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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| a1c1e22 | 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't tight with anxiety, all I had to do was sink into the blood-warm current and let myself spin away to the secret place where everything was all right. | Donna Tartt | ||
| fc8e6aa | I am sorry, as well, to present such a sketchy and disappointing exegesis of what is in fact the central part of my story. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 4ae22bc | 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... | Donna Tartt | ||
| 1c39709 | Understand, by saying 'God,' I am merely using 'God' as reference to long-term pattern we can't decipher. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 6d86010 | What I did experience when alone was a sort of general neurotic horror, a common attack of nerves and self-loathing magnified to the power of ten. Every cruel or fatuous thing I'd ever said came back to me with an amplified clarity, no matter how I talked to myself or jerked my head to shake the thoughts away: old insults and guilts and embarrassments stretching clear back to childhood--the crippled boy I'd made fun of, the Easter chick I'd.. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 9297aa4 | Anything is grand if it's done on a large enough scale, | Donna Tartt | ||
| 7a54afa | 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 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 A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don't get to choose our own hearts. We can't make ourselves want what's good for us or what's g.. | life lonliness love path people questions reality-of-life sadness self understanding | Donna Tartt | |
| beb38eb | Life: vacant, vain, intolerable. What loyalty did I owe it? None whatsoever. | Donna Tartt | ||
| e476e7b | liked the idea of living in a city -- any city, especially a strange one -- liked the thought of traffic and crowds, of working in a bookstore, waiting tables in a coffee shop, who knew what kind of solitary life I might slip into? Meals alone, walking the dogs in the evenings; and nobody knowing who I was. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 3d0222e | my own fatal tendency to try to make interesting people good. And | Donna Tartt | ||
| 883521a | Sometimes, when there's been an accident and reality is too sudden and strange to comprehend, the surreal will take over. Action slows to a dreamlike glide, frame by frame; the motion of a hand, a sentence spoken, fills an eternity. Little things--a cricket on a stem, the veined branches on a leaf--are magnified, brought from the background in achingly clear focus. And | Donna Tartt | ||
| b73ea51 | 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. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 2cd9014 | I have only to glance over my shoulder for all those years to drop away and I see it behind me again, the ravine, rising all green and black through the saplings, a picture that will never leave me. | donna-tartt guilt haunted indelible memory prologue the-secret-history | Donna Tartt | |
| 77658ea | overly sensitive to the souls of rooms and objects, the emanations | Donna Tartt | ||
| 32db5b1 | 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. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 0c472a7 | 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. | Donna Tartt | ||
| cb275a3 | I was struck by something rather obvious - namely, that any religious ritual is arbitrary unless one is able to see past it to a deeper meaning. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 6081dce | He's telling you that living things don't last--it's all temporary. Death in life. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 60a9405 | I mean we think of phenomenal change as being the very essence of time, when it's not at all. Time is something which defies spring and winter, birth and decay, the good and the bad, indifferently. Something changeless and joyous and absolutely indestructible. Duality ceases to exist; there is no ego, no 'I,' and yet it's not at all like those horrid comparisons one sometimes hears in Eastern religions, the self being a drop of water swallo.. | self time | Donna Tartt | |
| 3f88f89 | Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells awaited them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital. | kids | Donna Tartt | |
| 598f240 | I think we're much more hypocritical about illness, and poverty, than were people in former ages," I remember Julian saying once. "In America, the rich man tries to pretend that the poor man is his equal in every respect but money, which is simply not true. Does anyone remember Plato's definition of Justice in the Republic? Justice, in a society, is when each level of a hierarchy works within its place and is content with it. A poor man who.. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 49d15b8 | maybe that's what's waiting for us at the end of the journey, a majesty unimaginable until the very moment we find ourselves walking through the doors of it, what we find ourselves gazing at in astonishment when God finally takes His hands off our eyes and says: Look! | Donna Tartt | ||
