"It’s a curiously uniform message: when in doubt, what to do?..." — Donna Tartt

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It’s a curiously uniform message: when in doubt, what to do? Every shrink, every career counselor, every Disney princess knows the answer: ‘Be yourself.’ ‘Follow your heart.’ Only here’s what I really, really want someone to explain to me. What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can’t be trusted—? What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight towards a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster?

— Donna Tartt

The Goldfinch

When Being Yourself Is Evil The Pulls of the Heart

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Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you.

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Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you.

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

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But it’s so heartbreaking and unnecessary how we lose things. From pure carelessness.

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