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109fe98
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but now, with his subconscious mind knocked loose from its perch and flapping in the hollow corridors of his skull as erratically as a bat, there was no way to be sure of anything he might do.
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Donna Tartt |
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a337731
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What is unthinkable is undoable.
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Donna Tartt |
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e05f1b2
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Over 2,000 reptiles await you.
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Donna Tartt |
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70eb29b
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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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6ed6c63
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I--" At her tone, at once intimate and formal, a terrible sadness came over me, and when we looked at each other it seemed that the whole past was redefined and brought into focus by this moment, clear as glass, a complexity of stillness that was rainy afternoons in spring, a dark chair in the hallway, the light-as-air touch of her hand on the back of my head."
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Donna Tartt |
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9040846
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If he really wanted to be happy in the world, Horst? To have any kind of joyful or happy life? He should pay twenty grand to go back to his rapid detox place and then come here and smoke Buddha Haze and stand in a museum all day long.
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museums
marijuana
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Donna Tartt |
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e215038
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his subconscious mind knocked loose from its perch and flapping in the hollow corridors of his skull as erratically as a bat
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Donna Tartt |
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5fca7e7
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The other day, I tried to remember what was the word for 'dragonfly' and couldn't.
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Donna Tartt |
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fc7058c
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In the surprised silence that followed, a champagne cork popped in the kitchen, a burst of laughter. It was just past midnight: two minutes into Christmas Day. Then my father leaned back in his chair, and laughed. "Merry Christmas!" he roared, producing from his pocket a jewelry box which he slid over to Xandra, and two stacks of twenties (Five hundred dollars! Each!) which he tossed across the table to Boris and me. And though in the clock..
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Donna Tartt |
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aec3b9c
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had something to say? At any rate. We left our rooms pretty much
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Donna Tartt |
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bcf570a
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worrying, Potter! Don't stand there and look so unhappy! If we lose, we win, and if we win, we win! Everything is good!
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Donna Tartt |
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7f5a758
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You know what Picasso says. 'Bad artists copy, good artists steal.
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Donna Tartt |
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451baad
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For weeks, I'd been frozen, sealed-off; now, in the shower, I would turn up the water as hard as it would go and howl, silently. Everything was raw and painful and confusing and wrong and yet it was as if I'd been dragged from freezing water through a break in the ice, into sun and blazing cold.
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Donna Tartt |
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f052a57
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We were heading into the clumsy territory of my mother's funeral, stretched-out silences, wrong smiles, the place where words didn't work.
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Donna Tartt |
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f3b8a13
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There wasn't a single meaning. There were many meanings. It was a riddle expanding out and out and out.
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Donna Tartt |
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e0e1bbd
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Do you have any idea why you might be feeling better?" "No, not really," I said curtly. Better wasn't even the word for how I felt. There wasn't a word for it. It was more that things too small to mention--laughter in the hall at school, a live gecko scurrying in a tank in the science lab--made me feel happy one moment and the next like crying. Sometimes, in the evenings, a damp, gritty wind blew in the windows from Park Avenue, just as the..
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mourning
recovery
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Donna Tartt |
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b36750f
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I could hear a gaggle of Americans, couples, laughing, saying their loud goodbyes as they parted for their respective rooms: old college friends, jobs in the financial sector, five-plus years of corporate law and Fiona entering the first grade in the fall, all's well in Oaklandia, well goodnight then, God we love you guys, a life I might have had myself except I didn't want it.
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Donna Tartt |
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6665ffc
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And that was fine. I didn't matter much in the scheme of things and Martin didn't either. We were easily forgotten. It was a social and moral lesson, if nothing else. But for all foreseeable time to come -- for as long as history was written, until the icecaps melted and the streets of Amsterdam were awash with water -- the painting would be remembered and mourned. Who knew, or cared, the names of the Turks who blew the roof off the Parthen..
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Donna Tartt |
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51fae16
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Or--to quote another paradoxical gem of my dad's: sometimes you have to lose to win.
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Donna Tartt |
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0bd93d5
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We were easily forgotten. It was a social and moral lesson, if nothing else. But for all foreseeable time to come -- for as long as history was written, until the icecaps melted and the streets of Amsterdam were awash with water -- the painting would be remembered and mourned. Who knew, or cared, the names of the Turks who blew the roof off the Parthenon? the mullahs who had ordered the destruction of the Buddhas at Bamiyan? Yet living or d..
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Donna Tartt |
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97e2ac9
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And if what they say is true--if every great painting is really a self-portrait--what, if anything, is Fabritius saying about himself?
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self-portrait
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Donna Tartt |
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855c8db
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From his genial cursing, his infrequent shaving, the relaxed way he talked around the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, it was almost as if he were playing a character: some cool guy from a fifties noir or maybe Ocean's Eleven, a lazy, sated gangster with not much to lose. Yet even in the midst of his new laid-backness he still had that crazed and slightly heroic look of schoolboy insolence, all the more stirring since it was drifting t..
