Donna Tartt - The Secret History (1992)

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I suppose the shock of recognition is one of the nastiest shocks of all.

Donna Tartt
After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great

Donna Tartt
I began to see new buildings, too, which were connected by futuristic walkways lit from beneath. Long, cool perspectives of modern architecture, rising phosphorescent and eerie from the rubble.

Donna Tartt
Are you happy here?" I said at last. He considered this for a moment. "Not particularly," he said. "But you're not very happy where you are, either.

Donna Tartt
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
I hope we're all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?

Donna Tartt
Some things are too terrible to grasp at once. Other things - naked, sputtering, indelible in their horror - are too terrible to really grasp ever at all.It is only later, in solitude, in memory that the realization dawns: when the ashes are cold; when the mourners have departed; when one looks around and finds oneself - quite to one's surprise - in an entirely different world.

Donna Tartt
If I had grown up in that house I couldn't have loved it more, couldn't have been more familiar with the creak of the swing, or the pattern of the clematis vines on the trellis, or the velvety swell of land as it faded to gray on the horizon.... The very colors of the place had seeped into my blood.

Donna Tartt
One likes to think there's something in it, that old platitude amor vincit omnia. But if I've learned one thing in my short sad life, it is that that particular platitude is a lie. Love doesn't conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.

Donna Tartt
Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?

Donna Tartt
There is to me about this place a smell of rot, the smell of rot that ripe fruit makes. Nowhere, ever, have the hideous mechanics of birth and copulation and death -those monstrous upheavals of life that the Greeks call miasma, defilement- been so brutal or been painted up to look so pretty; have so many people put so much faith in lies and mutability and death death death.

Donna Tartt
She closed her eyes, dark-lidded, dark shadows beneath them; she really was older, not the glancing-eyed girl I had fallen in love with but no less beautiful for that; beautiful now in a way that less excited my senses than tore at my very heart.

Donna Tartt
And as we leave Donne and Walton on the shores of Metahemeralism, we wave a fond farewell to those famous chums of yore.

Donna Tartt
Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.

Donna Tartt
From the window, above the clatter of pots and the slamming of cabinets, Francis was singing, as though it was the happiest song in the world: 'We are the little black sheep who have gone astray... Baa baa baa... Gentlemen songsters off on a spree... Doomed from here to eternity...

Donna Tartt
Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.

Donna Tartt
In short: I felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way.

Donna Tartt
The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.

Donna Tartt
There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty-unless she is wed to something more meaningful-is always superficial

Donna Tartt
For if the modern mind is whimsical and discursive, the classical mind is narrow, unhesitating, relentless. It is not a quality of intelligence that one encounters frequently these days. But though I can digress with the best of them, I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.

Donna Tartt