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e5ee49c
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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?
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Donna Tartt |
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ff8fe8a
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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?
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Donna Tartt |
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02bf413
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The little white bundle--toddling dutifully down the hall to the front door--froze. Then a high-pitched scream as he began to run as fast as he could (which was not very fast at all, any more) and Boris--whooping with laughter--dropped to his knees. "Oh!" snatching him up, as Popchik wriggled and struggled. "You got fat! He got fat!" he said indignantly as Popchik jumped up and kissed him on the face. "You let him get fat! Yes, hello, poust..
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pets
reunion
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Donna Tartt |
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dc30bc7
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And the . Bit of a social failure. Well, that's putting it delicately. Quite overweight. Collects the cats, if you know what I mean.
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Donna Tartt |
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006bc43
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And yes--he will come to puking himself and feeling like stabbed through the head, but better there than in ambulance, BOOM, shirt cut open, mask jammed down on him, peoples slapping his face to wake him, laws involved, everyone very harsh and judgmental--believe me, Narcan, very very violent experience, you feel bad enough when you come round without being in hospital, bright lights and everyone very disapproving and hostile, treating you ..
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Donna Tartt |
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5cce5f4
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not that I'd even been thinking about Cinzia until the moment before, but it had all seemed so solid, so immutable, the whole social system of the building, a nexus where I could always stop in and see people, say hello, find out what was going on. People who had known my mother. People who had known my dad. And the farther I walked away, the more upset I got, at the loss of one of the few stable and unchanging docking-points in the world t..
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Donna Tartt |
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2d3afa3
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It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons. --SCHILLER
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Donna Tartt |
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609134a
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just as it was reassuring to know that far away, whales swam untroubled in Baltic waters and monks in arcane time zones chanted ceaselessly for the salvation of the world.
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Donna Tartt |
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576041c
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defensively.
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Donna Tartt |
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7df0ab9
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animal in the sitter (a tendency that,
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Donna Tartt |
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c693198
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I was confused by this sudden glare of attention; it was as if the characters in a favorite painting, absorbed in their own concerns, had looked up out of the canvas and spoken to me. Only the day before Francis, in a swish of black cashmere and cigarette smoke, had brushed past me in a corridor. For
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Donna Tartt |
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3c649e2
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Giovanna d'Arco aveva capeggiato un esercito quand'era poco piu grande di Harriet, e nondimeno, il Natale scorso, suo padre le aveva regalato un offensivo gioco di societa chiamato Cosa faro da grande? Era un gioco del tutto insulso, teso a indirizzare le future carriere delle partecipanti, ma per quanto bene una giocasse, soltanto quattro sbocchi le si paravano davanti: insegnante, ballerina, madre o infermiera.
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Donna Tartt |
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4f6f7f5
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and there she was, turning and smiling at me, at me! and there were way too many people in the theater because it was the seven o'clock show, way more people than I was comfortable with my generalized anxiety and hatred of crowded places and more people trickling in even after the show had started but I didn't care, it could have been a foxhole in the Somme being shelled by the Germans and all that mattered was her next to me in the dark, h..
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Donna Tartt |
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4da8796
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What if the pattern is pre-set? No no - hang on
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Donna Tartt |
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f02952a
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credulous father, a distinguished judge who had spent his final
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Donna Tartt |
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1cd1ce2
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Only here's what I really, really want someone to explain to me. What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can't be trusted--? 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, ..
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Donna Tartt |
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cb1272f
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In recent years they had fallen in with a gabby, childless couple, older than they were, called the MacNatts. Mr. MacNatt was an auto-parts salesman; Mrs. MacNatt was shaped like a pigeon and sold Avon. They had got my parents doing things like taking bus trips to factory outlets and playing a dice game called "bunko" and hanging around the piano bar at the Ramada Inn."
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Donna Tartt |
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587abbf
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Now of course, it would be easy for me to veer to the opposite extreme. I could say the secret of Julian's charm was that he latched on to young people who wanted to feel better than everybody else; that he had a strange gift for twisting feelings of inferiority into superiority and arrogance. I could also say that he did this not through altruistic motives but selfish ones, in order to fulfill some egotistic impulse of his own. And I could..
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Donna Tartt |
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1cbe2b4
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telephone, "Myriam's not my wife! This--" he handed"
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Donna Tartt |
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722066f
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God' as reference to long-term pattern we can't decipher.
