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f2ab4ad
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valiant efforts to make conversation all stumbled and sank into quicksand. The main thing I remembered were the forced smiles, the heavy smell of cherry pipe tobacco and Grandpa Decker's not-very-friendly warning to keep my sticky little mitts off his model train set (an Alpine village which took up an entire room of their house and according to him was worth tens of thousands of dollars).
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Donna Tartt |
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90400d0
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He played with relish, sleeves rolled up, smiling at his work, tinkling from the low ranges to the high with the tricky syncopation of a tap dancer going up a Ziegfeld staircase.
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Donna Tartt |
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4275ccb
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out of a clear blue sky the heroes and heroines abandoned their adventures for some dull sweetheart, got married and had families, and generally started acting like a bunch of cows.
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Donna Tartt |
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969aacd
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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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76d24e3
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I waited, uncertainly, my eyes on the Japanese chest. It was a beauty, a prize for a retired sea-captain's home in backwater Boston: scrimshaw and cowrie shells, Old Testament samplers cross-stitched by unmarried sisters, the smell of whale oil burning in the evenings, the stillness of growing old.
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Donna Tartt |
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31dd38a
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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 anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back igno..
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Donna Tartt |
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cd075bd
|
DAVE THE SHRINK HAD mentioned more than once that he wished I would develop a hobby--advice I resented, as the hobbies he suggested (racquetball, table tennis, bowling) all seemed incredibly lame. If he thought a game or two of table tennis was going to help me get over my mother, he was completely out to lunch.
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Donna Tartt |
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7710601
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Her death the dividing mark: Before and After. 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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Donna Tartt |
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dc780e2
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Understand, by saying 'God,' I am merely using 'God' as a reference to long-term pattern we can't decipher. Huge, slow-moving weather system rolling in on us from afar, blowing us randomly like-- But--maybe not so random and impersonal as all that, if you get me. [...] The point is maybe that the point is too big to see or work round to on our own.
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Donna Tartt |
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c1fd258
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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
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Donna Tartt |
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12170de
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And if what she'd wanted had been impossible from the start, still there was a certain lonely comfort in the fact that she'd known it was impossible and had gone ahead and done it anyway.
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Donna Tartt |
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5d1c4cd
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Ricordate le Erinni? [...] come spingevano la gente alla pazzia? Alzavano il volume al loro monologo interiore, portavano all'estremo limite qualita gia presenti, rendevano le persone tanto se stesse, da non poterlo sopportare.
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Donna Tartt |
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00aa942
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Demands?" said Andy. "She makes it sound as if you're asking for ten million in unmarked notes."
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Donna Tartt |
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7a46376
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Koli mi sumuiemo -- prinaimni ia takii, -- mi mozhemo znaiti vtikhu, pripadaiuchi do znaiomikh predmetiv, do rechei, iaki ne zminiuiut'sia.
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Donna Tartt |
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7037f08
|
Some time in October, right around Day of the Dead actually, I stayed in a Mexican seaside hotel where the halls flowed with blown curtains and all the rooms were named after flowers. The Azalea Room, the Camellia Room, the Oleander Room. Opulence and splendor, breezy corridors that swept into something like eternity and each room with its different colored door. Peony, Wisteria, Rose, Passion Flower. And who knows - but maybe that's what's..
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Donna Tartt |
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e4cf904
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I chim dali ia ishov, tim bil'shii smutok mene opanovuvav, shcho ia vtrativ ishche odnu stabil'nu i nadiinu pristan' u sviti, pro iaku zavzhdi dumav, shcho vona vzhe nikudi vid mene ne dinet'sia: znaiomi oblichchia, radisni privitannia: hey manito! Bo ia dumav, shcho tse ostannii narizhnii kamin' mogo minulogo, shcho vin zavzhdi lishit'sia tam, de ia iogo pokinuv.
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Donna Tartt |
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516731b
|
Dumki pronizuvali mene potuzhno i nespodivano, otruinii shepit u golovi maizhe ne zmovkav, khoch inodi stavav takim tikhim, shcho zvuchav maizhe na mezhi chutnosti, ale v inshikh vipadkakh zrostav do bezkontrol'nogo revu, perekhodiv u napad shalenstva, khtozna-chomu, inodi sprichiniti iogo mig navit' poganii kinofil'm, abo zanudna vechirka, abo korotkochasna nud'ga, abo trivalii bil'; timchasova panika i permanentnii rozpach -- use tse nava..
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Donna Tartt |
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501a06b
|
gonitva prosto za krasoiu -- tse pastka, priama stezhka do girkoti i smutku, shcho krasu treba poiednuvati z chimos' bil'sh znachushchim.
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Donna Tartt |
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b3735fc
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Un yo que no quieres. Unos sentimientos que no puedes evitar.
