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bd8e7e7
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When you're worried about something,' said Henry abruptly, 'have you ever tried thinking in a different language?
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Donna Tartt |
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a0ebba4
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Because I don't care what anyone says or how often or winningly they say it: no one will ever, ever be able to persuade me that life is some awesome, rewarding treat. Because, here's the truth: life is a catastrophe. The basic fact of existence - of walking around trying to feed ourselves and find friends and whatever else we do - is a catastrophe.
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Donna Tartt |
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527a114
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A wine-colored welt of scar tissue had bubbled up in the little stab hole; it was interesting to look at, like a small blob of pink glue, and it reminded her in a good way of Lawrence of Arabia, burning himself with matches. Evidently that sort of thing built soldierly character. "The trick," he'd said in the movie, "is not to mind that it hurts." In the vast and ingenious scheme of suffering, as Harriet was now beginning to understand it, ..
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Donna Tartt |
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6843ed2
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There was a grand piano, too, and Charles was playing, a glass of whiskey on the seat beside him. He was a little drunk; the Chopin was slurred and fluid, the notes melting sleepily into one another. A breeze stirred the heavy, moth-eaten velvet curtains, ruffling his hair.
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Donna Tartt |
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6c280f2
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I loved her every minute of every day, heart and mind and soul and all of it, and it was getting late and I wanted the place never to close, never.
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Donna Tartt |
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a4b3421
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She was as cool as dammit.
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Donna Tartt |
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a5358c5
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It's commonplace to say that we 'love' a book, but when we say it, we mean all sorts of things. Sometimes we mean that a book was important to us in out youth, though we haven't picked it up in years; sometimes what we 'love' is an impressionistic idea glimpsed from afar (Combray...madeleins...Tante Leonie...) as apposed to the experience of wallowing and plowing through an actual text, and all too often people claim to love books they have..
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books
love
love-books
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Donna Tartt |
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d73ac15
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S]he came up suddenly beside me so I saw her reflection in a mirror. At the sight of her I was paralyzed with happiness; ... [S]he was smiling at me, ... not a dream but a presence that filled the whole room ... I knew I couldn't turn around, that to look at her directly was to violate the laws of her world and mine; ... our eyes met in the glass for a long moment; but just as she seemed about to speak ... -- a vapor rolled between us and I..
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Donna Tartt |
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a7b2dbb
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IN THE NIGHT, I woke up wailing. The worst thing about the explosion was how I carried it in my body--the heat, the bone-jar and slam of it. In my dreams, there was always a light way out and a dark way out. I had to go the dark way, because the bright way was hot and flickering with fire. But the dark way was where the bodies were.
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Donna Tartt |
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f95d358
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At any rate, this was the weekend that things started to change, that the dark gaps between the street lamps begin to grow smaller and smaller, and farther apart, the first sign that one's train is approaching familiar territory, and will soon be passing through the well-known, well-lighted streets of town. The house was their trump card, their fondest treasure, and that weekend they revealed it to me slyly, by degrees - the dizzy little tu..
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Donna Tartt |
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02410ea
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I've been thinking a lot about what Hobie said: about those images that strike the heart and set it blooming like a flower, images that open up some much, much larger beauty that you can spend your whole life looking for and never find.
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Donna Tartt |
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36b4051
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Some things are too terrible to grasp at once. Other things-- naked, sputtering, indelible in their horror-- are too terrible to really ever grasp at all.
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Donna Tartt |
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8822170
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The more cultivated a person is, the more intelligent, the more repressed, then the more he needs some method of channeling the primitive impulses he's worked so hard to subdue. Otherwise those powerful old forces will mass and strengthen until they are violent enough to break free, more violent for the delay, often strong enough to sweep the will away entirely.
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Donna Tartt |
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579d111
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I mean, this man was not /Voltaire/ we killed.
