But it’s so heartbreaking and unnecessary how we lose things. From pure carelessness.
Catalog
Book
The Goldfinch
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE "The Goldfinch is a rarity that comes along perhaps half a dozen times per decade, a smartly written literary novel that connects with the heart as well as the mind....Donna Tartt has delivered a
Just as 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— so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in,…
Fate is cruel but maybe not random.
We can’t choose what we want and don’t want and that’s the hard lonely truth. Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us. We can’t escape who we are.
I’ve come to realize that the only truths that matter to me are the ones I don’t, and can’t, understand. What’s mysterious, ambiguous, inexplicable. What doesn’t fit into a story, what doesn’t have a story.
There’s only a tiny heartbeat and solitude, bright sunny wall and a sense of no escape. Time that doesn’t move, time that couldn’t be called time. And trapped in the heart of light: the little prisoner, unflinching.
Because: if our secrets define us, as opposed to the face we show the world: then the painting was the secret that raised me above the surface of life and enabled me to know who I am. And it’s there: in my notebooks, every page, even though it’s not. Dream and magic, magic and delirium. The Unified…
The pursuit of pure beauty is a trap, a fast track to bitterness and sorrow, that beauty has to be wedded to something more meaningful.
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…
A grandeur in the world, but not of the world, a grandeur that the world doesn’t understand.
We don’t get to choose the people we are.
There are images that strike the heart and set it blooming like a flower, images that open up some much, much larger beauty that you can spend your whole life looking for and never find.
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…
The nail where your fate is liable to catch and snag.
Who’s to say that gamblers don’t really understand it better than anyone else? Isn’t everything worthwhile a gamble? Can’t good come around sometimes through some strange back doors?
Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that, sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent.
Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil.
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.
Act of rebellion. Life: vacant, vain, intolerable. What loyalty did I owe it? None whatsoever. Why not beat Fate to the punch?
The heart-shock of believing, for only a moment, that you might just have what could never be yours.