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45b7157
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It didn't occur to me then, though it certainly does now, that it was years since I'd roused myself from my stupor of misery and self-absorption; between anomie and trance, inertia and parenthesis and gnawing my own heart out, there were a lot of small, easy, everyday kindnesses I'd missed out on; and even the word `kindness' was liking rising from unconsciousness into some hospital awareness of voices, and people, from a stream of digitize..
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Donna Tartt |
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659e40f
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How was it that a complex, a nervous and delicately calibrated mind like my own, was able to adjust itself perfectly after a shock like the murder, while Bunny's eminently more sturdy and ordinary one was knocked out of kilter?
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Donna Tartt |
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faf107c
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Aristotle says in the Poetics," said Henry, "that objects such as corpses, painful to view in themselves, can become delightful to contemplate in a work of art." "And I believe Aristotle is correct. After all, what are the scenes in poetry graven on our memories, the ones that we love the most? Precisely these. The murder of Agamemnon and the wrath of Achilles. Dido on the funeral pyre. The daggers of the traitors and Caesar's blood--rememb..
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Donna Tartt |
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69244df
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good doesn't always follow from good deeds, nor bad deeds result from bad, does it? Even the wise and good cannot see the end of all actions.
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Donna Tartt |
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83293ab
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my head in the rainclouds, my heart in the sky.
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Donna Tartt |
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c5aa550
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It was if the charming theatrical curtain had dropped away and I saw him for the first time as he really was: not the benign old sage, the indulgent and protective good-parent of my dreams, but ambiguous, a moral neutral, whose beguiling trappings concealed a being watchful, capricious, and heartless.
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Donna Tartt |
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2aa9def
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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.
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Donna Tartt |
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32740f3
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There had been nights in the desert where I was so sick with laughter, convulsed and doubled over with aching stomach for hours on end, I would happily have thrown myself in front of a car to make it stop.
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Donna Tartt |
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bddd4a3
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I blinked at her. My shades were down and the hall was dark and to me, half-drugged and reeling, she seemed not at all her bright unattainable self but rather a hazy and ineffably tender apparition, all slender wrists and shadows and disordered hair, the Camilla who resided, dim and lovely, in the gloomy boudoir of my dreams.
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Donna Tartt |
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38563fd
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I suppose there is a certain crucial interval in everyone's life when character is fixed forever;
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Donna Tartt |
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6a296ec
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She looked up at me, her eyes large with compassion, with understanding of the solitude and incivility of grief.
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Donna Tartt |
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e9e383d
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Out in the country it was not uncommon to discover that she had slipped away, alone, out to the lake, maybe, or down to the cellar, where once I found her sitting in the big marooned sleigh, reading, her fur coat thrown over her knees. Things would have been terrible strange and unbalanced without her. She was the Queen who finished out the suit of dark Jacks, dark King, and Joker.
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the-secret-history
queen
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Donna Tartt |
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6c41041
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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. Action slows to a dreamlike glide, frame by frame; the motion of a hand, a sentence spoken, fills an eternity.
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Donna Tartt |
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9202564
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It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from all the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one's burned tongues and skinned knees, that one's aches and pains are all one's own. Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us. Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that's why we're so anxious to lose them...
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Donna Tartt |
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d3693e6
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He was a bad painter and a vicious gossip, with a vocabulary composed almost entirely of obscenities, guttural verbs, and the word "postmodernist."
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Donna Tartt |
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d8cce14
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For humans-trapped in biology-there was no mercy: we lived a while, we fussed around for a bit and died, we rotted in the ground like garbage. Time destroyed us all soon enough. But to destroy, or lose, a deathless thing-to break bonds stronger than the temporal-was a metaphysical uncoupling all its own, a startling new flavor of despair.
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Donna Tartt |
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1e77c97
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From the window, above the clatter of pots and the slamming of cabinets, Francis was singing, as though it was the happiest song in the world: 'We are the little black sheep who have gone astray . . . Baa baa baa . . . Gentlemen songsters off on a spree . . . Doomed from here to eternity . . .
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Donna Tartt |
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75fbecb
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isn't the whole point of things--beautiful things--that they connect you to some larger beauty? Those first images that crack your heart wide open and you spend the rest of your life chasing, or trying to recapture, in one way or another?
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Donna Tartt |
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0354bbd
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Hobie's reassuring hand on my shoulder, a strong, comforting pressure, like an anchor letting me know that everything was okay. I hadn't felt a touch like that since my mother died--friendly, steadying in the midst of confusing events--and, like a stray dog hungry for affection, I felt some profound shift in allegiance, blood-deep, a sudden, humiliating, eyewatering conviction of this place is good, this person is safe, I can trust him, nob..
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Donna Tartt |
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e789ef4
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As I stood with her on the platform - she impatient, tapping her foot, leaning forward to look down the tracks - it seemed more than I could bear to see her go. Francis was around the corner, buying her a book to read on the train. 'I don't want you to leave,' I said. 'I don't want to, either.' 'Then don't.' 'I have to.' We stood looking at each other. It was raining. She looked at me with her rain-colored eyes. Camilla, I love you,' I said..
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Donna Tartt |
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d10dcf0
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To 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; but ever since the painting had vanished from under me I'd felt drowned and extinguished by vastness--not just the predictable vastness of time, and space, but the impassable distances between people even when they were within arm's reach of each other, and with a swell of vertigo I..
