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6f8a4a9
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To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal!
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Donna Tartt |
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573424d
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That's the first law of magic, Specs. Misdirection. Never forget it.
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Donna Tartt |
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2bb8a51
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But one mustn't underestimate the primal appeal--to lose one's self, lose it utterly. And in losing it be born to the principle of continuous life, outside the prison of mortality and time.
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primal
donna-tartt
the-secret-history
lose-yourself
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Donna Tartt |
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1077fdd
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For in the deepest, most unshakable part of myself reason was useless.
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Donna Tartt |
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0249da9
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I am an alcoholic. I'm the first to admit that. I can't drink at all. One drink is too many and a thousand's not enough.
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Donna Tartt |
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87c37d5
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What you want is to live and be happy in the world is a woman (or man) who has her (his) own life and lets you have yours
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Donna Tartt |
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dca1a15
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We looked at each other. And it occurred to me that despite his faults, which were numerous and spectacular, the reason I liked Boris and felt happy around him from almost the moment I'd met him was that he never afraid
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i-m-dying
theo
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Donna Tartt |
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2ef29de
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By happy contrast, Hobie's whole day revolved around dinner.
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Donna Tartt |
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25c39d4
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Five minutes before Julian arrived, they might be slouched in the living room -- curtains drawn, dinner simmering on chafing dishes in the kitchen, everyone tugging at collars and dull-eyed with fatigue -- but the instant the doorbell rang their spines would straighten, conversation would snap to life, the very wrinkles would fall from their clothes.
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Donna Tartt |
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78b3205
|
Everything was hysterically funny, even the playground slide was smiling at us, and at some point, deep in the night, when we were winging on the jungle gym and showers of sparks were flying out of our mouths, I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.
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laughter
light
tripping
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Donna Tartt |
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3ab1f94
|
A wilderness of gilt, gleaming in the slant from the dust-furred windows: gilded cupids, gilded commodes and torchieres, and -- undercutting the old-wood smell -- the reek of turpentine, oil paint, and varnish.
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Donna Tartt |
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d4cd5fc
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But even that day, there on the porch, with Charles beside me and the smell of wood smoke in the air, it had the quality of a memory; there it was, before my eyes, and yet too beautiful to believe.
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Donna Tartt |
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94a0262
|
From William Blake to Lady Gaga, from Rousseau to Rumi to Tosca to Mister Rogers, it's a curiously uniform message, accepted from high to low: when in doubt, what to do? How do we know what's right for us? Every shrink, every career counselor, every Disney princess knows the answer: "Be yourself." "Follow your heart." 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 b..
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Donna Tartt |
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3ebddd8
|
From William Blake to Lady Gaga, from Rousseau to Rumi to Tosca to Mister Rogers, it's a curiously uniform message, accepted from high to low: when in doubt, what to do? How do we know what's right for us? Every shrink, every career counselor, every Disney princess knows the answer: "Be yourself." "Follow your heart." 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 b..
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Donna Tartt |
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a38abad
|
Do you remember what we were speaking of earlier, of how bloody, terrible things are sometimes the most beautiful?" he said. "It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mor..
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murder
history
god
classic-literature
classics
terror
classic
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Donna Tartt |
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4a027c9
|
Certainly I would be less frightened of death (not just my own death but Welty's death, Andy's death, Death in general) if I thought a familiar person came to meet us at the door, because -- writing this now, I'm close to tears -- I think how poor Andy told me, with terror on his face, that my mother was the only person he'd known, and liked, who'd ever died. So -- maybe when Andy washed up spitting and coughing into the country on the far ..
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Donna Tartt |
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efa9e3f
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Do you remember what we were speaking of earlier, of how bloody, terrible things are sometimes the most beautiful?" he said. "It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mor..
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murder
history
god
classic-literature
classics
terror
classic
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Donna Tartt |
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b0e5636
|
Death is the mother of beauty," said Henry. "And what is beauty?" "Terror." "Well said," said Julian. "Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming."
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Donna Tartt |
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06f8cc7
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small, everyday things can lift us out of despair. But nobody can do it for you. You're the one who has to watch for the open door.
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Donna Tartt |
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133f51a
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but it was excruciating to emerge from my eerie submarine existence into this harsh stampede of noise and light.
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Donna Tartt |
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ab27374
|
Unsettled heart. The fetishism of secrecy. These people understood--as I did--the back alleys of the soul, whispers and shadows, money slipping from hand to hand, the password, the code, the second self, all the hidden consolations that lifted
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Donna Tartt |
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835540e
|
he said, in the most melancholy voice, 'She's hiding from me.' He was dreaming, of course. I thought it was rather sweet. So, to humour him, I said, 'Well, then. You must hide your eyes and count to ten and she'll come back.'" He laughed. "But he got angry at me. It was really rather charming of him. 'No,' he said, 'no she won't." 'But you're dreaming,' I said to him. 'No,' he said, 'no I'm not. It's not a dream. It's real."
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Donna Tartt |
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45a6f8b
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And maybe I was coping awfully well, I don't know. Certainly I wasn't howling aloud or punching my fist through windows or doing any of the things I imagined people might do who felt as I did. But sometimes, unexpectedly, grief pounded over me in waves that left me gasping; and when the waves washed back, I found myself looking out over a brackish wreck which was illumined in a light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly rem..