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Donna Tartt |
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dfc734f
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ale chi maie iakiis' gluzd usvidomliuvati, shcho zhittia zakinchuiet'sia pogano dlia nas usikh, navit' naishchaslivishikh, i naprikintsi mi vtrachaiemo vse, shcho maie iakes' znachennia, a prote vodnochas znati, shcho vsuperech tomu, iak zhorstoko organizovana gra, mozhna grati v neyi navit' iz pevnoiu radistiu?
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Donna Tartt |
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5c0f193
|
Tse zhittia -- z usima iogo vadami i perevagami -- duzhe korotke. Dolia zhorstoka, ale, mozhlivo, ne vipadkova. Priroda (u znachenni Smert') zavzhdi peremagaie, ale tse ne oznachaie, shcho mi povinni klaniatisia yii i kolinkuvati pered neiu. Navit' iakshcho mi ne zavzhdi radi perebuvati tut, nashe zavdannia -- pirnuti iakomoga glibshe v tsiu stichnu kanavu, pereplivti yiyi, vodnochas trimaiuchi nashi ochi i sertsia vidkritimi. I posered nas..
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Donna Tartt |
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df1a009
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When we are sad--at least I am like this--it can be comforting to cling to familiar objects, to the things that don't change.
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Donna Tartt |
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0d6668d
|
La bellezza e raramente dolce o consolatoria. Quasi l'opposto. La vera bellezza e sempre un po' inquietante.
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frasi
donna-tartt
libro
narrativa
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Donna Tartt |
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3c5d500
|
continuo Julian, <>
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donna-tartt
libro
narrativa
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Donna Tartt |
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5ff5807
|
He was a planet without an atmosphere. x.
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Donna Tartt |
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d16df32
|
I was disturbed by how many of my classmates disliked Thoreau, railed against him even, as if he (who claimed never to have learned anything of value from an old person) was an enemy and not a friend. His scorn of commerce--invigorating to me--nettled a lot of the more vocal kids in Honors English. "Yeah, right," shouted an obnoxious boy whose hair was gelled and combed stiff like a Dragon Ball Z character--"some kind of world it would be i..
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dragon-ball-z
english-class
thoreau
consumerism
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Donna Tartt |
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4b53c3c
|
And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky...
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Donna Tartt |
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fa93eb2
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futile
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Donna Tartt |
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7401764
|
quien dijo que la coincidencia es la manera que Dios tiene de permanecer anonimo?
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Donna Tartt |
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9413158
|
And this is either a completely disastrous question or the most sensible one I've ever asked in all my life.
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Donna Tartt |
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4bc8e30
|
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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cc2d44f
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lo extrano era mas bien descubrir en el presente un fragmento tan brillante del pasado vivo, danado y erosionado pero no destruido.
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Donna Tartt |
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bbe7249
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Hobie had an iron constitution. Whenever he came down with something himself, he drank a Fernet-Branca and kept going.
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Donna Tartt |
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79ff9eb
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Death is the mother of Beauty. And what is Beauty? Terror.
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Donna Tartt |
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f4d5e4a
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But 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.
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Donna Tartt |
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2b7ae16
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There's only a double abyss: between painter and imprisoned bird; between the record he left of the bird and our experience of it, centuries later.
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Donna Tartt |
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9b0c8bc
|
I don't know where to begin." He paused, and took a drink. "Do you remember last fall, in Julian's class, when we studied what Plato calls telestic madness? Bakcheia? Dionysiac frenzy?" "Yes,"I said rather impatiently. It was just like Henry to bring up something like this right now. "Well, we decided to try to have one." For a moment I thought I hadn't understood him. "What?" I said? "I said we decided to try to have a bacchanal."
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Donna Tartt |
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16658c2
|
They understood not only evil, it seemed, but the extravagance of tricks with which evil presents itself as good.
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Donna Tartt |
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19ee19d
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Silver--well, Bobo was actually not so bad guy. 'The Mensch'?
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Donna Tartt |
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8bf1db9
|
I am not unused to being confronted with my ow lies, but those of others never fail to throw me for a loop.
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Donna Tartt |
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24b4913
|
What if you had never seen the sea before? What if the only thing you'd ever seen was a child's picture - blue crayon, choppy waves? Would you know the real sea if you only knew the picture? Would you be able to recognize the real thing even if you saw it?
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Donna Tartt |
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512b9a1
|
You wan't to know what Classics are?" said a drunk Dean of Admissions to me at a faculty party a couple of years ago. "I'll tell you what Clasdics are. War and homos." A sententious and vulgar statement, certainly, but like many such gnomic vulgarities, it also contains a tiny splinter of truth."
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Donna Tartt |
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3b00c7a
|
but ever since the painting had vanished from under me I'd felt drowned and extinguished by vastness--not just the predictable vastness of time, and space, but the impassable distances between people even when they were within arm's reach of each other,
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Donna Tartt |
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7b6fd46
|
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."
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Donna Tartt |