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ac895cd
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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, nobody will hurt me here.
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Donna Tartt |
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49187cd
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It was getting dark; soon it would be time for dinner. I finished my drink in a swallow. 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 everyt..
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Donna Tartt |
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8031a16
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She did not care for children's books in which the children grew up, as what "growing up" entailed (in life as in books) was a swift and inexplicable dwindling of character; out of a clear blue sky the heroes and heroines abandoned their adventures for some dull sweetheart, got married and had families, and generally started acting like a bunch of cows." --
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Donna Tartt |
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4e9dc65
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Flapping crows. Shiny beetles crawling in the undergrowth. A patch of sky, frozen in a cloudy retina, reflected in a puddle on the ground. Yoo-hoo. Being and nothingness.
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Donna Tartt |
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a4d0ba4
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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 toward a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster?...If your deepest self is singing and coaxing you straight toward the bonfire, is it better to turn away? Stop your ears with wa..
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want
passion
identity
destructiveness
health
need
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Donna Tartt |
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b593720
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With a beautiful girl I could have consoled myself that she was out of my league; that I was so haunted and stirred even by her plainness suggested--ominously--a love more binding than physical affection, some tar-pit of the soul where I might flop around and malinger for years.
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Donna Tartt |
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cd4fdd5
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I think this goes more to the idea of 'relentless irony' than 'divine providence.
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irony
divine-providence
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Donna Tartt |
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129601b
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Whatever teaches us to talk to ourselves is important: whatever teaches us to sing ourselves out of despair. But the painting has also taught me that we can speak to each other across time. 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 rando..
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Donna Tartt |
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6349dfe
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The ceilings had set off a ghostly echo, giving all that desperate hilarity the quality of a memory even as I sat listening to it, memories of things I'd never known.
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donna-tartt
the-secret-history
memory
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Donna Tartt |
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3a39d5f
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The assignment was a two-page essay, in Greek, on any epigram of Callimachus that we chose. I'd done only a page and I started to hurry through the rest in impatient and slightly dishonest fashion, writing out the English and translating word by word. It was something Julian asked us not to do. The value of Greek prose composition, he said, was not that it gave one any particular facility in the language that could not be gained as easily b..
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Donna Tartt |
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435ed0d
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Why am I made the way I am? 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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illusion
reality
truth
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Donna Tartt |
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a0418b3
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Even the adorable drag in her step (like the little mermaid, too fragile to walk on land) drove me crazy. 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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409dd9f
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You don't feel a great deal of emotions for other people, do you?" I was taken aback. "What are you talking about?" I said. "Of course I do." "Do you?" He raised an eyebrow. "I don't think so. It doesn't matter," he said, after a long, tense pause. "I don't, either."
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Donna Tartt |
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7fa1932
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Putting your time in at the office; dutifully spawning your two point five; smiling politely at your retirement party; then chewing on your bedsheet and choking on your canned peaches at the nursing home. It was better never to have been born-never to have wanted anything, never to have hoped for anything.
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hopelessness
want
hope
nursing-home
spawning
retirement
office
career
duty
dying
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Donna Tartt |
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1786af8
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Pragmatists are often strangely superstitious.
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Donna Tartt |
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7ed1933
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A teahouse amid the cherry blossoms, on the way to death.
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Donna Tartt |
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7dd1a35
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After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great. To escape the cognitive mode of experience, to transcend the accident of one's moment of being. There are other advantages, more difficult to speak of, things which ancient sources only hint at and which I myself only understood after the fact.
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Donna Tartt |
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d533e1c
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Though Julian could be marvelously kind in difficult circumstances of all sorts, I sometimes got the feeling that he was less pleased by kindness itself than by the elegance of the gesture.
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kindness
julian-morrow
the-secret-history
elegance
fake
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Donna Tartt |
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c15599b
|
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. Like a fashion drawing come to life, she turned heads wherever she went, gliding along obliviously without appearing to notice the turbulence she created in her wake.
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Donna Tartt |
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4f1da30
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It was the most important night of my life,' he said calmly. 'It enabled me to do what I've always wanted most.' 'Which is?' 'To live without thinking.
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Donna Tartt |
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2cb9ee5
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Colors so bright, they nearly broke my heart.
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Donna Tartt |
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133c2a7
|
It's not about outward appearances but inward significance.
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Donna Tartt |
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4ee2c1e
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I hated being around people, couldn't pay attention to what anyone was saying, couldn't talk to clients, couldn't tag my pieces, couldn't ride the subway, human activity seemed pointless, incomprehensible, some blackly swarming ant hill in the wilderness, there was not a squeak of light anywhere I looked, the antidepressants I'd been dutifully swallowing for eight weeks hadn't helped a bit, nor had the ones before that (but then, I'd tried ..