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humor
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Donna Tartt |
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32ce962
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WHEN I WAS A boy, after my mother died, I always tried hard to hold her in my mind as I was falling asleep so maybe I'd dream of her, only I never did. Or, rather, I dreamed of her constantly, only as absence, not presence: a breeze blowing through a just-vacated house, her handwriting on a notepad, the smell of her perfume, streets in strange lost towns where I knew she'd been walking only a moment before but had just vanished, a shadow mo..
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Donna Tartt |
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e74a0bc
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It has always been hard for me to talk about Julian without romanticizing him. In many ways, I loved him the most of all; and it is with him that I am most tempted to embroider, to flatter, to basically reinvent. I think that is because Julian himself was constantly in the process of reinventing the people and events around him, conferring kindness, or wisdom, or bravery, or charm, on actions which contained nothing of the sort. It was one ..
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Donna Tartt |
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cb7e69d
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But walking through it all was one thing; walking away, unfortunately, has proved to be quite another, and though once I thought I had left that ravine forever on an April afternoon long ago, now I am not so sure. Now the searchers have departed, and life has grown quiet around me, I have come to realize that while for years I might have imagined myself to be somewhere else, in reality I have been there all the time: up at the top by the mu..
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donna-tartt
the-secret-history
haunted
prologue
trapped
memory
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Donna Tartt |
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ccc0fce
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Well - think about this. What if all your actions and choices, good or bad, made no difference to God? What if the pattern is pre-set? No no - hang on - this is a question worth struggling with. What if 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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0a8a220
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Asparagus is in season.
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murder
the-secret-history
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Donna Tartt |
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aeabba2
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How could the apartment have seemed so permanent and solid-looking when it was only a stage set, waiting to be struck and carried away by movers in uniform?
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Donna Tartt |
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3c5dc38
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Mais, vrai, J'ai trop pleure! Les aubes sont navrantes. What a sad and beautiful line that is. I'd always hoped that someday I'd be able to use it.
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madness
sanity
the-secret-history
suicide-note
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Donna Tartt |
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188ccb8
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T]hough the darkness sometimes lifted just enough so I could construe my surroundings, familiar shapes solidifying like bedroom furniture at dawn, my relief was never more than temporary because somehow the full morning never came, things always went black before I could orient myself and there I was again with ink poured in my eyes, guttering around in the dark.
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Donna Tartt |
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d960a81
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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? You don't know what Dionysus looks like. We're talking about God here. God is serious business.
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Donna Tartt |
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c1ece30
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Well, the Dutch invented the microscope," she said. "They were jewelers, grinders of lenses. They want it all as detailed as possible because even the tiniest things mean something."
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Donna Tartt |
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3720c5c
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An object--any object--was worth whatever you could get somebody to pay for it.
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Donna Tartt |
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bbc82ec
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It's a terrible thing, what we did," said Francis abruptly. "I mean, this man was not Voltaire we killed. But still. It's a shame. I feel bad about it."
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Donna Tartt |
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fc045d2
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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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9cc6168
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It's beautiful here, but morning light can make the most vulgar things tolerable.
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Donna Tartt |
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fcc6383
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Well the Dutch invented the microscope," she said. "They were jewellers, grinders of lenses. The want it all as detailed as possible because even the tiniest things mean something. Whenever you see flies or insects in a still life- a wilted petal, a black spot on the apple- the painter is giving you a secret message. He's telling you that living things don't last- it's all temporary. Death in life. That's why they're called natures mortes. ..
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Donna Tartt |
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2b19b72
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beauty alters the grain of reality. And I keep thinking too of the more conventional wisdom: namely, that the pursuit of pure beauty is a trap, a fast track to bitterness and sorrow, that beauty has to be wedded to something more meaningful. Only what is that thing? Why am I made the way I am? Why do I care about all the wrong things, and nothing at all for the right ones? Or, to tip it another way: how can I see so clearly that everything ..
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Donna Tartt |
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977d407
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Safe trip. I love you. No kidding.
