Book

The Secret History

Donna Tartt, winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for her most recent novel, The Goldfinch, established herself as a major talent with The Secret History, which has become a contemporary classic. Under the influence of their chari

(15 total)

Characters

Donna Tartt (15)Richard Papen (4)Henry Winter (2)

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

— Donna Tartt, amazon.com

Tagged: beauty, Beautiful, terror of beauty, viciously beautiful

“I thought too much, lived too much in the mind. It was hard to make decisions.”

— Donna Tartt, amazon.com

Tagged: Anxiety, Panic, Overthinking

“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, amazon.com

Tagged: Aging, Deep Beauty, Looks Fade (Feelings Persist)

“A terrible sweetness boiled up in me. Everything, for a moment was unstable and radiant as a dream.”

— Donna Tartt, Richard Papen, amazon.com

Tagged: Terrible Sweetness, Radiance, Life As A Dream, Dream Like Reality, Dreaming

“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 fie…”

— Donna Tartt, Richard Papen, amazon.com

Tagged: Definitive Moments, Descriptions of Perfect Love Ecstasy

“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.”

— Donna Tartt, amazon.com

Tagged: Brian Eno, References to Songs In Literature and Books

“Time is something which defies spring and winter, birth and decay, the good and the bad, indifferently.”

— Donna Tartt, amazon.com

Tagged: Time, Defining Time

“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.…”

— Donna Tartt, amazon.com

Tagged: Funny To Nerds, Dionysus, Bacchanal, Weird Things To Say, Plato

“Morning light can make the most vulgar things tolerable.”

— Donna Tartt, Henry Winter, amazon.com

Tagged: The Different Personalities of Light, Morning Light, Good Morning

“Any religious ritual is arbitrary unless one is able to see past it to a deeper meaning.”

— Donna Tartt, Henry Winter, amazon.com

Tagged: Religious Moments, Core Concepts, Ritual

“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…”

— Donna Tartt, Richard Papen, amazon.com

Tagged: Definitive Moments, Making Decisions

“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 expl…”

— Donna Tartt, Richard Papen, amazon.com

Tagged: Breaking Language, Thought Patterns

“My fatal flaw is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.”

— Donna Tartt, amazon.com

Tagged: Idyllic, Idyllic Diasters, Fatal Flaw, Picturesque

“The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we understood the gravity of our situation.”

— Donna Tartt, amazon.com

Tagged: first lines of books

“Does such a thing as ‘the fatal flaw,’ that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?”

— Donna Tartt, amazon.com

Tagged: first lines of books, Fatal Flaw