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3413891
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The center of my earth is you
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Donna Tartt |
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67a36b1
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Besides I think it's good to change the place where one sleeps from time to time. I believe it gives one more interesting dreams.
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Donna Tartt |
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1233730
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It seemed my whole life was composed of these disjointed fractions of time, hanging around in one public place and then another, as if I were waiting for trains that never came. And, like one of those ghosts who are said to linger around depots late at night, asking passersby for the timetable of the Midnight Express that derailed twenty years before, I wandered from light to light until that dreaded hour when all the doors closed and, step..
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winter
time
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Donna Tartt |
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84ce66b
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Side by side they were very much alike, in similarity less of lineament than of manner and bearing, a correspondence of gestures which bounced and echoed between them so that a blink seemed to reverberate, moments later, in a twitch of the other's eyelid.
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Donna Tartt |
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a13d912
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If he had his wits about him Bunny would surely keep his mouth shut; but now, with his subconscious mind knocked loose from its perch and flapping in the hollow corridors of his skull as erratically as a bat, there was no way to be sure of anything he might do.
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Donna Tartt |
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e41ef2b
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We can't choose what we want and don't want and that's the hard lonely truth. Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it's going to kill us. We can't escape who we are.
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Donna Tartt |
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e4d0d90
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Are you always up this early?' I asked him. 'Almost always,' he said without looking up. 'It's beautiful here, but morning light can make the most vulgar things tolerable.
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the-secret-history
morning
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Donna Tartt |
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7150210
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I honestly can't remember much else about those years except a certain mood that permeated most of them, a melancholy feeling that I associate with watching 'The Wonderful World of Disney' on Sunday nights. Sunday was a sad day - early to bed, school the next morning, I was constantly worried my homework was wrong - but as I watched the fireworks go off in the night sky, over the floodlit castles of Disneyland, I was consumed by a more gene..
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Donna Tartt |
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1d9d5d2
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it was complicated, she wasn't thinking only of herself but me too, since we'd both been through so many of the same things, she and I, and we were an awful lot alike-too much. And because we'd both been hurt so badly, so early on, in violent and irremediable ways that most people didn't, and couldn't, understand, wasn't it a bit... precarious? A matter of self-preservation? Two rickety and death-driven persons who would need to lean on eac..
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Donna Tartt |
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39c6675
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But does it make any sense at all to know that it ends badly for all of us, even the happiest of us, and that we all lose everything that matters in the end-and yet to know as well, despite all this, as cruelly as the game is stacked, that it's possible to play it with a kind of joy? To try to make some meaning out of all this seems unbelievably quaint. Maybe I only see a pattern because I've been staring too long. But then again, to paraph..
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joy
meaning
doomed
pattern
obsession
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Donna Tartt |
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88516c5
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I was worried that my exuberant drug use had damaged my brain and my nervous system and maybe even my soul in some irreparable and perhaps not readily apparent way.
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Donna Tartt |
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bd0f0cc
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But Robin: their dear little Robs. More than ten years later, his death remained an agony; there was no glossing any detail; its horror was not subject to repair or permutation by any of the narrative devices that the Cleves knew. And--since this willful amnesia had kept Robin's death from being translated into that sweet old family vernacular which smoothed even the bitterest mysteries into comfortable, comprehensible form--the memory of t..
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Donna Tartt |
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49777e8
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How were you supposed to explain this kind of thing? It seemed stupid to try. Even the memory was starting to seem vague and starry with unreality, like a dream where the details get fainter the harder you try to grasp them. What mattered more was the feeling, a rich sweet undertow so commanding that in class, on the school bus, lying in bed trying to think of something safe or pleasant, some environment or configuration where my chest wasn..
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Donna Tartt |
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7969f0e
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I suppose there is a certain crucial interval in everyone's life when character is fixed forever; for me, it was that first fall term I spent at Hampden.
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Donna Tartt |
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5cd699f
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That woman can sell water to a drowning man.
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Donna Tartt |
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999a727
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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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3ddcaee
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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, and the strip of highway visible -just barely - in the hills, beyond the trees. The very colors of the place had seeped into my blood: just as Hampden, in subsequent years, would always present itself ..
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Donna Tartt |
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f09e4e3
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You could study the connections for years and never work it out-it was all about things coming together,things falling apart,time warp, my mother standing out in front of the museum when time flickered and the light went funny, uncertainties hovering on the edge of a vast brightness. the stray chance that might, or might not, change everything.
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fate
meaning
life
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Donna Tartt |
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c419273
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I'd unboxed so much china from funeral sales and broken-up households that there was something almost unspeakably sad about the pristine, gleaming displays, with their tacit assurance that shiny new tableware promised an equally shiny and tragedy-free future.
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Donna Tartt |
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403de34
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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 painting because it's universal' 'I love this painting because it speaks to 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 enought to work its way into the mind and hea..
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painting
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Donna Tartt |
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1aa45fd
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with a grief no less sharp for not being intimate with its object.
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Donna Tartt |
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7d0709c
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White Sky. Trees fading at the skyline, the mountains gone. My hands dangled from the cuffs of my jacket as if they weren't my own. I never got used to the way the horizon there could just erase itself and leave you marooned, adrift, in an incomplete dreamscape that was like a sketch for the world you knew -the outline of a single tree standing in for a grove, lamp-posts and chimneys floating up out of context before the surrounding canvas ..
