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6596450
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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 I 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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a5cbcd1
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Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.
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Donna Tartt |
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34381c5
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Why does that obstinate little voice in our heads torment us so? Could it be because it reminds us that we are alive, of our mortality, of our individual souls - which, after all, we are too afraid to surrender but yet make us feel more miserable than any other thing? It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one's burned tongues and skinned knees, that ..
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Donna Tartt |
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c7c2bd9
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What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can't be trusted--? What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight towards a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster?
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heart
destruction
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Donna Tartt |
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9f53ec3
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Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?"
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literature
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Donna Tartt |
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5dbe90f
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I suppose the shock of recognition is one of the nastiest shocks of all.
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Donna Tartt |
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4b233ac
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Being the only female in what was basically a boys' club must have been difficult for her. Miraculously, she didn't compensate by becoming hard or quarrelsome. She was still a girl, a slight lovely girl who lay in bed and ate chocolates, a girl whose hair smelled like hyacinth and whose scarves fluttered jauntily in the breeze. But strange and marvelous as she was, a wisp of silk in a forest of black wool, she was not the fragile creature o..
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Donna Tartt |
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77374a7
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It is easy to see things in retrospect. But I was ignorant then of everything but my own happiness, and I don't know what else to say except that life itself seemed very magical in those days: a web of symbol, coincidence, premonition, omen. Everything, somehow, fit together; some sly and benevolent Providence was revealing itself by degrees and I felt myself trembling on the brink of a fabulous discovery, as though any morning it was all g..
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Donna Tartt |
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e059b35
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Not quite what one expected, but once it happened one realized it couldn't be any other way.
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Donna Tartt |
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2a0d701
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What are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a dead star? That, by the way, is a phrase of Julian's. I remember it from a lecture of his on the Iliad, when Patroklos appears to Achilles in a dream. There is a very moving passage where Achilles overjoyed at the sight of the apparition - tries to throw his arms around the ghost of his old friend, and it vanishes. The dead appear to us in dreams, said Julian, because tha..
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unhappiness
death
dreams
museum
classics
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Donna Tartt |
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4d47558
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Who cares? If he is good to you? None of us ever find enough kindness in the world, do we?
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Donna Tartt |
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8ddaa8e
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When we are sad--at least I am like this--it can be comforting to cling to familiar objects, to the things that don't change. Your descriptions of the desert--that oceanic, endless glare--are terrible but also very beautiful. Maybe there's something to be said for the rawness and emptiness of it all. The light of long ago is different from the light of today and yet here, in this house, I'm reminded of the past at every turn. But when I thi..
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Donna Tartt |
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c5121e6
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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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good
wrong
bad-deeds
what-is-bad
what-is-good
good-deeds
black-and-white
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Donna Tartt |
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40ada82
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Because--isn't it drilled into us constantly, from childhood on, an unquestioned platitude in the culture--? 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 wha..
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Donna Tartt |
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2168dc8
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It's funny, but thinking back on it now, I realize that this particular point in time, as I stood there blinking in the deserted hall, was the one point at which I might have chosen to do something very much different from what I actually did. But of course I didn't see this crucial moment for what it actually was; I suppose we never do. Instead, I only yawned, and shook myself from the momentary daze that had come upon me, and went on my w..
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Donna Tartt |
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f929096
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Even if it meant that she had failed, she was glad. And if what she'd wanted had been impossible from the start, still there was a certain lonely comfort in the fact that she'd known it was impossible and had gone ahead and done it anyway.
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Donna Tartt |
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19d70bb
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We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it?" "To live," said Camilla. "To live forever,"
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Donna Tartt |
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ff55108
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And the flavor 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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dc53630
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It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.
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Donna Tartt |
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631459a
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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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mortality
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Donna Tartt |
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243669a
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After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great.
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Donna Tartt |
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a4168aa
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The world won't come to me...so I must go to it.
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Donna Tartt |
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a64433a
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There was a horrible, erratic thumping in my chest, as if a large bird was trapped inside my ribcage and beating itself to death.
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Donna Tartt |
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de5a724
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Can't good come around sometimes through some strange back doors?
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Donna Tartt |
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36ce3f2
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If I had grown up in that house I couldn't have loved it more, couldn't have been more familiar with the creak of the swing, or the pattern of the clematis vines on the trellis, or the velvety swell of land as it faded to gray on the horizon . . . . The very colors of the place had seeped into my blood.
