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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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45c6e7a
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Quiza la buena suerte se parecia a la mala suerte en que tardabas un tiempo en asimilarla.
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Donna Tartt |
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4c07f9d
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None of us ever find enough kindness in the world, do we?
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Donna Tartt |
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df4f7c3
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A veces tienes que perder para ganar.
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Donna Tartt |
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28cb54c
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Penso che in questo caso dovremmo chiamarla ironia della sorte, piu che divina provvidenza." "Si, ma perche vuoi darle un nome? E se fossero la stessa cosa?"
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Donna Tartt |
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d352cf0
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the world is much stranger than we know or can say. And I know how you think, or how you like to think, but maybe this is one instance where you can't boil down to pure 'good' or pure 'bad' like you always want to do--? Like, your two different piles? Bad over here, good over here? Maybe not quite so simple. Because--all the way driving here, driving all night, Christmas lights on the motorway and I'm not ashamed to tell you, I got choked u..
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Donna Tartt |
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bc72dca
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Every time I thought of it my stomach squirmed, so that my first instinct was to slam the lid down hard and think of something else.
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Donna Tartt |
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d993ffd
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The thing to remember," said Dave, the psychiatrist who had been assigned to me by the city, "is that you'll be taken care of no matter what." He was a thirtyish guy with dark clothes and trendy eyeglasses who always looked as if he'd just come from a poetry reading in the basement of some church."
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Donna Tartt |
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093cbb5
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She'd heard the stories so often that she knew them by heart, could repeat them if she wanted, sometimes even dash in a detail or two neglected in the retelling [...]. The stories were familiar much as stories from her mother's girlhood were familiar, or stories from books. But none of them seemed connected with her in any fundamental way.
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Donna Tartt |
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e93fcf5
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No law against throwing a coat in the canal, is there?" "I would have thought so, yes." "Well--who knows. Not very widely enforced law, if you ask me"
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Donna Tartt |
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e0c29da
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Because--what if that particular goldfinch (and it is very particular) had never been captured or born into captivity, displayed in some household where the painter Fabritius was able to see it? It can never have understood why it was forced to live in such misery: bewildered by noise ( as I imagine), distressed by smoke, barking dogs, cooking smells, teased by drunkards and children, tethered to fly on the shortest of chains. Yet even a ch..
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Donna Tartt |
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441a004
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I knew my mother's feet, her clothes, her two-tone black and white shoes - and long after I was sure of it I made myself stand in their midst, folded deep inside myself like a sick pigeon with its eyes closed.
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Donna Tartt |
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e6b515d
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It used to be a perfectly ordinary day but now it sticks up on the calendar like a rusty nail.)
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Donna Tartt |
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c50c2d8
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Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. (...) We want to be devoured by it, to hide ourselves in that fire which refines us.
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Donna Tartt |
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c5117fb
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Also they have rattlesnakes, and the death penalty, which I think is primitive and unethical
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Donna Tartt |
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4d18d8a
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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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76c3da0
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Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it... We want to be devoured by it, to hide ourselves in that fire which refines us.
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Donna Tartt |
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7678215
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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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d8bc80c
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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.
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Donna Tartt |
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368987a
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It was six o'clock in the morning, and the sun was rising over the mountains, and the birches, and the impossibly green meadows; and to me, dazed with night and no sleep and three days on the highway, it was like a country from a dream.
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Donna Tartt |
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98945ba
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Sometimes, when there's been an accident and reality is too sudden and strange to comprehend, the surreal will take over. Action slows to a dreamlike glide, frame by frame; the motion of a hand, a sentence spoken, fills an eternity. Little things--a cricket on a stem, the veined branches on a leaf--are magnified, brought from the background in achingly clear focus.
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Donna Tartt |
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69b629a
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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?
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Donna Tartt |
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73fe1e6
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Perche quella piccola voce ostinata nella nostra testa ci tormenta cosi?>> disse , guardandoci. <
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tragedy
philosophy
donna-tartt
the-secret-history
philosophy-quotes
philosophy-of-life
greek
human-nature
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Donna Tartt |
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e56802c
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Eugene accepted the legitimacy of such phenomena, much as he and his brothers accepted the pageantry and feuds of World Federation professional wrestling, not caring much if some of the matches were fixed.
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Donna Tartt |
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d245d66
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aware that Allison's eyes were on him, stepped backwards and began instead to swivel his lower body in an oddly lascivious and adult-looking little dance.
