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d2f27b4
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I hate Gucci,' said Francis. 'Do you?' said Henry, glancing up from his reverie. 'Really? I think it's rather grand.' 'Come on, Henry.' 'Well, it's so expensive, but it's so ugly too, isn't it? I think they make it ugly on purpose. And yet people buy it out of sheer perversity.' 'I don't see what you think is grand about that.' 'Anything is grand if it's done on a large enough scale,' said Henry.
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Donna Tartt |
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97294f4
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He sailed through the world guided only by the dim lights of impulse and habit, confident that his course would throw up no obstacles so large that they could not be plowed over with sheer force of momentum.
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Donna Tartt |
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6710527
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She was the golden thread running through everything, a lens that magnified beauty so that the whole world stood transfigured in relation to her, and her alone.
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Donna Tartt |
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9242b3d
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He was a planet without an atmosphere.
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Donna Tartt |
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26867e4
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They all shared a certain coolness, a cruel, mannered charm which was not modern in the least but had the strange cold breath of the ancient world : they were magnificent creatures, such eyes, such hands, such looks - sic oculos, sic ille manus, sic ora ferebat.
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Donna Tartt |
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60352dc
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For in the deepest, most unshakable part of myself reason was useless. She was the missing kingdom, the unbruised part of myself I'd lost with my mother. Everything about her was a snowstorm of fascination,
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Donna Tartt |
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f5e4a4a
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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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Donna Tartt |
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99a7c99
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Cubitum eamus?" "What?" "Nothing."
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Donna Tartt |
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e88fc8a
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My hopes for a relationship with her were wholly unreal, whereas my ongoing misery, and frustration, were an all-too-horrible reality. Was groundless, hopeless romantic obsession any way to waste the rest of my life?
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Donna Tartt |
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7c8f117
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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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f8473ee
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There is to me about this place a smell of rot, the smell of rot that ripe fruit makes. Nowhere, ever, have the hideous mechanics of birth and copulation and death -those monstrous upheavals of life that the Greeks call miasma, defilement- been so brutal or been painted up to look so pretty; have so many people put so much faith in lies and mutability and death death death.
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Donna Tartt |
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5c2d89a
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The possible, as it was presented in her Health textbook (a mathematical progression of dating, "career," marriage, and motherhood), did not interest Harriet. Of all the heroes on her list, the greatest of them all was Sherlock Holmes, and he wasn't even a real person. Then there was Harry Houdini. He was the master of the impossible; more importantly, for Harriet, he was a master of escape. No prison in the world could hold him: he escaped..
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Donna Tartt |
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a21db48
|
The possible, as it was presented in her Health textbook (a mathematical progression of dating, "career," marriage, and motherhood), did not interest Harriet. Of all the heroes on her list, the greatest of them all was Sherlock Holmes, and he wasn't even a real person. Then there was Harry Houdini. He was the master of the impossible; more importantly, for Harriet, he was a master of escape. No prison in the world could hold him: he escaped..
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Donna Tartt |
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34a287c
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The dead appear to us in dreams 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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dreams
star
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Donna Tartt |
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2cbfc9d
|
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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10b5fcb
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I missed her so much I wanted to die: a hard, physical longing, like a craving for air underwater. 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. For some reason, it was one of the clearest memo..
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loss
mother
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Donna Tartt |
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475ae4b
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And I know I said earlier that he was perfect but he wasn't perfect, far from it; he could be silly and vain and remote and often cruel and still we loved him, in spite of, because.
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Donna Tartt |
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3f53259
|
It's not about outward appearances but inward significance. A grandeur in the world, but not of the world, a grandeur that the world doesn't understand. That first glimpse of pure otherness, in whose presence you bloom out and out and out. A self one does not want. A heart one cannot help.
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want
world
heart
inward
inward-significance
otherness
outward-appearances
grandeur
understand
help
self
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Donna Tartt |
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546ba10
|
Maybe the one had to be lost for the others to be found?
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sinners
redemption
sin
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Donna Tartt |
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111c292
|
The shame that tormented me was all the more corrosive for having no very clear origin: I didn't know why I felt so tainted, and worthless, and wrong-only that I did, and whenever I looked up from my books I was swamped by slimy waters rushing in from all sides.
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tainted
worthlessness
corrosive
torment
taint
shame
worthless
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Donna Tartt |
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fcaf01d
|
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 ..
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Donna Tartt |
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b1c6246
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But though it was the most resonant and real-seeming thing that had happened in a long time, I didn't want to spoil it by talking about it...
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Donna Tartt |
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c59a943
|
And yet she was wholly herself: a rarity.
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Donna Tartt |
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048a8af
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though I can digress with the best of them, I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.
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Donna Tartt |
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25cdb90
|
We have art in order not to die from the truth. --NIETZSCHE
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Donna Tartt |
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58fbee4
|
And you love her, yes. But not too much." "Why do you say that?" "Because you are not mad, or wild, or grieving! You are not roaring out to choke her with your own bare hands! Which means your soul is not too mixed up with hers. And that is good. 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 ..
