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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 851404d | we'd been there [at a restaurant] for hours, laughing over little things but being serious too, very grave, she being both generous and receptive (this was another thing about her; she listened, her attention was dazzling-I never had the feeling that other people listened to me half as closely; I felt like a different person in her company, a better one, could say things to her I couldn't say to anyone else, certainly not Kitsey [Theo's fia.. | Donna Tartt | ||
| bd7e187 | I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead. | Donna Tartt | ||
| cf2e80f | And what is beauty?" "Terror." | Donna Tartt | ||
| a2c9744 | beauty alters the grain of reality. And I keep thinking too of the more conventional wisdom: namely, that the pursuit of pure beauty is a trap, a fast track to bitterness and sorrow, that beauty has to be wedded to something more meaningful. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 8202bed | I had nothing to offer her. I was illness, instability, everything she wanted to get away from. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 3e6fb2b | for Hobie, who sorrowed over these elegant old remnants as if they were underfed children or mistreated cats, it was a point of duty to rescue what he could and then with his gifts as carpenter and joiner to recombine them into beautiful young Frankensteins that were in some cases plainly fanciful but in others such faithful models of the period that they were all but indistinguishable from the real thing. p452 | literary-allusion | Donna Tartt | |
| f0cef4b | No money, holes in my socks, living off oatmeal. | Donna Tartt | ||
| f496ae9 | 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 | ||
| 93eaf35 | I am gifted at blending myself into any given milieu--you've never seen such a typical California teenager as I was, nor such a dissolute and callous pre-med student--but somehow, despite my efforts, I am never able to blend myself in entirely and remain in some respects quite distinct from my surroundings, in the same way that a green chameleon remains a distinct entity from the green leaf upon which it sits, no matter how perfectly it has.. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 04f8c85 | and sharp-faced, like Boris, but with an evil red-rimmed gaze and tiny, brownish sawteeth. He made me think of a rabid fox. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 2321d58 | Waiting at the wrong place, most like. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 2b25c62 | I thought they spoke Russian in the Ukraine." "Well, yes. Depends what part of Ukraine. They're not so different languages, the two." | Donna Tartt | ||
| 7de03a9 | A different and much deeper sort of beauty altogether. The thing and yet not the thing. | Donna Tartt | ||
| e4d0507 | JUST FOR THE record, I do not consider myself an evil person (though how like a killer that makes me sound!). | Donna Tartt | ||
| 1c70523 | When you're worried about something," said Henry abruptly, "have you ever tried thinking in a different language?" | Donna Tartt | ||
| 2707ef5 | Maybe it's stupid to even articulate such hopes. But, then again, maybe it's more stupid not to. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 87200a0 | Sometimes, in the evenings, a damp, gritty wind blew in the windows from Park Avenue, just as the rush hour traffic was thinning and the city was emptying for the night; it was rainy, trees leafing out, spring deepening into summer; and the forlorn cry of horns on the street, the dank smell of the wet pavement had an electricity about it, a sense of crowds and static, lonely secretaries and fat guys with bags of carry-out, everywhere the un.. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 1a7d7b7 | That Mossberg," Boris said to me, accepting the bottle passed over the front seat. "Evil dirty thing. Sawed off--? sprays pellets here to Hamburg. Aim it way the fuck away from everyone and still you will hit half the people in the room." | guns killing | Donna Tartt | |
| ae277ec | sure how that was going to work, but once I got Boris out of the house I could figure something out. "Please, come on." "Is State Care that bad in America?" said Boris doubtfully." | Donna Tartt | ||