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Donna Tartt |
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20745b0
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Well the Dutch invented the microscope," she said. "They were jewellers, grinders of lenses. The want it all as detailed as possible because even the tiniest things mean something. Whenever you see flies or insects in a still life- a wilted petal, a black spot on the apple- the painter is giving you a secret message. He's telling you that living things don't last- it's all temporary. Death in life. That's why they're called natures mortes. ..
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Donna Tartt |
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8cdd278
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It's not as if we're running a hospital for sick children down here, let's put it that way. Where's the nobility in patching up a bunch of old tables and chairs? Corrosive to the soul, quite possibly. I've seen too many estates not to know that. Idolatry! Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only--if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn't it? And isn't the whole point of things--beautiful things--that th..
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care
heart
life
corrosive
patch-up
connect
objects
nobility
saving
destroy
soul
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Donna Tartt |
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1ddece9
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Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.
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Donna Tartt |
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4e797fc
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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 colour across the sky - so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quiet frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.
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Donna Tartt |
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ef6d8b5
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Too much--too tempting--to have my hands on it and not look at it. Quickly I slid it out, and almost immediately its glow enveloped me, something almost musical, an internal sweetness that was inexplicable beyond a deep, blood-rocking harmony of rightness, the way your heart beat slow and sure when you were with a person you felt safe with and loved. A power, a shine, came off it, a freshness like the morning light in my old bedroom in New ..
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Donna Tartt |
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f8e19fb
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He came up behind her and laid his hands on her shoulders; bending low, he put his lips close to the nape of her neck. "How about a kiss for your jailbird brother?" he said. She turned halfway, as if to touch her lips to his cheek but he slid a palm down her back and tipped her face up to his and kissed her full on the mouth--not a brotherly kiss, there was no mistaking it for that, but a long, slow, greedy kiss, messy and voluptuous. His b..
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Donna Tartt |
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b8c7e02
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We looked at each other, for a long strange moment that I've never forgotten, actually, like two animals meeting at twilight, during which some clear, personable spark seemed to fly up through his eyes and I saw the creature he really was--and he, I believe, saw me. For an instant we were wired together and humming, like two engines on the same circuit.
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Donna Tartt |
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a62401e
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You sound like my dad." "Well--let's put it another way. Who was it said that coincidence was just God's way of remaining anonymous?" "Now you really sound like my dad." "Who's to say that gamblers don't really understand it better than anyone else? Isn't everything worthwhile a gamble? Can't good come around sometimes through some strange back doors?"
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Donna Tartt |
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4014878
|
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. And somehow I had done it;
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Donna Tartt |
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053db33
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Clearly something had gone wrong, badly, only I wasn't quite sure what--apart from knowing that I was responsible somehow, in the generalized miasma of shame and unworthiness and being-a-burden that never quite left me.
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Donna Tartt |
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3114d80
|
Whenever you see flies or insects in a still life--a wilted petal, a black spot on the apple--the painter is giving you a secret message. He's telling you that living things don't last--it's all temporary. Death in life. That's why they're called natures mortes. Maybe you don't see it at first, with all the beauty and bloom, the little speck of rot. But if you look closer--there it is.
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death
life
philosophy
transience
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Donna Tartt |
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ae17479
|
Before, I was paralyzed, though I didn't really know it," he said. "It was because I thought too much, lived too much in the mind. It was hard to make decisions. I felt immobilized."
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Donna Tartt |
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6738381
|
There is a recurrent scene from those dinners that surfaces again and again, like an obsessive undercurrent in a dream. Julian, at the head of the long table, rises to his feet and lifts his wineglass. 'Live forever,' he says. And the rest of us rise too, and clink our glasses across the table, like an army regiment crossing sabres: Henry and Bunny, Charles and Francis, Camilla and I. 'Live forever,' we chorus, throwing our glasses back in ..
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Donna Tartt |