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Donna Tartt |
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a90053d
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I was fascinated by strangers, wanted to know what food they ate and what dishes they ate it from, what movies they watched and what music they listened to, wanted to look under their beds and in their secret drawers and night tables and inside the pockets of their coats.
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Donna Tartt |
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216a0a6
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How quickly he fell; how soon it was over.
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surprise
regret
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Donna Tartt |
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39111a3
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And the nights, bigger than imagining: black and gusty and enormous, disordered and wild with stars.
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Donna Tartt |
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73d7912
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Yet my longing for her was like a bad cold that had hung on for years despite my conviction that I was sure to get over it at any moment.
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Donna Tartt |
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7b4eadb
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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 cre..
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loneliness
sorrow
yellow
sunlight
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Donna Tartt |
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5981244
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As long as I am acting out of love, I feel I am doing best I know how.
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Donna Tartt |
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00aea7f
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Henry's a perfectionist, I mean, really-really kind of inhuman -- very brilliant, very erratic and enigmatic. He's a stiff, cold person, Machiavellian, ascetic and he's made himself what he is by sheer strength of will. His aspiration is to be this Platonic creature of pure rationality and that's why he's attracted to the Classics, and particularly to the Greeks -- all those high, cold ideas of beauty and perfection.
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Donna Tartt |
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10dd9fa
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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 colours than ordinary - I remember a few weeks before she died, eating a late supper with her in an Italian restaura..
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Donna Tartt |
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b9c45c9
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It happened in New York, April 10th, nineteen years ago. Even my hand balks at the date. I had to push to write it down, just to keep the pen moving on the paper. It used to be a perfectly ordinary day, but now it sticks up on the calendar like a rusty nail.
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grief
grieving-the-loss-of-a-mother
grieving
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Donna Tartt |
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b3dd2e0
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When I looked at the painting I felt the same convergence on a single point: a glancing sun-struck instance that existed now and forever. Only occasionally did I notice the chain on the finch's ankle, or think what a cruel life for a little living creature--fluttering briefly, forced always to land in the same hopeless place.
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Donna Tartt |
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2482f3b
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More than anything I was relieved that in my unfamiliar babbling-and-wanting-to-talk state I'd stopped myself from blurting the thing I'd never said, even though it was something we both knew well enough without me saying out loud to him in the street - which was, of course, I love you.
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boys-love
i-m-dying
theo
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Donna Tartt |
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2044865
|
They understand not only evil, it seemed, but the extravagance of tricks with which evil presents itself as good.
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Donna Tartt |
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fabfb76
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They too, knew this beautiful and harrowing landscape; they'd had the same experience of looking up from their books with fifth-century eyes and finding the world disconcertingly sluggish and alien, as if it were not their home.
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scholarship
classics
language
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Donna Tartt |
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1701523
|
The thought of her gave me such a continual anguish that I could no more forget her than an aching tooth. It was involuntary, hopeless, compulsive. For years she had been the first thing I remembered when I woke up, the last thing that drifted through my mind as I went to sleep, and during the day she came to me obtrusively, obsessively, always with a painful shock.
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pain
compulsion
anguish
compulsive
hopeless
obsession
unrequited-love
memory
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Donna Tartt |
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3c616ac
|
And as we leave Donne and Walton on the shores of Metahemeralism, we wave a fond farewell to those famous chums of yore.
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Donna Tartt |
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6fa8d38
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Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones I did not.
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the-secret-history
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Donna Tartt |
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b071218
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And who knows-but maybe that's what's waiting for us at the end of the journey, a majesty unimaginable until the very moment we find ourselves walking through the doors of it, what we find ourselves gazing at in astonishment when God finally takes His hands off our eyes and says: Look!
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Donna Tartt |
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b8197a1
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That night I wrote in my journal: "Trees are schizophrenic now and beginning to lose control, enraged with the shock of their fiery new colors. Someone -- was it van Gogh? -- said that orange is the color of insanity. _Beauty is terror._ We want to be devoured by it, to hide ourselves in that fire which refines us."
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Donna Tartt |
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7ef98e6
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Here is my experience. Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you. What you want to live and be happy in the world is a woman who has her own life and lets you have yours.
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Donna Tartt |