I was deluded, and I knew it... For the truth of it was: Pippa and I saw each other maybe twice a year; we e-mailed and texted, though with no great regularity; when she was in town we loaned each other books and went to the movies; we were friends; nothing more. My hopes for a relationship with her…
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Donna Tartt
Donna Tartt (born December 23, 1963) is an American writer, the author of the novels The Secret History (1992), The Little Friend (2002), and The Goldfinch (2013). Tartt won the WH Smith Literary Award for The Little Friend in 2003 and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for The Goldfinch in 2014. She was included in the list of the "100 Most Influential People" compiled by Time magazine in 2014. 2Life and career Tartt was born in Greenwood, Mississippi, in the Mississippi Delta, and raised in the nearby town of Grenada. She enrolled in the University of Mississippi in 1981, and her writing caught the attention of Willie Morris when she was a freshman. Following a recommendation from Morris, Barry Hannah, then an Ole Miss writer in residence, admitted the eighteen-year-old Tartt into his graduate course on the short story. "She was deeply literary," said Hannah. "Just a rare genius, really. A literary star." Following the suggestion of Morris and others, she transferred to Bennington College in 1982, where she was friends with fellow students Bret Easton Ellis, Jill Eisenstadt, and Jonathan Lethem. At Bennington she studied classics with Claude Frederick
While I was still in Amsterdam, I dreamed about my mother for the first time in years.
While I was still in Amsterdam, I dreamed about my mother for the first time in years.
You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life
Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you.
Beauty is terror.
Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you.
Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.
I thought too much, lived too much in the mind. It was hard to make decisions.
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.
A terrible sweetness boiled up in me. Everything, for a moment was unstable and radiant as a dream.
The sun came suddenly from behind a rain cloud, flooding the room with glorious light that wavered on the walls like water. Camilla’s face burst into glowing bloom. A terrible sweetness boiled up in me. Everything, for a moment—mirror, ceiling, floor—was unstable and radiant as a dream. I felt a…
I’d had an old Brian Eno song running through my head (‘In New Delhi / And Hong Kong / They all know that it won’t be long …’), I now had to sing it to myself each trip up or down the stairs.
Time is something which defies spring and winter, birth and decay, the good and the bad, indifferently.
Do you remember when we studied what Plato calls telestic madness? Bakcheia? Dionysiac frenzy?’ ‘Yes,’ I said, rather impatiently. It was just like Henry to bring up something like this right now. ‘Well, we decided to try to have one.’ For a moment I thought I hadn’t understood him. ‘What?’ I said.…
Morning light can make the most vulgar things tolerable.
Any religious ritual is arbitrary unless one is able to see past it to a deeper meaning.
It’s funny, but thinking back on it now, I realize that this particular point in time, as I stood there blinking in the deserted hall, was the one point at which I might have chosen to do something very different from what I actually did. But of course I didn’t see this crucial moment then for what…
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…
My fatal flaw is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.