Donna Tartt |
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f8377f6
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Because: if our secrets define us, as opposed to the face we show the world: then the painting was the secret that raised me above the surface of life and enabled me to know who I am. And it's there: in my notebooks, every page, even though it's not.
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Donna Tartt |
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f80d500
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It does not to do be frightened of things about which you know nothing,' he said. 'You are like children. Afraid of the dark.
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Donna Tartt |
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b68aa1a
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then realized she wasn't there. Or--she was there and she wasn't. Part of her was there, but it was invisible. The invisible part was the important part. This was something I had never understood before. But when I tried to say this out loud the words came out in a muddle and I realized with a cold slap that I was wrong. Both parts had to be together. You couldn't have one part without the other.
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Donna Tartt |
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55018bc
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And I'm hoping there's some larger truth about suffering here, or at least my understanding of it -- although I've come to realize that the only truths that matter to me are the ones I don't, and can't, understand.
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Donna Tartt |
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b106073
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I think about it quite a bit, actually, that look on his face. I think about a lot of things. I think about the first time I ever saw a birch tree; about the last time I saw Julian; about the first sentence that I ever learned in Greak. khalepa ta kala. Beauty is harsh.
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Donna Tartt |
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2db03f3
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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? Those first images that crack your heart wide open and you spend the rest of your life chasing, or trying to recapture, in one way or another?
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Donna Tartt |
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785c1fe
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Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you. What you want to live and be happy in the world is a woman who has her own life and lets you have yours.
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Donna Tartt |
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c499965
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Because, here's the truth: life is catastrophe. The basic fact of existence--of walking around trying to feed ourselves and find friends and whatever else we do--is catastrophe. Forget all this ridiculous 'Our Town' nonsense everyone talks: the miracle of a newborn babe, the joy of one simple blossom, Life You Are Too Wonderful To Grasp, &c. For me--and I'll keep repeating it doggedly till I die, till I fall over on my ungrateful nihilistic..
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Donna Tartt |
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daa987e
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And as terrible as this is, I get it. We can't choose what we want and don't want and that's the hard lonely truth. Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it's going to kill us. We can't escape who we are.
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Donna Tartt |
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28e1157
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Nihil sub sole novum [...] Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.
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Donna Tartt |
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c417edc
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But Beauty--unless she is wed to something more meaningful--is always superficial. It
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Donna Tartt |
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ec0e24a
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We drank our tea. The lamplight was warm and the apartment still and snug. At home in bed, in my private abyss of longing, the scenes i dreamed of always began like this: drowsy drunken hour, the two of us alone, scenarios in which invariably she would brush against me as if by chance, or lean coveniently close, cheek touching mine, to point out a passage in a book, opportunities that i would seize, gently but manfully, as exordium to more ..
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Donna Tartt |
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6bc275a
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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 grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game. Squirming
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Donna Tartt |
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cf60c36
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Over and over I played her favorite Arvo Part, as a way of being with her; and she had only to mention recently read novel for me to grab it up hungrily, to be inside her thoughts, a sort of telepathy
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obsession
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Donna Tartt |
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1cb721b
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She was young still, and the chains had not yet grown tight around her ankles...Whatever was to be done, she would do it.
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Donna Tartt |
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4cbc354
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It does all swing around strangely sometimes, doesn't it.
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Donna Tartt |
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762f32a
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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 here, it's our task to immerse ourselves anywa..
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Donna Tartt |
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f25f0a8
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picking up the phone to say hello, somehow I never had. "Are you okay?" --
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Donna Tartt |
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70e1594
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Well, girls always love assholes," said Platt, not bothering to dispute this. "Haven't you noticed?" No, I thought bleakly, untrue. Else why didn't Pippa love me?"
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heartbreak
love
unrequited-love
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Donna Tartt |
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4301c46
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Isn't everything worthwhile a gamble? Can't good come around sometimes through some strange back doors?
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Donna Tartt |
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2e77ef0
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coincidence was just God's way of remaining anonymous?
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Donna Tartt |
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ddc22c0
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it's so heartbreaking and unnecessary how we lose things. From pure carelessness. Fires, wars. The Parthenon, used as a munitions storehouse. I guess that anything we manage to save from history is a miracle." p28"
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Donna Tartt |
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2f4a981
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I was different, but it wasn't. And as the light flickered over it in bands, I had the queasy sense of my own life, in comparison, as a patternless and transient burst of energy, a fizz of biological static just as random as the street lamps flashing past.
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Donna Tartt |
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33d5b6b
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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 Earth." "So--"
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Donna Tartt |
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2a9ba13
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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.
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Donna Tartt |
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f88faf6
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It was better never to have been born - never to have wanted anything, never to have hoped for anything.
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Donna Tartt |
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6e0e334
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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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0a3dc4e
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The light of long ago is different from the light of today and yet here, in this house, I'm reminded of the past at every turn.
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Donna Tartt |
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c7fda09
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Maybe good luck was like bad luck in that it took awhile for it to sink in. You don't feel anything at first. The feeling came later on.
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Donna Tartt |
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f560d97
|
And I'm hoping there's some larger truth about suffering here, or at least my understanding of it - although I've come to realize that the only truths that matter to me are the ones I don't, and can't, understand. What's
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Donna Tartt |
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1de674f
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exactly that girl, not the prettiest, but the no-makeup and kind of ordinary-looking girl he'd chosen to be happy
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Donna Tartt |
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6cc7335
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What if--is more complicated than that? What if maybe opposite is true as well? Because, if bad can sometimes come from good actions--? where does it ever say, anywhere, that only bad can come from bad actions? Maybe sometimes--the wrong way is the right way? You can take the wrong path and it still comes out where you want to be? Or, spin it another way, sometimes you can do everything wrong and it still turns out to be right?" "I'm not su..
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Donna Tartt |