Donna Tartt, The Secret History Quotes
I suppose the shock of recognition is one of the nastiest shocks of all.
...with a grief no less sharp for not being intimate with its object.
Though Julian could be marvelously kind in difficult circumstances of all sorts, I sometimes got the feeling that he was less pleased by kindness itself than by the elegance of the gesture.
But while I have never considered myself a very good person, neither can I bring myself to believe that I am spectacularly bad one. Perhaps it's simply impossible to think of oneself in such a way.
Yet my longing for her was like a bad cold that had hung on for years despite my conviction that I was sure to get over it at any moment.
Mais, vrai, J'ai trop pleure! Les aubes sont navrantes. What a sad and beautiful line that is. I'd always hoped that someday I'd be able to use it.
I suppose there is a certain crucial interval in everyone's life when character is fixed forever.
For that you should read the original. In very great poetry the music often comes through even when one doesn't know language. I loved Dante passionately before I knew a word of Italian.
That surge of power and delight, of confidence, of control. That sudden sense of the richness of the world. Its infinite possibility.
I sometimes get the feeling that he was less pleased by kindness itself than by the elegance of the gesture.
The ceilings had set off a ghostly echo, giving all that desperate hilarity the quality of a memory even as I sat listening to it, memories of things I'd never known.
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.
Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw, " that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?
But, if I dare say it, it wasn't until I had helped kill a man that I realized how elusive and complex an act a murder can actually be, and not necessarily attributable to one dramatic motive.
their reality was far more interesting than any idealized version could possibly be
