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1bc5ad4
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Clearly 'worry' was the mark of a primitive and spiritually unevolved person.
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Donna Tartt |
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abb8f1f
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Yet if you scratched very deep at that idea of pattern (which apparently he had never taken the trouble to do), you hit an emptiness so dark that it destroyed, categorically, anything you'd ever looked at or thought of as light.
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Donna Tartt |
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2f39c5a
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Amsterdam, I dreamed about my mother for the first time in years. I'd been shut up in my hotel for more than a week, afraid to telephone anybody or go out; and my heart scrambled and floundered at even the most innocent noises: elevator bell, rattle of the minibar cart, even church clocks tolling the hour, de Westertoren, Krijtberg, a dark edge to the clangor, an inwrought fairy-tale sense of doom. By day I sat on the foot of the bed strain..
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Donna Tartt |
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a7749a3
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Maybe not quite so simple. Because--all the way driving here, driving all night, Christmas lights on the motorway and I'm not ashamed to tell you, I got choked up--because I was thinking, couldn't help it, about the Bible story--? you know, where the steward steals the widow's mite, but then the steward flees to far country and invests the mite wisely and brings back thousandfold cash to widow he stole from? And with joy she forgave him, an..
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Donna Tartt |
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5a9b0a6
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Different cultures and all that, but it's true what they say about the Japanese being undemonstrative.
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Donna Tartt |
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a7163cc
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Right," I said, after an off-balance pause. A knocker, in the trade, was a shark who charmed his way into old people's homes: to cheat them of valuables"
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Donna Tartt |
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bb11663
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a vida - para alem do mais que possa ser - e curta. (...) o destino e cruel e talvez nao aleatorio. (...) a morte ganha sempre, mas isso nao quer dizer que tenhamos de lhe baixar a cabeca e a bajular.
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Donna Tartt |
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41284fe
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But if you close the door... the night could last forever...
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Donna Tartt |
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97dbf72
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Now--" stretching up on tiptoe, to kiss me on the cheek--"let's both be good, and truthful, and kind to each other, and let's be happy together and have fun always." xxii. SO I SPENT THE night--we ordered in, later, and then went back to bed. But though on some level it was all easy enough pretending everything was the same (because, in some way, hadn't we both been pretending all along?) on another I felt nearly suffocated by the weight of..
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Donna Tartt |
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7ebeff5
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Well, she doesn't have anything to do with it, Richard, you're just like that guy in 'Dragnet' that always wants the facts.
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Donna Tartt |
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6981dd5
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And the farther I walked away, the more upset I got, at the loss of one of the few stable and unchanging docking-points in the world that I'd taken for granted: familiar faces, glad greetings...
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Donna Tartt |
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19f9d74
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The interesting thing, in the photograph, was how the fragile little knock-kneed boy--smiling sweetly, pristine in his sailor suit--was also the old man who'd clasped my hand while he was dying: two separate frames, superimposed upon each other, of the same soul. And the painting, above his head, was the still point where it all hinged: dreams and signs, past and future, luck and fate. There wasn't a single meaning. There were many meanings..
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Donna Tartt |
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0666247
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Puedes equivocarte de camino y que aun asi este te lleve a donde quieres ir. O, viceversa, a veces puedes hacerlo todo mal y aun asi sale bien.
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Donna Tartt |
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9a77ce4
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Mais, vrai, j'ai trop pleure! Les aubes sont navrantes.
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Donna Tartt |
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3b6f890
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Silence. Her eyes on mine. But unlike Kitsey--who was always at least partly somewhere else, who loathed serious talk, who at a similar turn would be looking around for the waitress or making whatever light and/or comic remark she could think of to keep the moment from getting too intense--she was listening, she was right with me, and I could see only too well how saddened she was at my condition, a sadness only worsened by the fact she tru..
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Donna Tartt |
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3e4158c
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Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that, sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent. People gambled and golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked up over the news and fussed over their children and gossi..
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Donna Tartt |
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bbb36b1
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Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before
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Donna Tartt |
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c9b8381
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honestly can't remember much else about those years
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Donna Tartt |
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c59d58c
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Though he didn't treat them as equals - he didn't treat anyone as an equal, actually - neither did he resort to the condescending friendliness of the wealthy.
