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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| ed95039 | But the moon was so large and clear through the uncurtained window that it made me think instead of a story my mother had told me, about driving to horse shows with her mother and father in the back seat of their old Buick when she was little. "It was a lot of travelling--ten hours sometimes through hard country. Ferris wheels, rodeo rings with sawdust, everything smelled like popcorn and horse manure. One night we were in San Antonio, and .. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 74ef9db | She was still a girl, a slight lovely girl who lay in bed and ate chocolates, a girl whose hair smelled like hyacinth and whose white scarves fluttered jauntily in the breeze; | Donna Tartt | ||
| d8e1e13 | had I stayed in California I might have ended up in a cult or at the very least practicing some weird dietary restriction. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 4663f26 | He was a marvelous talker, a magical talker, and I wish I were able to give a better idea what he said, but it is impossible for a mediocre intellect to render the speech of a superior one | Donna Tartt | ||
| f3b3d28 | And isn't the whole point of things--beautiful things--that they connect you to some larger beauty? | Donna Tartt | ||
| b110eb9 | And it's a temptation for any intelligent person, and especially for perfectionists such as the ancients and ourselves, to try to murder the primitive, emotive, appetitive self. But that is a mistake. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 9500f91 | The lamplight was eerie, and, standing there motionless in our bathrobes, sleepy, with shadows flickering all around, I felt as though I had woken from one dream into an even more remote one, some bizarre wartime bomb shelter of the unconscious. | descriptive donna-tartt dream-within-a-dream dreams eerie the-secret-history | Donna Tartt | |
| 83bd5f2 | Hobie]"Theo." His hug was strong and parental, and so fierce that it made me cry even harder. Then his hand was on my shoulder, heavy anchoring hand that was security and authority itself; he was leading me in, into the workshop, dim gilt and rich wood smells I'd dreamed of, up the stairs into the long-lost parlor, with its velvets and urns and bronzes." | Donna Tartt | ||
| 214c1fe | Occasionally a car swooshed by in the rain and its headlights would swing round momentarily and illuminate the room-the pool table, snowshoes on the wall and the rowing machine, the armchair in which Henry sat, motionless, a glass in his hand and the cigarette burning low between his fingers. For a moment his face, pale and watchful as a ghost's, would be caught in the headlights and then, very gradually, it would slide back into the dark. | literature-quotes the-secret-history | Donna Tartt | |
| 178aea2 | It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to lose control completely? To throw off all the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? | Donna Tartt | ||
| 046c335 | I slept all day, face down in the pillow, a comfortable dead-man's float only remotely disturbed by a chill undertow of reality--talk, footsteps, slamming doors--which threaded fitfully through the dark, blood-warm waters of dream. | donna-tartt figurative-language the-secret-history | Donna Tartt | |
| 5d28e2f | It's awful being a child," she said, simply, "at the mercy of other people." | Donna Tartt | ||
| 9d2326b | A picture that will never leave me. I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell. | Donna Tartt | ||
| d2d8ba9 | I felt rotten. Dead butterfly floating on the surface of the pool. Audible machine hum. Drowned crickets and beetles swirling in the plastic filter baskets. Above, the setting sun flared gaudy and inhuman, blood-red shelves of cloud that suggested end-times footage of catastrophe and ruin: detonations on Pacific atolls, wildlife running before sheets of flame. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 7783a88 | Time slid from under me in drifts like ice skids on the highway, punctuated by sudden sharp flashes where my wheels caught and I was flung into ordinary time: | Donna Tartt | ||
| 571c74a | It made me feel less mortal, less ordinary. It was support and vindication; it was sustenance and sum. It was the keystone that held the whole cathedral up. And it was awful to learn, by having it so suddenly vanish from under me, that all my adult life I'd been privately sustained by that great, hidden, savage joy: the conviction that my whole life was balanced atop a secret that might at any movement blow me part. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 0012dac | That life--whatever else it is--is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn't mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we're not always so glad to be here, it's our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 20688ed | I never took it out...though even when I couldn't see it I liked knowing it was there for the depth and solidity it gave things, the reinforcement to infrastructure, an invisible, bedrock rightness that reassured me just as it was reassuring to know that far away, whales swam untroubled in Baltic waters and monks in arcane time zones chanted ceaselessly for the salvation of the world. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 0a2781d | Nihil sub sole novum, I thought as I walked back down the hall to my room. Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 78c69be | I see that as usual I've gone on too long and that I'm running out of room, but I do hope that you are happy and well, and it's all a little less lonely out there than you may have feared. If there's anything I can do for you back here, or if I can help you in any way, please know that I will. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 23fef80 | He kept thinking about Mary. What a fool he'd been to let her go. To think, with the thoughtless assurance of youth, that the world was replete with endless possibilities. He'd thought it a mistake to choose so early in life and embrace the present good. He'd been a great one for looking for greener pastures. He'd kept looking until all his pastures were brown with time. ("Old Haunts")" | love opportunity | Richard Matheson | |
