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5ac1d56
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The most satisfying of languages, Latin.
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latin
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Donna Tartt |
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bd2a2ac
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Out on the lawn, Bunny had just knocked Henry's ball about seventy feet outside the court. There was a ragged burst of laughter; faint, but clear, it floated back across the evening air. That laughter haunts me still.
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laughter
donna-tartt
the-secret-history
haunting
melancholy
sad
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Donna Tartt |
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389376a
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I am gifted at blending myself into any given milieu--you've never seen such a typical California teenager as I was, nor such a dissolute and callous pre-med student--but somehow despite my efforts, I am never able to blend myself in entirely and remain in some respects quite distinct from my surroundings, in the same way that a green chameleon remains a distinct entity from the leaf upon which it sits, no matter how perfectly it has approx..
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simile
impostor
donna-tartt
the-secret-history
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Donna Tartt |
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f8fc441
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Every new event - everything I did for the rest of my life - would only separate us more and more: days she was n longer a part of, an ever-growing distance between us. Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away.
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Donna Tartt |
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6fea1d8
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But, if I dare say it, it wasn't until I had helped kill a man that I realized how elusive and complex an act a murder can actually be, and not necessarily attributable to one dramatic motive.
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murder
the-secret-history
motive
psychology
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Donna Tartt |
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89c310d
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There such things as ghosts. People everywhere have always known that. And we believe in them every bit as much as Homer did. Only now, we call them by different names. Memory. The unconscious.
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ghosts
memory
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Donna Tartt |
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987aaa9
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All of a sudden, images from every crime movie I'd ever seen began to pop into my mind--the windowless room, the harsh lights and narrow hallways, images which did not seem so much theatrical or foreign as imbued with the indelible quality of memory, of experience lived.
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donna-tartt
the-secret-history
memory
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Donna Tartt |
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1cfecd8
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Elle ne s'interessait pas aux livres dans lesquels les enfants grandissaient, car (dans la vie comme en litterature) ce processus entrainait un affaiblissement accelere et inexplicable du caractere ; de facon totalement inattendue, les heros et les heroines renoncaient a leurs aventures pour un amour insipide, se mariaient et fondaient une famille, et, en general, se comportaient comme un troupeau de vaches.
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mariage
enfants
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Donna Tartt |
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e0d2a32
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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 awareness of voices, and people, from a stream of digitized ma..
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Donna Tartt |
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3715f32
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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.
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Donna Tartt |
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13780f3
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I'd be perfectly happy if I could sit looking at the same half dozen paintings for the rest of my life. I can't think of a better way to go insane.")"
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Donna Tartt |
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d71d5b2
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The nail where your fate is liable to catch and snag." "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?"
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Donna Tartt |
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7113916
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I think of what Hobie said: 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.
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Donna Tartt |
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98cc580
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Mr. MacNatt was an auto-parts salesman; Mrs. MacNatt was shaped like a pigeon and sold Avon.
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Donna Tartt |
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278113a
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And that was it: infinite loop; no alt-tab out. You could force close, shut down the computer, start all over and run it again, and the game would still lock up and freeze at the same place. "Where's Popper?" No cheat code. Game over. There was no way past that moment."
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Donna Tartt |
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f317835
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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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389088d
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when what she needed was something concrete, some small final memory to slip its hand in hers and accompany her--sightless now, stumbling--through this sudden desert of existence which stretched before her from the present moment until the end of life.
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Donna Tartt |
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bd1a93c
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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 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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34dc357
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I remember a story I read once, a soldier, was it at Shiloh? He was talking to me but not with his whole attention. Gettysburg? a soldier so mad with shock that he started burying birds and squirrels on the battlefield. You had lot of little things killed too, in the crossfire, little animals. Many tiny graves. p128
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war
interesting-facts
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Donna Tartt |
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48cb91e
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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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5b7d4c1
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What if--is more complicated than that? What if maybe opposite is true as well? Because, if bad can sometimes come from good actions--? where does it ever say, anywhere, that only bad can come from bad actions? Maybe sometimes--the wrong way is the right way? You can take the wrong path and it still comes out where you want to be? Or, spin it another way, sometimes you can do everything wrong and it still turns out to be right?
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Donna Tartt |
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d21383c
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I guess that anything we manage to save from history is a miracle.
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Donna Tartt |
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f5cca2f
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What if all your actions and choices, good or bad, make 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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5c28296
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I'm not blaming anything on your mom, I'm way past that. It's just that she loved you so much, I always felt like kind of an interloper with you guys. Stranger-in-my-own-house kind of thing. You two were so close--" he laughed, sadly--"there wasn't much room for three."
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Donna Tartt |
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147669c
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Even in some smoky post-catastrophe Manhattan you could imagine him swaying genially at the door in the rags of his former uniform, the Barbours up in the apartment burning old National Geographics for warmth, living off gin and tinned crabmeat.
