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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| f45a9f0 | Non possiamo scegliere cosa vogliamo e cosa non vogliamo e questa e la verita nuda e cruda. Non possiamo scappare da cio che siamo. [...] E per quanto mi piacerebbe credere che ci sia una verita dietro l'illusione, mi sono convinto che non c'e alcuna verita dietro l'illusione. Perche, tra la "realta" da un lato, e il punto in cui la mente va a sbattere contro la realta, esiste uno spazio sottile, uno spicchio d'arcobaleno da cui origina la .. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 4c76262 | Leaving the EU is harder than a lot of people thought it was going to be | Amber Rudd | ||
| c6c437c | But depression wasn't the word. This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time. The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the g.. | Donna Tartt | ||
| ecf66ff | Il quadro mi ha anche insegnato che possiamo comunicare l'un l'altro a distanza di secoli. E sento di avere qualcosa di molto serio e urgente da dirti, mio inesistente lettore, e sento che devo dirtelo immediatamente come se ci trovassimo nella stessa stanza. Che la vita - qualunque cosa sia - e breve. Che il destino e crudele ma forse non casuale. Che la Natura (intesa come Morte) vince sempre, ma questo non significa che dobbiamo inchinar.. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 1c4faa9 | I don't want you to help me.' She raised her head and looked at me: her gaze hit me hard and sweet as a shot of morphine. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 1341c08 | For a moment I was disoriented, seized by panic; could a ghost embody itself through wavelengths, electronic dots, a picture tube? What are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a dead star? | Donna Tartt | ||
| 930dfdf | would. | Donna Tartt | ||
| b995e9d | It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from all the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one's burned tongues and skinned knees, that one's aches and pains are all one's own. Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us. Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that's why we're so anxious to lose them, don't you t | Donna Tartt | ||
| 2370fd0 | As is true of most incipient bad things in life, i had not really prepared myself for this possibility. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 7003119 | The value of Greek prose composition, he said, [was that] if done properly, off the top of one's head, it taught one to think in Greek. One's thought patterns become different, he said, when forced into the confines of a rigid and unfamiliar tongue. Certain common ideas become inexpressible; other, previously undreamt-of ones spring to life, finding miraculous new articulation. By necessity, I suppose, it is difficult for me to explain in E.. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 3966d43 | It has always been hard for me to talk about Julian without romanticizing him. In many ways, I loved him the most of all;and it is with him that i am most tempted to embroider, to flatter, to basically reinvent. I think that is because Julian himself was constantly in the process of reinventing people and events around him, conferring kindness, or wisdom, or bravery, or charm, on actions which contained nothing of the sort. It was one of th.. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 878c34a | Andy had been good to me when I had no one else. The least I could do was be kind to his mother and sister. It didn't occur to me then, though it certainly does now, that it was years since I'd roused myself from my stupor of misery and self-absorption; between anomie and trance, inertia and parenthesis and gnawing my own heart out, there were a lot of small, easy, everyday kindnesses I'd missed out on; and even the word kindness was like r.. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 9aeb3a5 | In high school I developed a habit of wandering through shopping malls after school, swaying through the bright, chill mezzanines until I was so dazed with consumer goods and product codes, with promenades and escalators, with mirrors and Muzak and noise and light, that a fuse would blow in my brain and all at once everything would become unintelligible: color without form, a babble of detached molecules. Then I would walk like a zombie to .. | feelings inspirational | Donna Tartt | |
| 245018b | It is not death therefore that is burdensome, but the fear of death. | Ambrose | ||
| 020a530 | Un acte qui nous prouverait, ainsi qu'a lui-meme, qu'il etait reellement possible de mettre en oeuvre les principes eleves que nous avait enseignes Julian. Je me rappelle son reflet dans le miroir alors qu'il levait le revolver vers sa tete. Il avait une expression de concentration extatique, presque de triomphe, celle d'un plongeur de haut vol courant a l'extremite du tremplin : joyeux, les yeux fermes, dans l'attente du grand plongeon. | Donna Tartt | ||
| fd37ae3 | It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we shiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? | Donna Tartt | ||
| 72d9674 | The months subsequent were an endless dreary battle of paperwork, full of stalemates, fought in trenches. | Donna Tartt | ||
| dee08aa | Somewhere, Bunny had heard that John Donne had been acquainted with Izaak Walton, and in some dim corridor of his mind this friendship grew larger and larger, until in his mind the two men were practically interchangeable. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 61a9e16 | the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime. | Donna Tartt | ||