| 8a9fff7 | In a typical desperation for quick answers, easily understood, people had turned to primitive worship as the solution. With less than success. Not only had they died as quickly as the rest of the people, but they had died with terror in their hearts, with a mortal dread flowing in their very veins. | religion | Richard Matheson | |
| e33fbe0 | When Morton Silkline reached the hall, his customer was just flapping out a small window. Quite suddenly, Morton Silkline found the floor. | Richard Matheson | ||
| 13653ba | You bastard, he thought, almost affectionately, watching the minuscule protoplasm fluttering on the slide. You dirty little bastard. | post-apocalyptic richard-matheson | Richard Matheson | |
| 86ddfb4 | Miniture protoplasm, the dirty little bastard! | horror | Richard Matheson | |
| 94c99c2 | It was a moment in which he felt a desperate need to believe in a God that shepherded his own creations. But, even praying, he felt a twinge of self-reproach, and knew he might start mocking his own prayer at any second. Somehow, though, he managed to ignore his iconoclastic self and went on praying anyway. Because he wanted the dog, because he needed the dog. | Richard Matheson | ||
| 239eafe | But are his needs any more shocking than the needs of other animals and men? Are his deeds more outrageous than the deeds of the parent who drained the spirit from his child? The vampire may foster quickened heartbeats and levitated hair. But is he worse than the parent who gave to society a neurotic child who became a politician? | Richard Matheson | ||
| 7356905 | Then he went into the dining room, consulting his watch. It was ten thirty already. More than half the morning was gone. More than half the time for sitting and trying to write the prose that would make people sit up and gasp. It happened that way more often now than he would even admit to himself. Sleeping late, making up errands, doing anything to forestall the terrible moment when he must sit down before his typewriter and try to wrench .. | writer-s-block writing | Richard Matheson | |
| c3d9329 | She felt all right. Her heart was like a drum hanging from piano wire in her chest, slowly, slowly beaten. Her hands and feet were numb, not with cold but with a sultry torpor. Thoughts moved with a tranquil lethargy, her brain a leisurely machine imbedded in swaths of woolly packing. She felt all right. | lethargy torpor tranquility tranquilization | Richard Matheson | |
| 3118220 | The silence of the library was complete save for the thudding of his shoes as he walked along the second-floor hallway. Outside, there were birds sometimes and, even lacking that, there seemed to be a sort of sound outside. Inexplicable, perhaps, but it never seemed deathly still in the open as it did inside a building. Especially here in this giant, gray-stoned building that housed the literature of a world's dead. | Richard Matheson | ||
| 7188490 | I am of the opinion", Tharkay said, "that you ought not assign to free will something more likely the consequence of a sharp blow to the skull." | laurence temeraire | Naomi Novik | |
| 0269152 | Well, I only wish you may all not have your throats slit by Uygurs," Riley said in deep pessimism, giving up, after he had tried once more at dinner to persuade them to remain. . . "I will not let anyone slit your throats at all," Temeraire said, a little indignantly. "Although I would like to see an Uygur; is that a kind of dragon?" "A kind of bird, I think," Granby said; Laurence was doubtful, but he did not like to contradict when he wa.. | Naomi Novik | ||
| cf49e25 | as though the magic had burned off like the liquor on a pudding. | Naomi Novik | ||
| 4597b10 | Little Irina must be a woman grown by now. A beauty, I have heard, surely?' It was more mockery: he had heard nothing of the sort, of course. I had traveled with my father; the court and his advisers knew I was nothing out of the ordinary, and hardly a girl to turn a young tsar's head - if he had been in any danger of turning his head at all, except perhaps all the way round like an owl. | Naomi Novik | ||
| 41e9a21 | My mother had enough magic to give me three blessings before she died," I said, and he instinctively bent in to hear it. "The first was wit; the second beauty, and the third--that fools should recognize neither." | Naomi Novik | ||
| ad0831f | Keynes, quite ignoring the covert gestures, the attempts at signaling, of nearly every senior officer, examined [Lily] and declared that she was perfectly fit to fly, "had better fly, I should say; this agitation is unnatural, and must be worked off." "But perhaps," Laurence said, voicing the reluctance which the captains all privately shared, and they as a body began to suggest flights out over the ocean, along the scenic and settled coast.. | Naomi Novik | ||
| f8cb753 | The cows were all running around their pen in manic terror. | Naomi Novik | ||
| 855361a | The soldiers were already laying pikes along the wall by torch-light, with the points bristling upwards; they had draped cloaks over the poles to make small tents to sleep under. A few of them were sitting around small campfires, soaking dried meat in boiling water, stirring kasha into the broth to cook up. They cleared hastily out of our way without our even having to say a word, afraid. Sarkan seemed not to notice, but I couldn't help fee.. | Naomi Novik | ||
| 904f4ab | If I were very offensive, do you suppose they would go away now? | Naomi Novik | ||
| 41e4cb1 | Her beautiful face was blank as an unwritten book. | Naomi Novik | ||
| 47cc0cb | Fear and work weren't all bad, as companions went. They were both better than loneliness, and the deeper fears, the worse ones that I knew would come true: that I wouldn't see my mother and father for ten years, that I'd never live again in my own home, never run wild in the woods again, that whatever strange alchemy acted on the Dragon's girls would soon begin to take hold of me, and make me into someone I wouldn't recognize at the end of .. | fantasy mythology-fiction | Naomi Novik | |
| 4619243 | You learn to feel it less, child; or you learn to love other things. | life love selflove | Naomi Novik | |
| a7a201e | The creaking was every song I'd ever heard about war and battle; the horses clopping along, the drumbeat. All those stories must have ended this same way, with someone tired going home from a field full of death, but no one ever sang this part. | Naomi Novik | ||
| 1795a14 | How far would we have to go to run from winter? | Naomi Novik |