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Donna Tartt |
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7d6c272
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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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6b37dc8
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I met her my first year of college, and was initially attracted to her because she seemed an intelligent, brooding malcontent like myself; but after about a month, during which time she'd firmly glued herself to me, I began to realize, with some little horror, that she was nothing more than a lowbrow, pop-psychology version of Sylvia Plath.
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Donna Tartt |
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90f6bd9
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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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76f8fc1
|
It was rotten top to bottom. Putting your time in at the office; dutifully spawning your two point five; smiling politely at your retirement party; then chewing on your bedsheet and choking on your canned peaches at the nursing home. It was better never to have been born - never to have wanted anything, never to have hoped for anything.
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Donna Tartt |
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173e154
|
Let's both be good, and truthful, and kind to each other, and let's be happy together and have fun always.
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Donna Tartt |
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ce6e427
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Worry! What a waste of time. All the holy books were right. Clearly 'worry' was the mark of a primitive and spiritually unevolved person. What was that line from Yeats, about the bemused Chinese sages? All things fall and are built again. Ancient glittering eyes. This was wisdom. People had been raging and weeping and destroying things for centuries and wailing about their puny individual lives, when--what was the point? All this useless so..
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Donna Tartt |
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7d673b2
|
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 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..
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fate
painting
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Donna Tartt |
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a17c766
|
Her photographs, lining the hall outside my bedroom-- many different Pippas, at many different ages-- were a daily torment, always expected, always new; but though I tried to keep my eyes away always it seemed I was glancing up by mistake and there she was, laughing at someone else's joke or smiling at someone who wasn't me, always a fresh pain, a blow straight to the heart.
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Donna Tartt |
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14e0120
|
no matter how hard I tried to wish him out of the picture--for there he always was, in my hands and my voice and my walk...
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Donna Tartt |
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d3e6f27
|
There's a pattern and we're a part of it. Yet if you scratched very deep at that idea of pattern (which apparently he had never taken the trouble to do), you hit an emptiness so dark that it destroyed, categorically, anything you'd ever looked at or thought of as light.
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Donna Tartt |
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b219d70
|
Even Proust--there's a famous passage where Odette opens the door with a cold, she's sulky, her hair is loose and undone, her skin is patchy, and Swann, who has never cared about her until that moment, falls in love with her because she looks like a Botticelli girl from a slightly damaged fresco. Which Proust himself only knew from a reproduction. He never saw the original, in the Sistine Chapel. But even so--the whole novel is in some ways..
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Donna Tartt |
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4ad5a14
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White noise, impersonal roar. Deadening incandescence of the boarding terminals. But even these soul-free, sealed-off places are drenched with meaning, spangled and thundering with it. Sky Mall. Portable stereo systems. Mirrored isles of Drambuie and Tanqueray and Chanel No. 5. I look at the blanked-out faces of the other passengers--hoisting their briefcases, their backpacks, shuffling to disembark--and I think of what Hobie said: beauty a..
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Donna Tartt |
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f3bbf01
|
Mine, mine. Fear, idolatry, hoarding. The delight and terror of the fetishist.
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Donna Tartt |
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e6fe34c
|
ONE SUNDAY MORNING, I climbed up to the light from a weighty and complicated dream, nothing of it left but a ringing in my ears and the ache of something slipped from my grasp and fallen into a crevasse where I would not see it again. Yet somehow--in the midst of this profound sinking, snapped threads, fragments lost and untrackable--a sentence stood out, ticking across the darkness like a news crawler at the bottom of a TV screen:
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Donna Tartt |
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c5deffe
|
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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3c8b6d4
|
We don't like to admit it," said Julian, "but the idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than anything. All truly civilized people - the ancients no less than us - have civilized themselves through the willful repression of the old, animal self. Are we, in this room, really very different from the Greeks and the Romans? Obsessed with duty, piety, loyalty, sacrifice? All those things which are ..
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Donna Tartt |
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1cf95f5
|
We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others, that in the end, we become disguised to ourselves. --FRANCOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
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Donna Tartt |
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1b03b8c
|
Maybe good luck was like bad luck in that it took a while to sink in.
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Donna Tartt |
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96fafdb
|
Time, and repeated screenings, have endowed the memory with a menace the original did not possess. -The Secret History, pg. 260
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Donna Tartt |
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deb3296
|
Death is the mother of beauty.
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Donna Tartt |
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65bcce2
|
Be still, O little one, for I am Death. Another cobra had said that, in something else by Kipling. The cobras in his stories were heartless but they spoke beautifully, like wicked kings in the Old Testament.
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Donna Tartt |