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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 91a371e | But, as her mother had often told her, life wasn't meant to be easy. It was meant to be lived. | Susan Mallery | ||
| 977d407 | Safe trip. I love you. No kidding. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 20745b0 | Well the Dutch invented the microscope," she said. "They were jewellers, grinders of lenses. The 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. .. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 8cdd278 | It's not as if we're running a hospital for sick children down here, let's put it that way. Where's the nobility in patching up a bunch of old tables and chairs? Corrosive to the soul, quite possibly. I've seen too many estates not to know that. Idolatry! Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only--if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn't it? And isn't the whole point of things--beautiful things--that th.. | care connect corrosive destroy heart life nobility objects patch-up saving soul | Donna Tartt | |
| 1ddece9 | Genuine beauty is always quite alarming. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 4e797fc | And just as 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 colour across the sky - so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quiet frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime. | Donna Tartt | ||
| ef6d8b5 | Too much--too tempting--to have my hands on it and not look at it. Quickly I slid it out, and almost immediately its glow enveloped me, something almost musical, an internal sweetness that was inexplicable beyond a deep, blood-rocking harmony of rightness, the way your heart beat slow and sure when you were with a person you felt safe with and loved. A power, a shine, came off it, a freshness like the morning light in my old bedroom in New .. | Donna Tartt | ||
| f8e19fb | He came up behind her and laid his hands on her shoulders; bending low, he put his lips close to the nape of her neck. "How about a kiss for your jailbird brother?" he said. She turned halfway, as if to touch her lips to his cheek but he slid a palm down her back and tipped her face up to his and kissed her full on the mouth--not a brotherly kiss, there was no mistaking it for that, but a long, slow, greedy kiss, messy and voluptuous. His b.. | Donna Tartt | ||
| b8c7e02 | We looked at each other, for a long strange moment that I've never forgotten, actually, like two animals meeting at twilight, during which some clear, personable spark seemed to fly up through his eyes and I saw the creature he really was--and he, I believe, saw me. For an instant we were wired together and humming, like two engines on the same circuit. | Donna Tartt | ||
| a62401e | You sound like my dad." "Well--let's put it another way. Who was it said that coincidence was just God's way of remaining anonymous?" "Now you really sound like my dad." "Who's to say that gamblers don't really understand it better than anyone else? Isn't everything worthwhile a gamble? Can't good come around sometimes through some strange back doors?" | Donna Tartt | ||
| 4014878 | It had been a conscious decision to pull free. It had taken everything I had to do it, like an animal gnawing a limb off to escape a trap. And somehow I had done it; | Donna Tartt | ||
| 053db33 | Clearly something had gone wrong, badly, only I wasn't quite sure what--apart from knowing that I was responsible somehow, in the generalized miasma of shame and unworthiness and being-a-burden that never quite left me. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 3114d80 | 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 if you look closer--there it is. | death life philosophy transience | Donna Tartt | |
| ae17479 | Before, I was paralyzed, though I didn't really know it," he said. "It was because I thought too much, lived too much in the mind. It was hard to make decisions. I felt immobilized." | Donna Tartt | ||
| 6738381 | There is a recurrent scene from those dinners that surfaces again and again, like an obsessive undercurrent in a dream. Julian, at the head of the long table, rises to his feet and lifts his wineglass. 'Live forever,' he says. And the rest of us rise too, and clink our glasses across the table, like an army regiment crossing sabres: Henry and Bunny, Charles and Francis, Camilla and I. 'Live forever,' we chorus, throwing our glasses back in .. | Donna Tartt | ||
| ac895cd | 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. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 49187cd | 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.. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 8031a16 | 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." -- | Donna Tartt | ||
| 4e9dc65 | 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. | Donna Tartt | ||
| a4d0ba4 | 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.. | destructiveness health identity need passion want | Donna Tartt | |
| b593720 | 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. | Donna Tartt | ||
| cd4fdd5 | I think this goes more to the idea of 'relentless irony' than 'divine providence. | divine-providence irony | Donna Tartt | |
| 129601b | 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.. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 6349dfe | 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. | donna-tartt memory the-secret-history | Donna Tartt | |
| 3a39d5f | 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.. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 435ed0d | 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? | illusion reality truth | Donna Tartt | |
| a0418b3 | 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. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 409dd9f | 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." | Donna Tartt | ||
| 7fa1932 | 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. | career duty dying hope hopelessness nursing-home office retirement spawning want | Donna Tartt | |
| 1786af8 | Pragmatists are often strangely superstitious. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 7ed1933 | A teahouse amid the cherry blossoms, on the way to death. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 7dd1a35 | 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. | Donna Tartt | ||
| d533e1c | 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. | elegance fake julian-morrow kindness the-secret-history | Donna Tartt | |
| 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. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 4f1da30 | 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. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 2cb9ee5 | Colors so bright, they nearly broke my heart. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 133c2a7 | It's not about outward appearances but inward significance. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 4ee2c1e | 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 .. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 7d6c272 | 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. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 6b37dc8 | 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. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 90f6bd9 | 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. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 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. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 173e154 | Let's both be good, and truthful, and kind to each other, and let's be happy together and have fun always. | Donna Tartt | ||
| ce6e427 | 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.. | Donna Tartt |