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Donna Tartt |
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f837c5b
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I hadn't been at school since the day before my mother died and as long as I stayed away her death seemed unofficial somehow. But once I went back it would be a public fact. Worse: the thought of returning to any kind of normal routine seemed disloyal, wrong.
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Donna Tartt |
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2d9725e
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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, disaster? If your deepest self is singing and coaxing you straig..
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Donna Tartt |
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3504199
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And what would I do ? Part of me was immobile, stunned with despair, like those rats that lose hope in laboratory experiments and lie down in the maze to starve.
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Donna Tartt |
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bb1e442
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Is it better to throw yourself head first and laughing into the holy rage calling your name?
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Donna Tartt |
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720acb7
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But when she was annoyed with me, she had a cold way of saying "Apparently" in answer to almost anything I said, making me feel stupid. "Um, I can't find the can opener." "Apparently." "There's going to be a lunar eclipse tonight." "Apparently." "Look, sparks are coming out of the wall socket." "Apparently."
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humour
humor
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Donna Tartt |
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2e0f8aa
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During the next week, everyone noticed that my appetite had improved, even Toddy. "Are you done with your hunger strike?" he asked me curiously, one morning. "Toddy, eat your breakfast." "But I thought that was what it was called. When people don't eat." "No, a hunger strike is for people in prison," Kitsey said coolly. "Kitten," said Mr. Barbour, in a warning tone. "Yes, but he ate three waffles yesterday," said Toddy, looking eagerl..
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humour
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Donna Tartt |
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63f6f94
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Running might take her forward, it could even take her home; but it couldn't take her back--not ten minutes, ten hours, not ten years or days.
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Donna Tartt |
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3e084b8
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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 toward a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster?...If your deepest self is singing and coaxing you straig..
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Donna Tartt |
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76754f9
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Who was it said that coincidence was just God's way of remaining anonymous?
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Donna Tartt |
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b417ece
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Weren't we, as sentient beings, put upon the earth to be happy, in the brief time allotted to us?
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Donna Tartt |
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73e90c9
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a few hours could change everything - 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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5277946
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Sigoura pote den mporese na katalabei giati etan upokhreomene na zei se tose dustukhia :skiagmene apo thorubous ,pnigmene ston kapno, me skulia na gabgizoun, murodies apo phageta pou mageireuontan, methustakes kai paidia na ten pilateuoun, to mekos tes alusidas elakhisto. Entoutois , akoma kai ena paidi mporei na dei ten axioprepeia tes: E ensarkose tou sthenous se lepta phtera kai euthrausta kokala. Okhi phobismene , oute kan apelpismene, ..
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Donna Tartt |
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f2bc088
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I began to laugh uncontrollably, so hard I nearly fell off the swing, because I knew then for sure he saw the same thing I did. More than that: we were creating it. Whatever the drug was making us see, we were constructing it together. And, with that realization, the virtual-reality simulator flipped into color. It happened for both of us at the same time, pop! We looked at each other and just laughed; everything was hysterically funny, eve..
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friendship
love
theo-decker
ecstasy
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Donna Tartt |
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e1522f3
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He would deny this is confronted, citing evasively his affection for Dante and Giotto, but anything overtly religious filled him with a pagan alarm; and I believe that like Pliny, whom he resembled in so many respects, he secretly thought it to be a degenerate cult carried to extravagant lengths.
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Donna Tartt |
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955a398
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I supposed that when anyone accustomed to working with the mind is faced with a straightforward action, there's a tendency to embellish, to make it overly clever. On paper there's a certain symmetry. Now that I'm faced with the prospect of executing it I realize how hideously complicated it is.
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Donna Tartt |
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a1cdeb2
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I can't believe you two," Henry said crossly. "I reminded you of this last night." "But we forgot," said the twins, in simultaneous despair. "How could you?" "Well, if you wake up intending to murder someone at two o'clock, you hardly think what you're going to feed the corpse for dinner." "Asparagus is in season," said Francis helpfully."
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Donna Tartt |
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69fb20a
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And what does a person with such a romantic temperament seek in the study of the classics? He asked this as if, having had the good fortune to catch such a rare bird as myself, he was anxious to extract my opinion while I was still captive in his office. 'If by romantic you mean solitary and introspective,' I said, 'I think romantics are frequently the best classicists.' He laughed. 'The great romantics are often failed classicists. But tha..
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romanticism
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Donna Tartt |
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abec892
|
I was charmed by his conversation, and despite its illusion of being rather modern and digressive (to me, the hallmark of the modern mind is that it loves to wander from its subject) I now see that he was leading me by circumlocution to the same points again and again. 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..
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modern-mind
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Donna Tartt |