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Donna Tartt |
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aa16ee2
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I az chuvstvam, che ima neshcho mnogo seriozno, mnogo vazhno, koeto triabva da ti kazha, moi nes'shchestvuvashchi chitateliu, i chuvstvam, che triabva da go kazha taka nastoiatelno, kakto ako stoiakh v staiata pred teb. Che zhivot't - kak'vto i drugi kachestva da ima - e krat'k. Che s'dbata e zhestoka, no mozhe bi ne e proizvolna. Che Prirodata (s koeto iskam da kazha Sm'rtta) vinagi pobezhdava, no tova ne oznachava, che triabva da se prekl..
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Donna Tartt |
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ff83ca7
|
Or rather, I dreamed of her constantly, only as absence, not presence: a breeze blowing through a just-vacated house, her handwriting on a notepad, the smell of her perfume, streets in strange lost towns where I knew she'd been walking only a moment before but had just vanished, a shadow moving away against a sunstruck wall. Sometimes I spotted her in a crowd, or in a taxicab pulling away, and these glimpses of her I treasured despite the f..
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Donna Tartt |
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e45d77e
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And if beauty is terror," said Julian, "then what is desire? We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it?" "To live," said Camilla. "To live forever," said Bunny, chin cupped in palm."
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Donna Tartt |
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06c9ac7
|
But I couldn't. It was real; I knew it, even in the dark. Raised yellow streak of paint on the wing and feathers scratched in with the butt of the brush. One chip on the upper left edge that hadn't been there before, tiny mar less than two millimeters, but otherwise: perfect. I was different, but it wasn't. And as the light flickered over it in bands, I had the queasy sense of my own life, in comparison, as a patternless and transient burst..
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Donna Tartt |
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05794e9
|
Well, whatever one thinks of the Roman Church, it is a worthy and powerful foe. I could accept that sort of conversion with grace. But I shall be very disappointed indeed if we lose him to the Presbyterians.
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Donna Tartt |
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7e1f1f0
|
We looked at each other and just laughed; everything was hysterically funny, even the playground slide was smiling at us, and at some point, deep in the night, when we were swinging on the jungle gym and showers of sparks were flying out of our mouths, I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.
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Donna Tartt |
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11d5db8
|
She was a living reverie for me: the mere sight of her sparked an almost infinite range of fantasy, from Greek to Gothic, from vulgar to divine.
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Donna Tartt |
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3dde83f
|
Because it is dangerous to ignore the existence of the irrational. The more cultivated a person is, the more intelligent, the more repressed, then the more he needs some method of channeling the primitive impulses he's worked so hard to subdue. Otherwise those powerful old forces will mass and strengthen until they are violent enough to break free, more violent for the delay, often strong enough to sweep the will away entirely.
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repression
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Donna Tartt |
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85cc0fd
|
Always remember, the person we're really working for is the person who's restoring the piece a hundred years from now. He's the one we want to impress.
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Donna Tartt |
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e9e5dd3
|
But though I knew just how lucky I was, still it was impossible to feel happy or even grateful for my good fortune. It was as if I'd suffered a chemical change of the spirit: as if the acid balance of my psyche had shifted and leached the life out of me in aspects impossible to repair, or reverse, like a frond of living coral hardened to bone.
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Donna Tartt |
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3ce7bb8
|
it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn't touch.
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immortality
art
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Donna Tartt |
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0119cc3
|
We don't like to admit it, but the idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than almost anything. All truly civilized people - the ancients no less than us - have civilized themselves through the wilful repression of the old, animal self.
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self
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Donna Tartt |
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5dce2ca
|
It was rainy, trees leafing out, spring deepening into summer; and the forlorn cry of horns on the street, the dank smell of the wet pavement had an electricity about it, a sense of crowds and static, lonely secretaries and fat guys with bags of carry-out, everywhere the ungainly sadness of creatures pushing and struggling to live.
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Donna Tartt |
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d79fe9c
|
It does not do to be frightened of things about which you know nothing," he said. "You are like children. Afraid of the dark."
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Donna Tartt |
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7c81051
|
They were playing old Bob Dylan, more than perfect for narrow Village streets close to Christmas and the snow whirling down in big feathery flakes, the kind of winter where you want to be walking down a city street with your arm around a girl like on the old record cover
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winter
records
snow
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Donna Tartt |
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a504138
|
Why do I care about all the wrong things, and nothing at all for the right ones? Or, to tip it another way: how can I see so clearly that everything I love or care about is illusion, and yet - for me, anyway - all that's worth living for lies in that charm?
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Donna Tartt |
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fe9dddd
|
For if the modern mind is whimsical and discursive, the classical mind is narrow, unhesitating, relentless.
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Donna Tartt |
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134466d
|
You want to know what Classics are?" said a drunk Dean of Admissions to me at a faculty party a couple of years ago. "I'll tell you what Classics are. Wars and homos."
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Donna Tartt |