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Donna Tartt |
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ae21891
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I suppose there is a certain crucial interval in everyone's life when character is fixed forever.
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Donna Tartt |
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ad2dacb
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Three coffees, two with milk, please," said Francis to the fat woman behind the counter. "No milk, just Cremora." "Well, then, just black, I guess." He turned to us. "Have you seen the paper this morning?"
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Donna Tartt |
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d76d031
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At her tone, at once intimate and formal, a terrible sadness came over me, and when we looked at each other it seemed that the whole past was redefined and brought into focus by this moment, clear as glass, a complexity of stillness that was rainy afternoons in spring, a dark chair in the hallway, the light-as-air touch of her hand on the back of my head. "I'm"
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Donna Tartt |
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91c8cdb
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I often thought how peculiar my life must look to someone reading those letters, far away.
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Donna Tartt |
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d87bd2f
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After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great,' he said. 'To escape the cognitive mode of experience, to transcend the accident to one's moment of being. There are other advantages, more difficult to speak of, things which ancient sources only hint at and which I myself only understood after the fact.
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Donna Tartt |
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4cebaa9
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Und bei diesem strammen kleinen Portrat ist es nicht schwer, das Menschliche in dem Finken zu sehen. Wurdevoll, verwundbar. Ein Gefangener, der einen anderen anschaut.
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Donna Tartt |
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597305e
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It's funny, but thinking back on it now, I realize that this particular point in time, as I stood there blinking in the deserted hall, was the one point at which I might have chosen to do something very different from what I actually did. But of course I didn't see this crucial moment then for what is was; I suppose we never do.
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Donna Tartt |
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795a852
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For that you should read the original. In very great poetry the music often comes through even when one doesn't know language. I loved Dante passionately before I knew a word of Italian.
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poetry
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Donna Tartt |
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8ca8f83
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it felt like the waking-up moment between dream and daylight where everything merged and mingled just as it was about to change, all in the same, fluid, euphoric slide:
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Donna Tartt |
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73ceb87
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I like the idea of living in a city - any city, especially a strange one - like the thought of traffic and crowds, of working in a bookstore, waiting tables in a coffee shop, who knew what kind of odd, solitary life I might slip into? Meals alone, waling the dogs in the evenings; and nobody knowing who I was.
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Donna Tartt |
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423dab4
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I sometimes get the feeling that he was less pleased by kindness itself than by the elegance of the gesture.
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Donna Tartt |
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2036c51
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I was wide awake, and yet part of me was so glassed-off and numb I was practically in a coma.
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Donna Tartt |
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1e7bc88
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And the painting, above his head, was the still point where it all hinged: dreams and signs, past and future, luck and fate.
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Donna Tartt |
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89c44a9
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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?
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Donna Tartt |
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4a707c0
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I was jarred - a little spooked as well - at so blatant a reference to something referred to, by mutual agreement, almost exclusively with codes, catchwords, a hundred different euphemisms. "It was the most important night of my life," he said calmly. "It enabled me to do what I've always wanted most." "Which is?" "To live without thinking."
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Donna Tartt |
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6207130
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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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4fc4ed2
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won't last, it's
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Donna Tartt |
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0e88025
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They were a pair of white mice, I thought--only Kitsey was a spun-sugar, fairy-princess mouse whereas Andy was more the kind of luckless, anemic, pet-shop mouse you might feed to your boa constrictor. "Get"
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Donna Tartt |
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0e1e789
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furniture polish: 16 parts beeswax, 4 parts resin, 1 part Venice turpentine,
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Donna Tartt |
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82ae4a9
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CHAPTER 3
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Donna Tartt |
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8827ed6
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Y eso es lo que hacen todos los grandes maestros. Rembrandt. Velazquez. Lo ultimo de Tiziano. Construyen la ilusion, el truco..., pero te acercas un paso mas y se desintegra en pinceladas. Abstracto, como de otro mundo. Una clase de belleza totalmente diferente y mucho mas profunda. Es y no es.
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Donna Tartt |
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6bc2180
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All that blind, infantile hunger to save and be saved, to repeat the past and make it different, had somehow attached itself, ravenously, to her.
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Donna Tartt |
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bda5041
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Tenemos el arte para no morir de la verdad. NIETZSCHE
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Donna Tartt |
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952f689
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Nitric acid. Lampblack. Furniture, like all living things, acquired marks and scars over the course of time. The effects of time, visible and invisible.
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Donna Tartt |