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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 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.. | want passion identity destructiveness health need | 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. | irony divine-providence | 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 the-secret-history memory | 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. | hopelessness want hope nursing-home spawning retirement office career duty dying | 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. | kindness julian-morrow the-secret-history elegance fake | 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 | ||
| 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.. | fate painting | Donna Tartt | |
| 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. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 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... | Donna Tartt | ||
| 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. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 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.. | Donna Tartt | ||
| f33d41a | In a town in Calabria, a long time ago, there lived an old lady everyone called Strega Nona, which meant "Grandma Witch"." -- | potions witch | Tomie dePaola | |
| c6fa9ce | It was a fairy tale, no fooling. It was unreality becoming real. This frightened her. Because people don't care for unreality becoming real. It pricks their well-fed minds, you see, with something like a hunger pang. They prefer the logical stuffiness of expectancy. It is only at certain times that they weaken, letting imagination in. That's the time to get them. ("The Disinheritors")" | reality imagination unreality rationality | Richard Matheson | |
| f7f1620 | It's horrible," she said. He looked at her in surprise. Horrible? Wasn't that odd? He hadn't thought that for years. For him the word "horror" had become obsolete. A surfeiting of terror made terror a cliche. To Robert Neville the situation merely existed as natural fact. It had no adjectives." | normalcy terror legend | Richard Matheson | |
| cd50bb9 | Patience, he told himself. Get yourself at least one virtue, anyway. | Richard Matheson | ||
| bdbcaeb | She sounded angry. That was the way she'd been as long as he'd known her. If she became ill, it irritated her. She was annoyed by sickness. She seemed to regard it as a personal affront. | illness irritation sickness | Richard Matheson | |
| a9887f4 | It was a high ceilinged room with tall, large-panes windows. Apart from the doorway was the desk where book had been checked out in days when books were still being checked out. He stood there for a moment looking around the silent room, shaking his head slowly. All these books, he thought, the residue of a planet's intellect, the scrapings of futile minds, the leftovers, the potpourri of artifacts that had no power to save men from perishi.. | metaphor library books death apocalypse decay empty zombies dead | Richard Matheson | |
| a8227a8 | Death is a fascinating lure to men who can stand aside and watch it operate on someone else. (from "The Conqueror")" | Richard Matheson | ||
| 8c4b220 | What would a Mohammedan vampire do if faced with a cross? The | Richard Matheson | ||
| d3c1db3 | Staring down at the brook, I remembered a stream near Mammoth Lake. We'd parked the camper just above it and, all night, listened to it splashing across rocks and stones; a lovely sound. | Richard Matheson | ||
| 9a888e7 | The cross. He held one in his hand, gold and shiny in the morning sun. This, too, drove the vampires away. Why? Was there a logical answer, something he could accept without slipping on banana skins of mysticism? | Richard Matheson | ||
| 5ddc8cd | Again he shook his head. The world's gone mad, he thought. The dead walk about and I think nothing of it. The return of corpses has become trivial in import. How quickly one accepts the incredible if only one sees it enough! | humour death change corpses normality undead usual zombies dead | Richard Matheson | |
| f0f5108 | There had been something gentle in her, a pool of magic, not a running stream that had washed away all the ordinary parts of her life. | magic mythology-fiction | Naomi Novik |