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Donna Tartt |
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7f5a4f4
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Hard to put things right. You don't often get that chance. Sometimes all you can do is not get caught.
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Donna Tartt |
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52fa2ef
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Matters progressed.
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Donna Tartt |
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b8595ae
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And, increasingly, I find myself fixing on that refusal to pull back. Because I don't care what anyone says or how often or winningly they say it: no one will ever, ever be able to persuade me that life is some awesome, rewarding treat. Because, here's the truth: life is catastrophe. The basic fact of existence--of walking around trying to feed ourselves and find friends and whatever else we do--is catastrophe. Forget all this ridiculous 'O..
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Donna Tartt |
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1411012
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Tulips, I thought, staring at the jumble of letters before me. Had the ancient Greeks known them under a different name, if they'd had tulips at all? The letter psi, in Greek, is shaped like a tulip. All of a sudden, in the dense alphabet forest of the page, little black tulips began to pop up in a quick, random pattern like falling raindrops.
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Donna Tartt |
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6be4d49
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And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn't touch. For if disaster and oblivion have followed this painting down through time -- so too has love. Insofar as it is immortal (and it is) I have a small, bright, immutable part in that immortality. It exists; and it keeps on existing. And I add my own love to the history of peopl..
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love
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Donna Tartt |
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33abf09
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Me she was watching for: me. And the heart-shock of believing, for only a moment, that you might just have what could never be yours.
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Donna Tartt |
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02fa363
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You amaze me," he said. "You think nothing exists if you can't see it."
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Donna Tartt |
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116fdec
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Sometimes when I saw him at a distance - fists in pockets, whistling, bobbing along with his springy old walk - I would have a strong pang of affection mixed with regret. I forgave him, a hundred times over, and never on the basis of anything more than this: a look, a gesture, a certain tilt of his head.
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Donna Tartt |
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c638e80
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And how did they drive people mad? They turned up the volume of the inner monologue, magnified qualities already present to great excess, made people so much themselves that they couldn't stand it.
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Donna Tartt |
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f67003e
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It was a clear, black morning, encrusted with stars.
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stars
early-morning
donna-tartt
the-secret-history
descriptive
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Donna Tartt |
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ddb2905
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A goodbye at the gate," said Hobie. He seemed to be talking partly to himself. "That's what he would have wanted. The parting glimpse, the death haiku - he wouldn't have liked to leave without stopping to speak to someone along the way. 'A teahouse amid the cherry blossoms on the way to death."
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Donna Tartt |
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aef0eaf
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Twelve years after Robin's death, no one knew any more about how he had ended up hanged from a tree in his own yard than they had on the day it happened.
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Donna Tartt |
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4bd833f
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All my life, people have taken my shyness for sullenness, snobbery, bad temper of one sort or another.
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Donna Tartt |
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fba8849
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And though in the clockless, temperature-controlled casino night, words like 'day' and 'Christmas' were fairly meaningless constructs, 'happiness,' amidst the loudly clinked glasses, didn't seem quite such a doomed or fatal idea.
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Donna Tartt |
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edb2ffc
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The lamplight was warm and the apartment still and snug. At home in bed, in my private abyss of longing, the scenes I dreamed of always began like this. I could lose myself forever in that singular little face, in the pessimism of her beautiful mouth. When I imagined these phrases cast in her voice, they were almost intolerably sweet; now, sitting right beside her, it was unthinkable that I should voice them myself.
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Donna Tartt |
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3994ea7
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Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. 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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5d732f9
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With the news about Andy, it was like someone had thrown an x-ray switch and reversed everything into photographic negative, so that even with the daffodils and the dogwalkers and the traffic cops whistling on the corners, death was all I saw: sidewalks teeming with dead, cadavers pouring off the buses and hurrying home from work, nothing left of any of them in a hundred years except tooth fillings and pacemakers and maybe a few scraps of c..
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Donna Tartt |
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8d3fda8
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It's crazy," she'd said, "but I'd be perfectly happy if I could sit looking at the same half dozen paintings for the rest of my life. I can't think of a better way to go insane.")"
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Donna Tartt |
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37a3c1a
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Lyra, Cassiopeia the queen, whiplash Scorpius with the twin stings in his tail, all the friendly childhood patterns that had twinkled me to sleep from the glow-in-the-dark planetarium stars on my bedroom ceiling back in New York. Now, transfigured - cold and glorious like deities with their disguises flung off - it was as if they'd flown through the roof and into the sky to assume their true, celestial homes.
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Donna Tartt |
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2395043
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All her grace was in her vagueness. Her voice was soft, her manner languid, her features blurred and dreamy.
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Donna Tartt |
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e2865b0
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The firelight magnified our shadows, glinted off the silver, flickered high upon the walls; its reflection roared orange in the windowpanes as if a city were burning outside. The whoosh of the flames was like a flock of birds, trapped and beating in a whirlwind near the ceiling. And I wouldn't have been at all surprised if the long mahogany banquet table, draped in linen, laden with china and candles and fruit and flowers, had simply vanish..
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Donna Tartt |
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ed17ca7
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You have an unusual equipment for fate, exercise with care!'
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Donna Tartt |