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Donna Tartt |
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45b1423
|
No. I've always been drawn to broken, wild terrain. The oddest tongues come from such places, and the strangest mythologies, and the oldest cities, and the most barbarous religions
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Donna Tartt |
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88e4725
|
It was interesting to see the change that came over Boris when he was speaking another language--a sort of livening, or alertness, a sense of a different and more efficient person occupying his body.
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Donna Tartt |
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c4ceedd
|
I was deluded, and I knew it. Worse: my love for Pippa was muddied-up below the waterline with my mother, with my mother's death, with losing my mother and not being able to get her back. 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. There was an instability in it, a sickness. I was seeing things that weren't there. I was only one step away f..
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grief
loss
relationship
reality
past
hope
delusional
delusional-love
unreal
loner
delusion
save
hunger
stalking
misery
hopeless
frustration
obsession
waste
unrequited-love
sickness
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Donna Tartt |
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464609d
|
With distaste, Harriet reflected upon how life had beaten down the adults she knew, every single grown-up. Something strangled them as they grew older, made them doubt their own powers-laziness? Habit? Their grip slackened; they stopped fighting and resigned themselves to what happened. "That's Life." That's what they all said. "That's Life, Harriet, that's just how it is, you'll see."
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Donna Tartt |
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ccec773
|
Beauty is terror.
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Donna Tartt |
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4a35eab
|
The group mind was such (private jokes and bemusement, everyone clustered round vacation videos on the iPhone) that it was hard to imagine any of them going to a movie by themselves or eating alone at a bar; sometimes, the affable sense of committee among the men particularly gave me the slight feeling of being interviewed for a job.
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Donna Tartt |
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3ff4e89
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It wasn't the kind of thing you could ask but still I wanted to know. Did she have nightmares too? Crowd fears? Sweats and panics? Did she ever have the sense of observing herself from afar, as I often did, as if the explosion had knocked my body and my soul into two separate entities that remained about six feet apart from one another? Her gust of laughter had a self-propelling recklessness I knew all too well from wild nights with Boris, ..
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Donna Tartt |
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2732bd3
|
even when I couldn't see it I liked knowing it was there for the depth and solidity it gave things, the reinforcement to infrastructure, an invisible, bedrock rightness that reassured me 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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199faf3
|
Maybe that's why I tend to equate physical beauty with qualities with which it has absolutely nothing to do. I see a pretty mouth or a moody pair of eyes and imagine all sorts of deep affinities, private kinships. Never mind that half a dozen jerks are clustered round the same person, just because they've been duped by the same pair of eyes.
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idealism
beauty
love
attraction
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Donna Tartt |
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ffede09
|
I wanted her to know just how much I loved her while also letting her know that she bore not one particle of blame for not loving me back. But I wouldn't say that. It was rosepetals I wanted to throw, not a poison dart.
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unrequited-love
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Donna Tartt |
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cad9e69
|
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." "Aspargus is in season," said Francis helpfully."
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Donna Tartt |
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0641017
|
Hely's feelings didn't run very deep; he lived in sunny shallows where it was always warm and bright.
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Donna Tartt |
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36eeb99
|
I] thought of that line from The Iliad I love so much, about Pallas Athene and the terrible eyes shining.
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Donna Tartt |
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e60368a
|
It seemed my whole life was composed of these disjointed fractions of time, hanging around in one public place and then another, as if I were waiting for trains that never came. And, like one of those ghosts who are said to linger around depots late at night, asking passersby for the timetable of the Midnight Express that derailed twenty years before, I wandered from light to light until that dreaded hour when all the doors closed and, step..
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Donna Tartt |
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101bdee
|
The Roman genius, and perhaps the Roman flaw was an obsession with order. One sees it in their architecture, their literature, their laws--this fierce denial of darkness, unreason, chaos. Easy to see why the Romans, usually so tolerant of foreign religions, persecuted the Christians mercilessly--how absurd to think a common criminal had risen from the dead, how appalling that his followers celebrated him by drinking his blood. The illogic o..
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Donna Tartt |
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8d1381a
|
And, in this staunch little portrait, it's hard not to see the human in the finch. Dignified, vulnerable. One prisoner looking at another. But who knows what Fabritius intended? There's not enough of his work left to even make a guess. The bird looks out at us. It's not idealized or humanized. It's very much a bird. Watchful, resigned. There's no moral or story. There's no resolution. There's only a double abyss: between painter and impriso..
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Donna Tartt |
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778ce84
|
And yes--scholars might care about the innovative brushwork and use of light, the historical influence and the unique significance in Dutch art. But not me. As my mother said all those years ago, my mother who loved the painting only from seeing it in a book she borrowed from the Comanche County Library as a child: the significance doesn't matter. The historical significance deadens it. Across those unbridgeable distances--between bird and ..
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Donna Tartt |
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3e22b6f
|
In America, the rich man tries to pretend that the poor man is his equal in every respect but money, which is simply not true.
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Donna Tartt |
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532ad44
|
Bleakly, Harriet gazed out into the antiseptic gloom. A weight lay upon her, and a darkness. She'd learned things she never knew, things she had no idea of knowing, and yet in a strange way it was the hidden message of Captain Scott: that victory and collapse were sometimes the same thing.
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Donna Tartt |
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3770ec8
|
is it better to throw yourself head first and laughing into the holy rage calling your name?
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fate
temptation
duty
|
Donna Tartt |
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819a838
|
And as much as I'd like to believe there's a truth beyond illusion, I've come to believe that there's no truth beyond illusion. Because, between 'reality' on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there's a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic.And--I would argue..
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Donna Tartt |