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Donna Tartt |
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1f56387
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THINGS WOULD HAVE TURNED out better if she had lived. As it was, she died when I was a kid; and though everything that's happened to me since then is thoroughly my own fault, still when I lost her I lost sight of any landmark that might have led me someplace happier, to some more populated or congenial life. 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 anyo..
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Donna Tartt |
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b930628
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His warmth, which seemed to presume upon some happy old intimacy we did not share, had thrown me into awkwardness.
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Donna Tartt |
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53e6aa8
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Talvolta, nel caso di un incidente, quando l'evento e troppo improvviso e strano per essere compreso, il surreale prende il sopravvento. Le azioni procedono al rallentatore, come in un sogno, fotogramma per fotogramma; il movimento di una mano, una frase, durano un'eternita.
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Donna Tartt |
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9835a5a
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a light that made me think of long hours in dusty libraries, and old books, and silence.
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Donna Tartt |
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a30125e
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While to a certain extent Milton is right-the mind is its own place and in itself can make a Heaven of Hall and so forth-it is nonetheless clear that Plano was modeled less on Paradise than that other, more dolorous city.
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Donna Tartt |
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00a1754
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Rather in the way that the Roman Empire continued in a certain fashion to run itself even when there was no one left to run it and the reason behind it was entirely gone, much of this routine remained intact even during the terrible days after Bunny's death. Up until the very end there was always, always, Sunday-night dinner at Charles and Camilla's, except on the evening of the murder itself, when no one felt much like eating and it was po..
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Donna Tartt |
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25ce89d
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Most of the benches bore the names of benefactors--in memory of Mrs. Ruth Klein or whatever--but my mother's bench, the Rendezvous Point, alone of all the benches in that part of the park had been given by its anonymous donor a more mysterious and welcoming message: EVERYTHING OF POSSIBILITY. It had been Her Bench since before I was born; in her early days in the city, she had sat there with her library book on her afternoons off, going wit..
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Donna Tartt |
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dc2d495
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How much did she remember? I wondered, afire with humiliation yet unable to tear my eyes from her. 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 gu..
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pain
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Donna Tartt |
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4586120
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The idea of living there, of not having to go back ever again to asphalt and shopping malls and modular furniture; of living there with Charles and Camilla and Henry and Francis and maybe even Bunny; of no one marrying or going home or getting a job in a town a thousand miles away or doing any of the traitorous things friends do after college; of everything remaining exactly as it was, that instant--the idea was so truly heavenly that I'm n..
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Donna Tartt |
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746021d
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But poor Andy--even before he was skipped ahead a grade--had always been a chronically picked-upon kid: scrawny, twitchy, lactose-intolerant, with skin so pale it was almost transparent, and a penchant for throwing out words like 'noxious' and 'chthonic' in casual conversation.
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Donna Tartt |
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e92bbec
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ominously--a love more binding than physical affection, some tar-pit of the soul where I might flop around and malinger for years.
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Donna Tartt |
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358c063
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Lying awake, I tried to recall all my best memories of her - to freeze her in my mind so I wouldn't forget her - but instead of birthdays and happy times I kept remembering things like how a few days before she was killed she'd stopped me halfway out the door to pick a thread off my school jacket.
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Donna Tartt |
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3423b11
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The dead appear to us in dreams, said Julian, because that's the only way they can make us see them; what we see is only a projection, beamed from a great distance, light shining at us from a dead star...
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Donna Tartt |
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4468639
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torpor.
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Donna Tartt |
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646649b
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What mattered more was the feeling, a rich sweet undertow so commanding that in class, on the school bus, lying in bed trying to think of something safe or pleasant, some environment or configuration where my chest wasn't tight with anxiety, all I had to do was sink into the blood-warm current and let myself spin away to the secret place where everything was all right. Cinnamon-colored walls, rain on the windowpanes, vast quiet and a sense ..
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Donna Tartt |
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26d4df3
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Buffalo is a long way from New York City; but apart from a dreamlike, feverish stop in Syracuse, where I walked and watered Popper and bought us a couple of cheese danishes because there wasn't anything else--I managed to sleep almost the whole way, through Batavia and Rochester and Syracuse and Binghamton, with my cheek against the window and cold air coming through at the crack, the vibration taking me back to Wind, Sand and Stars and a l..
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Donna Tartt |
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0719a03
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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.
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magic
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Donna Tartt |
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4d1e73b
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I find myself fixing on that refusal to pull back. 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 catastrophe. The basic fact of existence - of walking around trying to feed ourselves and find friends and whatever else we do - is catastrophe. Forget all this ridiculous 'Our Town' nonsense..
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Donna Tartt |
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86b20da
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Anyway, she loved horses a lot, my mother. When she was growing up she had a horse she said got lonely sometimes? and he liked to come right up to the house and put his head in at the window to see what was going on. "What was his name? "Paintbox." I'd loved it when my mother told me about the stables back in Kansas: owls and bats in the rafters, horses nickering and blowing. I knew the names of all her childhood horses and dogs. Paintbox! ..
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Donna Tartt |