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Donna Tartt |
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b9525a1
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She was right: school was lonely. The eighteen and nineteen year olds didn't socialize with the younger kids, and though there were plenty of students my age and younger [...] their lives were so cloistered and their concerns so foolish and foreign-seeming that it was as if they spoke some lost middle-school tongue I'd forgotten. They lived at home with their parents; they worried about things like grade curves and Italian Abroad and summer..
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clueless
earnest
undamaged
foolish
lonely
school
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Donna Tartt |
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8241890
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he said well if you can't plan it out ahead of time, you'll just have to work it out as you go along
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Donna Tartt |
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afea4ab
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But how," said Charles, who was close to tears, "how can you possibly justify cold-blooded murder?" Henry lit a cigarette. "I prefer to think of it," he had said, "as redistribution of matter."
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Donna Tartt |
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f628532
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On she prattled, friendly as a parrot. But my loyalties were elsewhere. And the flavour 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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b1ad020
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it may be a superhuman effort to lose oneself so completely, but that's nothing compared to the effort of getting oneself back again
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Donna Tartt |
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e9af45e
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Well, is true. I did know. Because if possible to paint fakes that look like that? Las Vegas would be the most beautiful city in the history of earth!
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Donna Tartt |
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a7ed6e3
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Um, we don't hit women in America." He scowled, and spit out an apple seed. "No. Americans just persecute smaller countries that believe different from them."
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Donna Tartt |
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c632394
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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. Only what is that thing? Why am I made the way I am? Why do I care about the wrong things, and nothing at all for the right ones? To tip it another way: how can I see so clearly that everything I love or care about is illusion, and yet--..
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Donna Tartt |
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8034e84
|
Though I would have died rather than told anyone, I was worried my exuberant drug use had damaged my brain and my nervous system and maybe even my soul in some irreparable and perhaps not readily apparent way.
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Donna Tartt |
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a14464b
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I closed my eyes, overwhelmed with the wine, with her, with the impossibility of explaining it. "It's just--his last moments on earth, you know? And the space between my life, and his, was very, very thin. There wasn't any space. It was like something opened up between us. Like a huge flash of what was real what mattered, No me, no him. We were the same person. Same thoughts-- we didn't have to talk. It was just a few minutes but it might h..
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Donna Tartt |
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17ec8b9
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Mr. Dial grinned. His small teeth, his wide-set eyes and his bulging forehead - plus his habit of looking at the class in profile, rather than straight on - gave him the slight aspect of an unfriendly dolphin.
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Donna Tartt |
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9c77280
|
But despite the gloss and sparkle of the job (champagne breakfasts, gift bags from Bergdorf's) the hours were long and there was a hollowness at the heart of it that-I knew-made her sad.
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Donna Tartt |
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9fd666c
|
Ed e una tentazione per qualsiasi persona intelligente, e specialmente per perfezionisti come gli antichi e noi, cercare di uccidere l'io primitivo, emozionale, animale. Ma e un errore." "Perche?" chiese Francis, sporgendosi leggermente in avanti. Julian aggrotto le sopracciglia, il lungo naso conferiva al suo profilo, aggettante, l'aspetto di un etrusco in bassorilievo. "Perche e pericoloso ignorare l'esistenza dell'irrazionale. Piu civili..
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Donna Tartt |
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dfdadb1
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The smells, the shadows, even the dappled pale trunks of the plane trees lifted my spirits
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Donna Tartt |
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63d3aed
|
It's a big shift. I don't know quite how to explain it. Between wanting and not wanting, caring and not caring. Of course it's a lot more than that too. Shock and aura. Things are stronger and brighter and I feel on the edge of something inexpressible.
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Donna Tartt |
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4d490ba
|
but the first rule of restorations, as he'd taught me earlier on, was that you never did what you couldn't reverse.
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Donna Tartt |
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d82d36b
|
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 they connect you to some larger beauty?
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Donna Tartt |
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19df2d5
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four hundred years before us, four hundred years after we're gone--it'll never strike anybody the same way and the great majority of people it'll never strike in any deep way at all but--a really great painting is fluid enough to work its way into the mind and heart through all kinds of different angles, in ways that are unique and very particular. Yours, yours. I was painted for you. And--oh, I don't know, stop me if I'm rambling..." passi..
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Donna Tartt |
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7c9eeb6
|
Beauty--unless she is wed to something more meaningful--is always superficial.
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Donna Tartt |
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b01a4fd
|
That little guy, said Boris in the car on the way to Antwerp. You know the painter saw him-he wasn't painting that bird from his mind, you know? That's a real little guy, chained up on the wall, there. If I saw him mixed up with dozen other birds all the same kind, I could pick him out, no problem. And he's right. So could I. And if I could go back in time I'd clip the chain in a heartbeat and never care a minute that the picture was never ..
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goldfinch
painting
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Donna Tartt |
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dd4e477
|
it was a clear night, with crickets and a million stars
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Donna Tartt |
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a07429e
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gallows
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Donna Tartt |