| 358f080 | the suddenness of the explosion had never left me, I was always looking for something to happen, always expecting it just out of the corner of my eye, certain configurations of people in public places could trigger it, a wartime urgency, someone cutting in front of me the wrong way or walking too fast at a particular angle was enough to throw me into tachycardia and trip-hammer panic, the kind that made me stumble for the nearest park bench.. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 867a6c8 | I'd yearned for the darkness and repose of Hobie's house, its crowded rooms and old-wood smell, tea leaves and tobacco smoke, bowls of oranges on the sideboard and candlesticks scalloped with puddled beeswax. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 0a37cc8 | 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 they connect you to some larger beauty? Those first images that crack your heart wide open and you spend the rest of your life chasing, or trying to recapture, in one way or another? Because, I mean--mending old things, preserving them, looking after them--on some level there's no rational grounds for .. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 4dd1359 | 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 love this picture because it's universal.' 'I love this painting because it speaks to all mankind.' That's not the reason anyone loves a piece of art. It's a secret whisper from an alleyway. Psst, you. Hey kid. Yes you." Fingertip gliding over the faded-out photo--the conservator's touch, a touch-without-touching, a commun.. | Donna Tartt | ||
| f11947e | 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 | ||
| 9980e42 | death, | Donna Tartt | ||
| a0c1c4f | Snowing in Dubai! A miracle, Potter! Look!" "That's Dublin you ass. Not Dubai." "Vali otsyuda! Fuck off!" | Donna Tartt | ||
| f9f2550 | We had trench warfare in America way before World War I. Most people don't know that. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 8645611 | I'll probably think about it all my life: that candlelit circle, a tableau vivant of the daily, commonplace happiness that was lost when I lost her. | Donna Tartt | ||
| c808fb2 | the minibar cart, even church clocks tolling the hour, de Westertoren, Krijtberg, a dark edge to the clangor, an inwrought fairy-tale sense of doom. By day I sat on the foot of the bed straining to puzzle out the Dutch-language | Donna Tartt | ||
| 5f4d649 | It was the secret no one told you, the thing you had to learn for yourself: viz. that in the antiques trade there was really no such thing as a "correct" price. Objective value--list value--was meaningless. If a customer came in clueless with money in hand (as most of them did) it didn't matter what the books said, what the experts said, what similar items at Christie's had recently gone for. An object--any object--was worth whatever you co.. | Donna Tartt | ||
| c5afec9 | away. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 1cf1fd8 | the world won't come to me,' he used to say, 'so I must go to it'-- | Donna Tartt | ||
| 865d9a9 | he'd probably just crawl in the corner and starve. Like a hamster you forgot to feed. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 57099de | A turn, a screw, a pull, a twist, the drug that makes you prettiest. | Amanda Palmer | ||
| b99f6bf | 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 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: | Donna Tartt | ||
| a5d0d00 | simple obviously being in her mind a key word in dealing with overwhelmed and cranky grooms. "Really really simple and neutral." It seemed to be registry protocol that the groom should be allowed to select the casual china (I guess for all those Super Bowl parties I would be hosting with the guys, ha ha) while the "formal ware" should be left to the experts: the ladies. "It's fine," I said, more curtly than I'd meant to, when I realized the.. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 6cbb2af | nd isn't the whole point of things--beautiful things--that they connect you to some larger beauty? Those first images that crack your heart wide open and you spend the rest of your life chasing, or trying to recapture, in one way or another? | Donna Tartt | ||
| c9eb1cb | And isn't the whole point of things--beautiful things--that they connect you to some larger beauty? Those first images that crack your heart wide open and you spend the rest of your life chasing, or trying to recapture, in one way or another? | Donna Tartt | ||
| 2c183b1 | an excuse to bring out the bottle of sherry and visit | Donna Tartt | ||
| f46c221 | and yet isn't it always the inappropriate thing, the thing that doesn't quite work, that's oddly the dearest? | Donna Tartt | ||
| 4c9b23a | La gente muere, eso esta claro. Pero la perdida de ciertos objetos es tan tragica e innecesaria... Por puro descuido. En incendios y en guerras. Como el Partenon, que utilizaron como almacen de polvora. Supongo que todo lo que logramos rescatar de la Historia es un milagro. | Donna Tartt | ||
| c329f0b | Mis suenos nunca llegaban a ser pesadillas en toda regla sino solo interludios perturbados en los que mi madre se quedaba trabajando hasta tarde y no encontraba ningun medio de transporte para volver a casa, a veces en las afueras, en alguna area reducida a cenizas llena de coches abandonados y perros encadenados que ladraban en los patios. Intranquilo, la buscaba en ascensores de servicio y en edificios abandonados, la esperaba en la penum.. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 034d08e | It's not about outward appearances but inward significance. A grandeur in the world, but not of the world, a grandeur that the world doesn't understand. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 0860661 | 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 |