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850e727
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these people are crazy. I mean like shooting-guns-at-chickens crazy.
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Donna Tartt |
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ba47a9c
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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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6a51018
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Intentionally or no: I had extinguished a light at the heart of the world.
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Donna Tartt |
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22149b0
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Minie balls and repeating rifles. That was why the body count was so high. We had trench warfare in America way before WW1. p128
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war
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Donna Tartt |
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d7e4620
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A teahouse amid the cherry blossoms, on the way to death. p136
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japanese-death-poem
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Donna Tartt |
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3841c5c
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He had an orange stain on his mouth from the prawns, the old jabberwock.
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donna tartt |
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54bb527
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And--maybe it's ridiculous to go on in this vein, although it doesn't matter since no one's ever going to see this--but does it make any sense at all to know that it ends badly for all of us, even the happiest
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Donna Tartt |
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02966dd
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if you didn't take picture from museum, and Sascha didn't steal it back, and I didn't think of claiming reward--well, wouldn't all those dozens of other paintings remain missing too? Forever maybe? Wrapped in brown paper? Still shut in that apartment? No one to look at them? Lonely and lost to the world? Maybe the one had to be lost for the others to be found?" "I think this goes more to the idea of 'relentless irony' than 'divine providenc..
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Donna Tartt |
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f33911d
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And yet it was remarkable too how his world limped on without him. Strange, I thought, as I jumped a sheet of water at the curb, how 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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affead2
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What do you think about America?" "Everyone always smiles so big! Well--most people. Maybe not so much you. I think it looks stupid." --
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literature
fiction
the-goldfinch
literary-fiction
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Donna Tartt |
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6d358c2
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Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you
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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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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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reunion
pets
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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
|
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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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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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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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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13c1dd5
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It had been a conscious decision to pull free. It had taken everything I had to do it, like an animal gnawing a limb off to escape a trap.
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Donna Tartt |
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847b298
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You had to hand it to her: she was as cool as dammit.
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Donna Tartt |
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75bd6ce
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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. And
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Donna Tartt |
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db2f6c0
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and leaving
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Donna Tartt |
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39b6600
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Then why aren't you happy?" "I don't want to talk about it." "And"
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Donna Tartt |
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3e0426c
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The silence between us was happy and strange, connected by the cord and the icy voices thinly echoing. "You don't have to talk," she said. "If you don't feel like it." Her eyelids were heavy and her voice was drowsy and like a secret. "People always want to talk but I like being quiet."
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Donna Tartt |
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f565673
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But my loyalties were elsewhere. And the flavor of Pippa's kiss--bittersweet and strange--stayed with me all the way back uptown, swaying and sleepy as I sailed home on the bus, melting with sorrow and loveliness, a starry ache that lifted me up above the windswept city like a kite: my head in the rainclouds, my heart in the sky.
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Donna Tartt |
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f0c42b8
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affectionate exasperated breath I knew
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Donna Tartt |
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0f30fcb
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The least I could do was be kind to his mother and sister. It didn't occur to me then, though it certainly does now, that it was years since I'd roused myself from my stupor of misery and self-absorption; between anomie and trance, inertia and parenthesis and gnawing my own heart out, there were a lot of small, easy, everyday kindnesses I'd missed out on; and even the word kindness was like rising from unconsciousness into some hospital awa..
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Donna Tartt |
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90e3771
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I began to realize, with some little horror, that she was nothing more than a lowbrow, pop-psychology version of Sylvia Plath. It lasted forever, like some weepy and endless made-for-TV movie--all the clinging, all the complaints, all the parking-lot confessions of "inadequacy" and "poor self-image," all those banal sorrows."
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Donna Tartt |
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406db7f
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And though it's a bleak thing to admit all these years later, still I've never met anyone who made me feel loved the way she did. Everything came alive in her company; 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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love
mother
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Donna Tartt |
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818da78
|
A goodbye at the gate," said Hobie. He seemed to be talking partly to himself. "That's what he would have wanted. The parting glimpse, the death haiku--he wouldn't have liked to leave without stopping to speak to someone along the way. 'A teahouse amid the cherry blossoms, on the way to death.' " He"
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Donna Tartt |
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08799dd
|
Hordes of people on the street, lighted Christmas trees sparkling high on penthouse balconies and complacent Christmas music floating out of shops, and weaving in and out of crowds I had a strange feeling of being already dead,
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Donna Tartt |
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7aef9ba
|
After class, I wandered downstairs in a dream, my head spinning, but acutely, achingly conscious that I was alive and young on a beautiful day
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Donna Tartt |
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ffb3c45
|
And besides (I told myself) wasn't it time to Move Forward, Let Go, turn from the garden that was locked to me? Live In The Present, Focus On The Now instead of grieving for what I could never have?
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Donna Tartt |
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8813e16
|
Well--let's put it another way. Who was it said that coincidence was just God's way of remaining anonymous?
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Donna Tartt |