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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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fiction
literary-fiction
literature
the-goldfinch
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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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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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abec892
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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 |
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de48bb0
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We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others, that in the end, we become disguised to ourselves. -- FRANCOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
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Donna Tartt |
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4a8b2a4
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And beauty is terror,' said Julian, 'then what is desire? We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it?' 'To live,' said Camilla. 'To live forever,' said Bunny, chin cupped in palm.
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life
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Donna Tartt |
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d6dbd5f
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I read The Great Gatsby. It is one of my favorite books and I had taken it out of the library in hopes that it would cheer me up; of course, it only made me feel worse, since in my own humorless state I failed to see anything except what I construed as certain tragic similarities between Gatsby and myself.
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Donna Tartt |
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818da78
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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 |
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6ae871c
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That life -- whatever else it is -- is short.
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Donna Tartt |
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0c083a9
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And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn't touch.
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Donna Tartt |
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0c7c174
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The chronological sorting of memories is an interesting business. Prior to this first weekend in the country, my recollections of that fall are distant and blurry: from here on out, they come into a sharp, delightful focus. It is here that the stilted mannequins of my initial acquaintance begin to yawn and stretch and come to life. It was months before the gloss and mystery of newness, which kept me from seeing them with much objectivity, w..
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Donna Tartt |