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4103323
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A character like his disintegrates under analysis. It can only be defined by the anecdote, the chance encounter or the sentence overheard.
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Donna Tartt |
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1674eec
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I had never been to Brooklyn and didn't know a thing about it but I liked the idea of living in a city - any city, especially a strange one - liked the thought of traffic and crowds, of working in a bookstore, waiting tables in a coffee shop, who knew what kind of odd, solitary life I might slip into?
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Donna Tartt |
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0bb5a19
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You know that thing Julian used to say,' said Francis. 'Which thing?' 'About a Hindu saint being able to slay a thousand on the battlefield and it not being a sin unless he felt remorse.
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Donna Tartt |
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82c66e9
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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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e4af7e4
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This was extraordinary, as Mrs. Fountain was so cheap she washed out her old tinfoil to roll in a ball and use again,
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Donna Tartt |
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68f243d
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understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole;
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Donna Tartt |
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24b7a5d
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his unhappiness was our fault. My mother and I got on his nerves. It was because of us he had a job he couldn't stand. Everything we did was irritating. He particularly didn't enjoy being around me, not that he often was: in the mornings, as I got ready for school, he sat puffy-eyed and silent over his coffee with the Wall Street Journal in front of him, his bathrobe open and his hair standing up in cowlicks, and sometimes he was so shaky t..
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Donna Tartt |
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dadeb63
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Certainly, families like Harriet's (and Hely's) would not tolerate for one moment brick-throwing at children white or black ("or purple," as Edie was fond of piping up in any discussion about skin color). And yet there Harriet was, at the all-white school."
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Donna Tartt |
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4a9d90c
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Reason is always apparent to a discerning eye. But luck? It's invisible, erratic, angelic.
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Donna Tartt |
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552f8d6
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unbearable claustrophobia of the soul,
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Donna Tartt |
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0dc402c
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But I think maybe it's more like a column of figures where you add two numbers wrong at the start, and it throws the total. If you trace it back, you can see the mistake - the point where you would have had a different outcome.
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Donna Tartt |
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420ed27
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That life--whatever else it is--is short.
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Donna Tartt |
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740fc05
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I had a feeling of deja vu when, the next afternoon, Julian answered the door exactly as he had the first time, by opening it only a crack and looking through it warily, as if there were something wonderful in his office that needed guarding, something that he was careful not everyone should see. It was a feeling I would come to know well in the next months. Even now, years later and far away, sometimes in dreams I find myself standing befo..
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Donna Tartt |
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ea2f5cb
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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
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Donna Tartt |
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4603dc2
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Was it wrong, wanting to sleep late with the covers over my head and wander around a peaceful house with old seashells in drawers and wicker baskets of folded upholstery fabric stored under the parlor secretary, sunset falling in drastic coral spokes through the fanlight over the front door?
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Donna Tartt |
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8fb1304
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began to walk home, very quickly. A car full of high-school girls screeched around the corner. They were the girls who ran all the clubs and won all the elections in Allison's high-school class: little Lisa Leavitt; Pam McCormick, with her dark ponytail, and Ginger Herbert, who had won the Beauty Revue; Sissy Arnold, who wasn't as pretty as the rest of them but just as popular. Their faces--like movie starlets', universally worshiped in the..
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Donna Tartt |
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dc8f4d8
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Death is the mother of beauty" "And what is beauty?" "Terror" "Well said. Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary, genuine beauty is always quite alarming"
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terror
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Donna Tartt |
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a1b79f7
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If a painting really works down in your heart and changes the way you see, and think, and feel, you don't think, 'oh, I love this picture because it's universal.' 'I love this painting because it speaks to all mankind.' That's not the reason anyone loves a piece of art. It's a secret whisper from an alleyway. Psst, you. Hey kid. Yes you. An individual heart-shock...A really great painting is fluid enough to work its way into the mind and he..
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Donna Tartt |
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1d035c6
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Sometimes when there's been an accident and reality is too sudden and strange to comprehend, the surreal will take over
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reality
the-secret-history
surreal
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Donna Tartt |
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75dba3c
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There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty -unless she is wed to something more meaningful -is always superficial
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donna-tartt
the-secret-history
superficial
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Donna Tartt |
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84bd7f3
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Even if life is great--keep it to yourself. You don't want to tempt the devil.
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Donna Tartt |
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ace97a1
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EVER SINCE BORIS HAD shown up with the bruised eye, I had built Boris's father up in my mind to be some thick-necked Soviet with pig eyes and a buzz haircut. In fact--as I was surprised to see, when I did finally meet him--he was as thin and pale as a starved poet. Chlorotic, with a sunken chest, he smoked incessantly, wore cheap shirts that had grayed in the wash, drank endless cups of sugary tea. But when you looked him in the eye you rea..
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Donna Tartt |
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aa7786f
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But then finally we had to go inside and almost the instant we did the spell was broken, and in the brightness of the hallway we were embarrassed and stiff with each other, almost as if the house lights had been turned up at the end of a play, and all our closeness exposed for what it was: make-believe. For months I had been desperate to recapture that moment; and-in the bar, for an hour or two - I had. But it was all unreal again, we were ..