| 0126c00 | And always, always, that same toast. Live forever. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 06fdb86 | That was a cozy night, a happy night; lamps lit, sparkle of glasses, rain falling heavy on the roof. Outside, the treetops tumbled and tossed, with a foamy whoosh like club soda bubbling up in the glass. The windows were open and a damp cool breeze swirled through the curtains, bewitchingly wild and sweet. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 72e421b | Here is my experience. Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you. | Donna Tartt | ||
| eebecbb | Because, here's the truth: life is catastrophe. | Donna Tartt | ||
| d0c87dd | 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. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 0c78ce9 | Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you. What you want to live and be happy in the world is a woman who has her own life and lets you live yours. | Donna Tartt | ||
| bea019b | 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. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 3717513 | And so Cristina submerged her ears beneath the water and the world grew a little quieter; her hair fanned out atop the plane and she ran her fingers through it and was reminded of a goddess in a Renaissance painting. Her mind wandered far from the villa and the ruins and her unshakable sense that her world was about to change. | Chris Bohjalian | ||
| c3c6e0c | Welcomes seclusion. Not precisely antisocial, but reclusive. | Chris Bohjalian | ||
| 1219aad | Pero luego el silencio cubrio las cabezas, como una manta pesada. Todos volvieron hacia Neville unos rostros palidos. Neville los observo serenamente. Y de pronto comprendio. Yo soy el anormal ahora. La normalidad es un concepto mayoritario. Norma de muchos, no de un solo hombre. Y comprendio, tambien, la expresion de aquellos rostros: angustia, miedo, horror. Tenian miedo, si. Era para ellos un monstruo terrible y desconocido, una malignid.. | Richard Matheson | ||
| b10d337 | There was no sound but that of his shoes and the now senseless singing of birds. Once I thought they sang because everything was right with the world, Robert Neville thought. I know now I was wrong. They sing because they're feeble minded. | Richard Matheson | ||
| 7d9fb17 | Se estrecha el circulo. Un nuevo terror nacido de la muerte, una nueva supersticion que invade la fortaleza del tiempo. Soy leyenda. | Richard Matheson | ||
| f63a660 | The last man in the world was irretrievably stuck with his delusions. | Richard Matheson | ||
| c7e46dd | The day the library was shut down, he thought, some maiden librarian had moved down the room, pushing each chair against its table. Carefully, with a plodding precision that was the cachet of herself. | Richard Matheson | ||
| ebb8700 | All right, little boy, he tried kidding himself, calm down now. Santa Claus is coming to town with all the nice answers. No longer will you be a weird Robinson Crusoe, imprisoned on an island of night surrounded by oceans of death. | Richard Matheson | ||
| 05506c5 | They won't accept reasonable things with their minds but the fantastic things they'll swallow whole when their emotions are brought into play. Because the emotions have no limits on belief. The emotions will swallow anything--and they do. | Richard Matheson | ||
| 8348946 | He forgot everything, time and place; it was just the two of them together, needing each other, survivors of a black terror embracing because they had found each other. | Richard Matheson | ||
| c4ab006 | Memory was such a worthless thing, really. Nothing it dealt with was attainable. It was concerned with phantom acts and feelings, with all that was uncapturable except in thought. It was without satisfaction. Mostly, it hurt... | Richard Matheson | ||
| cbe2ca4 | But now, in the final hours, even hope had vanished. Yet he could smile. At a point without hope he had found contentment. He knew he had tried and there was nothing to be sorry for. And this was complete victory, because it was a victory over himself. | hope victory | Richard Matheson | |
| 35055c7 | It was more than a spider. It was every unknown terror in the world fused into wriggling, poison-jawed horror. It was every anxiety, insecurity, and fear in his life given a hideous, night-black form. | fear insecurity terror | Richard Matheson | |
| 3df5534 | To look at the entire journey all at once was stupidity. You thought of it in segments; that was the only way. | Richard Matheson | ||
| 1f42129 | In a world of monotonous horror there could be no salvation in wild dreaming. Horror he had adjusted to. But monotony was the greater obstacle, and he realized it now, understood it at long last. | Richard Matheson |