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Donna Tartt |
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0055b85
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A truck shot past in a whine of spray.
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Donna Tartt |
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8a71daf
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Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells awaited them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital. Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that, sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysteriou..
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Donna Tartt |
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6e16224
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How was it possible to miss someone as much as I missed my mother? I missed her so much I wanted to die: a hard, physical longing, like a craving for air underwater.
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Donna Tartt |
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9eae8d4
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Era una quietud que yo conocia bien: asi se encerraba en si misma una casa cuando alguien moria.
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Donna Tartt |
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973ee08
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Even if you don't like Poe--he invented the detective story. And science fiction. In essence, he invented a huge part of the twentieth century.
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Donna Tartt |
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315a987
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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 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--I
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Donna Tartt |
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209782f
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At first I thought they were playing to an
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Donna Tartt |
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8a0ad6a
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garden hoes, there was a small but conspicuous headline.
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Donna Tartt |
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d389694
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Un grande dolore, che comincio a comprendere solo adesso: il cuore non si sceglie. Non possiamo obbligarci a desiderare cio che e bene per noi o per gli altri. Non siamo noi a determinare il tipo di persone che siamo.
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Donna Tartt |
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a302fa5
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I look at the blanked-out faces of the other passengers--hoisting their briefcases, their backpacks, shuffling to disembark--and 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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c05a0a2
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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.
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Donna Tartt |
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bac48f6
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And I'm hoping there's some larger truth about suffering here, or at least my understanding of it--although I've come to realize that the only truths that matter to me are the ones I don't, and can't, understand. What's mysterious, ambiguous, inexplicable. What doesn't fit into a story, what doesn't have a story. Glint of brightness on a barely-there chain. Patch of sunlight on a yellow wall. The loneliness that separates every living creat..
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Donna Tartt |
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aef1b28
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and how precious was life that two such friends, in so big world, should find each other again after so great separation?
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Donna Tartt |
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25ce59e
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I turned, painting in hand, to show it to her, and then realized she wasn't there. Or - she was there and she wasn't. Part of her was there, but it was invisible. The invisible part was the important part. This was something I hadn't understood before.
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Donna Tartt |
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457d768
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Because: if our secret defines us, as opposed to the face we show the world: then the painting was the secret that raised me above the surface of life and enabled me to know who I am. And it's there: in my notebooks, every page, even though it's not. Dream and magic, magic and delirium. The Unified Field Theory. A secret about a secret.
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self
secrets
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Donna Tartt |
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81e4e7f
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What is unthinkable is undoable
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Donna Tartt |
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c7e2a6e
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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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0000fe9
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Bad artists copy, good artists steal.
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Donna Tartt |
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bd7fbee
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Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally believed to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petrie dish of melodrama and distortion. I remember well, for instance, the blind animal terror which ensued when some townie set off the civil defense siren..
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Donna Tartt |
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8ab48e3
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If your deepest self is singing and coaxing you straight toward the bonfire, is it better to turn away? Stop your ears with wax? Ignore all the perverse glory your heart is screaming at you? Set yourself on the course that will lead you dutifully towards the norm, reasonable hours and regular medical check-ups, stable relationships and steady career advancement, the New York Times and brunch on Sunday, all with the promise of being somehow ..
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Donna Tartt |
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62ef2a6
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Because--all the way driving here, driving all night, Christmas lights on the motorway and I'm not ashamed to tell you, I got choked up--because I was thinking, couldn't help it, about the Bible story--? you know, where the steward steals the widow's mite, but then the steward flees to far country and invests the mite wisely and brings back thousandfold cash to widow he stole from? And with joy she forgave him, and they killed the fatted ca..
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Donna Tartt |
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3cbdb3c
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Grown children (an oxymoron, I realize) veer instinctively to extremes: the young scholar is much more a pedant than his older counterpart. And I, being young myself, took these pronouncements of Henry's very seriously. I doubt if Milton himself could have impressed me more.
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youth
scholars
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Donna Tartt |
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d95c24f
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not to look back or feel sad about things, that home is wherever I am.
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loneliness
sadness
homesickness
contentment
home
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Donna Tartt |
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d183011
|
Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us.
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Donna Tartt |
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719c1d9
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Bunny put away his copy of The Bride of Fu Manchu and started carrying around a volume of Homer instead.
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Donna Tartt |