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Donna Tartt |
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c029c3e
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I had said goodbye to her once before, but it took everything I had to say goodbye to her then, again, for the last time, like poor Orpheus turning for a last backward glance at the ghost of his only love and in the same heartbeat losing her forever: hinc illae lacrimae, hence those tears.
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Donna Tartt |
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85ed9ed
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The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.
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Donna Tartt |
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cdc446e
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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 living creature. Sorrow inseparable from joy.
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loneliness
mystery
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Donna Tartt |
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6f351d6
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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 in the house said something different and time didn't actually correspond to the standard measure but instead meandered along at its own sedate tick-tock, obeying the pace of his antique-crowded backwater, far from the factory-built, epoxy-glued version of the world.
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Donna Tartt |
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87262f3
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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 solitary life I might slip into? Meals alone, walking the dogs in the evenings; and nobody knowing who I was.
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places
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Donna Tartt |
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6b56a4a
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Running might take her forward, it could even take her home; but it couldn't take her back-not ten minutes, ten hours, not ten years or days. And that was tough, as Hely would say. Tough: since back was the way she wanted to go, since the past was the only place she wanted to be.
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Donna Tartt |
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025b100
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The sky was a rich, mindless, never-ending blue, like a promise of some ridiculous glory that wasn't really there.
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Donna Tartt |
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bbce8ae
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Walking into the library, I took in my breath sharply and stopped: glass fronted bookcases and Gothic panels, stretching fifteen feet to a frescoed and plaster-medallioned ceiling. In the back of the room was a marble fireplace, big as a sepulchre, and a globed gasolier--dripping with prisms and strings of crystal beading--sparkled in the dim. There was a piano, too, and Charles was playing, a glass of whiskey on the seat beside him. He was..
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Donna Tartt |
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09f769c
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I realized that the childish impression I had always had of my father, as Just Lawgiver, was entirely wrong. We were utterly dependent on this man, who was not only deluded and ignorant, but incompetent in every way. What was more, I knew that my mother was incapable of standing up to him. It was like walking into the cockpit of an airplane and finding the pilot and co-pilot passed out drunk in their seats. And standing outside the Lyceum, ..
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Donna Tartt |
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7c394ae
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Why did I obsess over people like this? Was it normal to fixate on strangers in this particular vivid, fevered way? I didn't think so. It was impossible to imagine some random passer-by on the street forming quite such an interest in me. And yet it was the main reason I'd gone in those houses with Tom: 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 t..
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Donna Tartt |
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22d1c76
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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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fa5c89f
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It's a terrible thing, what we did," said Francis abruptly. "I mean, this man was not Voltaire we killed. But still. It's a shame. I feel bad about it." "Well, of course, I do too," said Henry matter-of-factly. "But not bad enough to want to go to jail for it." Francis snorted and poured himself another shot of whiskey and drank it straight off. "No," he said. "Not that bad."
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Donna Tartt |
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e4f972e
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The problem (as I'd learned, repeatedly) was that thirty-six hours in, with your body in full revolt, and the remainder of your un-opiated life stretching out bleakly ahead of you like a prison corridor, you needed some fairly compelling reason to keep moving forward into darkness, rather than falling straight back into the gorgeous feather mattress you'd so foolishly abandoned.
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Donna Tartt |
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086aec5
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People die, sure," my mother was saying. "But it's so heartbreaking and unnecessary how we lose things. From pure carelessness. Fires, wars. The Parthenon, used as a munitions storehouse. I guess that anything we manage to save from history is a miracle."
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Donna Tartt |
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cdf66e3
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If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.
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Donna Tartt |
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bde31cf
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Never do what you can't undo.
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Donna Tartt |
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e9e30db
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I accepted all this counsel politely, with a glassy smile and a glaring sense of unreality. Many adults seemed to interpret this numbness as a positive sign; I remember particularly Mr. Beeman (an overly clipped Brit in a dumb tweed motoring cap, whom despite his solicitude I had come to hate, irrationally, as an agent of my mother's death) complimenting me on my maturity and informing me that I seemed to be "coping awfully well." And maybe..
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mourning
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Donna Tartt |
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76e4b4a
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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. ... You see one painting, I see another, the art book puts it at another remove still, the lady buying ..
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Donna Tartt |
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7122716
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Somehow the present had shrunk into a smaller and much less interesting place.
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Donna Tartt |
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1341f74
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Viewed from a distance, his character projected an impression of solidity and wholeness which was in fact as insubstantial as a hologram; up close, he was all motes and light, you could pass your hand right through him. If you stepped back far enough, however, the illusion would click in again and there he would be, bigger than life, squinting at you from behind his little glasses and raking back a dank lock of hair with one hand.
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Donna Tartt |
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bc58809
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We had not spoken about the incident in my room several nights before and, in the drowsy silence of the car, I felt the need to make things plain. "You know, Francis," I said. "What?" It seemed the best thing was just to come right out and say it. "You know," I said, "I'm really not attracted to you. I mean, not that--" "Isn't that interesting," he said coolly. "I'm really not attracted to you, either." "But--"
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the-secret-history
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Donna Tartt |
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0eb59db
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He laughed. "What's to say? Great paintings--people flock to see them, they draw crowds, they're reproduced endlessly on coffee mugs and mouse pads and anything-you-like. And, I count myself in the following, you can have a lifetime of perfectly sincere museum-going where you traipse around enjoying everything and then go out and have some lunch. But--" crossing back to the table to sit again "--if a painting really works down in your heart..
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Donna Tartt |
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44808ae
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how strange to find that the present contained such a bright shard of the living past, damaged and eroded but not destroyed.
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Donna Tartt |