| f6d49a5 | I forgave him, a hundred times over, and never on the basis of anything more than this: a look, a gesture, a certain tilt of his head. | Donna Tartt | ||
| ecf19e4 | That's odd,' said Henry. 'The first thing I thought of when I tasted that coffee was you. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 26251f9 | Took | Donna Tartt | ||
| 4103323 | A character like his disintegrates under analysis. It can only be defined by the anecdote, the chance encounter or the sentence overheard. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 1674eec | I had never been to Brooklyn and didn't know a thing about it but I 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 odd, solitary life I might slip into? | Donna Tartt | ||
| 0bb5a19 | You know that thing Julian used to say,' said Francis. 'Which thing?' 'About a Hindu saint being able to slay a thousand on the battlefield and it not being a sin unless he felt remorse. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 82c66e9 | Everything was raw and painful and confusing and wrong and yet it was as if I'd been dragged from freezing water through a break in the ice, into sun and blazing cold. | Donna Tartt | ||
| e4af7e4 | This was extraordinary, as Mrs. Fountain was so cheap she washed out her old tinfoil to roll in a ball and use again, | Donna Tartt | ||
| 68f243d | understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole; | Donna Tartt | ||
| 24b7a5d | his unhappiness was our fault. My mother and I got on his nerves. It was because of us he had a job he couldn't stand. Everything we did was irritating. He particularly didn't enjoy being around me, not that he often was: in the mornings, as I got ready for school, he sat puffy-eyed and silent over his coffee with the Wall Street Journal in front of him, his bathrobe open and his hair standing up in cowlicks, and sometimes he was so shaky t.. | Donna Tartt | ||
| dadeb63 | Certainly, families like Harriet's (and Hely's) would not tolerate for one moment brick-throwing at children white or black ("or purple," as Edie was fond of piping up in any discussion about skin color). And yet there Harriet was, at the all-white school." | Donna Tartt | ||
| 4a9d90c | Reason is always apparent to a discerning eye. But luck? It's invisible, erratic, angelic. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 552f8d6 | unbearable claustrophobia of the soul, | Donna Tartt | ||
| 0dc402c | But I think maybe it's more like a column of figures where you add two numbers wrong at the start, and it throws the total. If you trace it back, you can see the mistake - the point where you would have had a different outcome. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 420ed27 | That life--whatever else it is--is short. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 740fc05 | I had a feeling of deja vu when, the next afternoon, Julian answered the door exactly as he had the first time, by opening it only a crack and looking through it warily, as if there were something wonderful in his office that needed guarding, something that he was careful not everyone should see. It was a feeling I would come to know well in the next months. Even now, years later and far away, sometimes in dreams I find myself standing befo.. | Donna Tartt | ||
| ea2f5cb | 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 color across the sky | Donna Tartt | ||
| 4603dc2 | Was it wrong, wanting to sleep late with the covers over my head and wander around a peaceful house with old seashells in drawers and wicker baskets of folded upholstery fabric stored under the parlor secretary, sunset falling in drastic coral spokes through the fanlight over the front door? | Donna Tartt | ||
| 8fb1304 | began to walk home, very quickly. A car full of high-school girls screeched around the corner. They were the girls who ran all the clubs and won all the elections in Allison's high-school class: little Lisa Leavitt; Pam McCormick, with her dark ponytail, and Ginger Herbert, who had won the Beauty Revue; Sissy Arnold, who wasn't as pretty as the rest of them but just as popular. Their faces--like movie starlets', universally worshiped in the.. | Donna Tartt | ||
| dc8f4d8 | Death is the mother of beauty" "And what is beauty?" "Terror" "Well said. Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary, genuine beauty is always quite alarming" | terror | Donna Tartt | |
| a1b79f7 | 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. An individual heart-shock...A really great painting is fluid enough to work its way into the mind and he.. | Donna Tartt | ||
| 1d035c6 | Sometimes when there's been an accident and reality is too sudden and strange to comprehend, the surreal will take over | reality surreal the-secret-history | Donna Tartt | |
| 75dba3c | There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty -unless she is wed to something more meaningful -is always superficial | donna-tartt superficial the-secret-history | Donna Tartt | |
| 84bd7f3 | Even if life is great--keep it to yourself. You don't want to tempt the devil. | Donna Tartt | ||
| ace97a1 | EVER SINCE BORIS HAD shown up with the bruised eye, I had built Boris's father up in my mind to be some thick-necked Soviet with pig eyes and a buzz haircut. In fact--as I was surprised to see, when I did finally meet him--he was as thin and pale as a starved poet. Chlorotic, with a sunken chest, he smoked incessantly, wore cheap shirts that had grayed in the wash, drank endless cups of sugary tea. But when you looked him in the eye you rea.. | Donna Tartt |