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Donna Tartt |
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5f53acd
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On game day, until five o'clock or so, the white desert light held off the essential Sunday gloom--autumn sinking into winter, loneliness of October dusk with school the next day--but there was always a long still moment toward the end of those football afternoons where the mood of the crowd turned and everything grew desolate and uncertain, onscreen and off, the sheet-metal glare off the patio glass fading to gold and then gray, long shado..
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Donna Tartt |
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c18b022
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Wedding Obergruppenfuhrer
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Donna Tartt |
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aa51add
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still when I lost her I lost sight of any landmark that might have led me someplace happier,
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Donna Tartt |
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289de4f
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It kept being a shock every time I remembered it, a fresh slap: she was gone. Every new event--everything I did for the rest of my life--would only separate us more and more: days she was no 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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b34c33b
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Certainly I would be less frightened of death (not just my own death but Welty's death, Andy's death, Death in general) if I thought a familiar person came to meet us at the door, because--writing this now, I'm close to tears--I think how poor Andy told me, with terror on his face, that my mother was the only person he'd known, and liked, who'd ever died. So--maybe when Andy washed up spitting and coughing into the country on the far side o..
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Donna Tartt |
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24aebaf
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At one time I had liked the idea, that the act, at least, had bound us together; we were not ordinary friends, but friends till-death-do-us-part. This thought had been my only comfort in the aftermath of Bunny's death. Now it made me sick, knowing there was no way out. I was stuck with them, with all of them, for good.
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Donna Tartt |
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d6559fe
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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 creature from every other
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Donna Tartt |
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850f7ee
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and though she was not beautiful her calmness had the magnetic pull of beauty--a stillness so powerful that the molecules realigned themselves around her when she came into a room.
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Donna Tartt |
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5cfc97b
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They 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. Maybe you don't see it at first with all the beauty and bloom, the little speck of rot. But ..
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Donna Tartt |
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e008e6a
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Navernoe, kogda udaetsia spasti khot' chto-to ot khoda istorii, eto uzhe samo po sebe chudo. Vokrug menia, mimo menia - dom zhil svoei zhizn'iu. mne bylo naplevat', chto eto tam za muzyka. Ia slushal eio tol'ko iz-za dozhdlivogo sveta, belogo dereva za oknom, raskatov groma, Pippy. Kak zhe menia zaneslo v etu strannuiu novuiu zhizn', gde po nocham orut p'ianye inostrantsy, a ia khozhu v griaznoi odezhde i nikto menia ne liubit? Razvratnyi u..
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Donna Tartt |
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d56167f
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Inogda, chtoby poniat' tselyi mir, nuzhno sosredotochit'sia na samoi krokhotnoi ego chasti, pristal'no vgliadyvat'sia v to, chto nakhoditsia riadom s toboi, poka ono ne zamenit tseloe; no s tekh samykh por, kak kartina ot menia uskol'znula, ia chuvstvoval, chto zakhlebyvaius' i propadaiu v bezgranichnosti - i ne tol'ko v poniatnoi bezgranichnosti vremeni i prostranstva, no i v nepreodolimykh rasstoianiiakh mezhdu liud'mi, dazhe kogda do nik..
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Donna Tartt |
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75350ef
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And I feel I have something very serious and urgent to say to you, my non-existent reader, and I feel I should say it as urgently as if I were standing in the room with you. That life--whatever else it is--is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn't mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we're not always so glad to be here, it's our task to immerse ourselves a..
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goldfinch
theo
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Donna Tartt |
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544d158
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Things would have turned out better is she had lived. As it was, she died when I was kid;and thought everything that 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.
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love
the-goldfinch
mother
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Donna Tartt |
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21b544c
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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 had taken for granted: familiar faces, glad greetings: hey manito! For I had thought that this last touchstone of the past, at least, would be where I'd left it.
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grief
loss
home
nostalgia
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Donna Tartt |
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86e3992
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installed herself as Wedding Obergruppenfuhrer.
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Donna Tartt |
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1253af7
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This piece, not of the first quality, doesn't fit with anything else I own, and yet isn't it always the inappropriate thing, the thing that doesn't quite work, that's oddly the dearest?
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Donna Tartt |
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0a68502
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It was all very different from the crowded, complicated, and overly formal atmosphere of the Barbours', where everything was rehearsed and scheduled like a Broadway production, an airless perfection from which Andy had been in constant retreat, scuttling to his bedroom like a frightened squid. By contrast Hobie lived and wafted like some great sea mammal in his own mild atmosphere, the dark brown of tea stains and tobacco, where every clock..
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Donna Tartt |
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0935d0b
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BEFORE BORIS, I HAD borne my solitude stoically enough, without realizing quite how alone I was.
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Donna Tartt |
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750c86e
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only truths that matter to me are the ones I don't, and can't, understand.
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Donna Tartt |
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bba609e
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I felt I understood the secret grandeur of dying, all the knowledge held back from all humankind until the very end:
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Donna Tartt |
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3f9a542
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She was a masterpiece of composure; nothing ever ruffled her or made her upset, and though she was not beautiful her calmness had the magnetic pull of beauty--a stillness so powerful that the molecules realigned themselves around her when she came into a room.
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Donna Tartt |