Donna Tartt

“הם רוצים הכול מפורט ככל האפשר, כי אפילו לדברים הקטנים ביותר יש משמעות. [אבל] בכל פעם שאתה רואה זבובים או חרקים בטבע דומם – עלה כותרת נבול, כתם שחור על תפוח – הצייר שולח לך מסר סודי. הוא אומר לך שדברים חיים לא שורדים – הכול זמני. מוות בתוך החיים.”

“הציור גרם לי להרגיש פחות בן־תמותה, פחות רגיל. הוא היווה תמיכה והצדקה. הוא היה מחיה ותמצית. הוא היה אבן הראשה שהחזיקה את הקתדרלה כולה.”

“איך נקלעתי לחיים החדשים המוזרים האלה, שבהם זרים שיכורים צועקים סביבי בלילה וכל הבגדים שלי מלוכלכים ואף אחד לא אוהב אותי?”

“כשאיבדתי אותה איבדתי גם כל ציון דרך שהיה עשוי להוביל אותי אל מקום מאושר יותר, אל חיים מיושבים או נעימים יותר.”

“היא החלה למצוץ את מקל הספגטי היבש. הטעם הקמחי היה מוכר, כשל בצק, והוליד פרץ בלתי צפוי של תמונות מגן הילדים.”

“What do you think about America?""Everyone always smiles so big! Well—most people. Maybe not so much you. I think it looks stupid.”

“A different and much deeper sort of beauty altogether. The thing and yet not the thing.”

“I'm not sure whay I've been drawn to this subject, except that murder is a subject that has always drawn people for as long as people have been telling stories.”

“After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great,' he said. 'To escape the cognitive mode of experience, to transcend the accident to one's moment of being. There are other advantages, more difficult to speak of, things which ancient sources only hint at and which I myself only understood after the fact.”

“Well, girls always love assholes,” said Platt, not bothering to dispute this. “Haven't you noticed?” No, I thought bleakly, untrue. Else why didn't Pippa love me?”

“I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive.”

“It's commonplace to say that we 'love' a book, but when we say it, we mean all sorts of things. Sometimes we mean that a book was important to us in out youth, though we haven't picked it up in years; sometimes what we 'love' is an impressionistic idea glimpsed from afar (Combray...madeleins...Tante Leonie...) as apposed to the experience of wallowing and plowing through an actual text, and all too often people claim to love books they haven't read at all. Then there are books we love so much that we read every year or two, and know passages of them by heart; that cheer us up when we are sick or sad and never fail to amuse us when we take them up at random; that we pass on to all our friends and acquaintances; and to which we return again and again with undimmed enthusiasm over the course of a lifetime. I think it goes without saying ghat most books that engage readers on this very high levels are masterpieces; and this is why I believe that True Grit by Charles Portis is a masterpiece.”

“What’s worth living for? what’s worth dying for? what’s completely foolish to pursue?”

“Because I don’t care what anyone says or how often or winningly they say it: no one will ever, ever be able to persuade me that life is some awesome, rewarding treat. Because, here’s the truth: life is a catastrophe. The basic fact of existence – of walking around trying to feed ourselves and find friends and whatever else we do – is a catastrophe. Forget all this ridiculous ‘Our Town’ nonsense everyone talks: the miracle of a newborn babe, the joy of one simple blossom, Life You Are Too Wonderful To Grasp, &c. For me – and I’ll keep repeating it doggedly till I die, till I fall over on my ungrateful nihilistic face and am too weak to say it: better never born, than born into this cesspool. Sinkhole of hospital beds, coffins, and broken hearts. No release, no appeal, no “do-overs” to employ a favored phrase of Xandra’s, no way forward but age and loss, and no way out but death.”

“Maybe that's why I tend to equate physical beauty with qualities with which it has absolutely nothing to do. I see a pretty mouth or a moody pair of eyes and imagine all sorts of deep affinities, private kinships. Never mind that half a dozen jerks are clustered round the same person, just because they've been duped by the same pair of eyes.”

“...life - whatever else it is - is short... maybe even if we're not always so glad to be here, it's our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open.”

“Well, I do have some maiden aunts that are not quite like the aunts in the book, but I definitely do have a couple of them, and a couple of old aunties.”

“Great paintings—people flock to see them, they draw crowds, they’re reproduced endlessly on coffee mugs and mouse pads and anything-you-like. And, I count myself in the following, you can have a lifetime of perfectly sincere museum-going where you traipse around enjoying everything and then go out and have some lunch. But 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 alleyway. Psst, you. Hey kid. Yes you. An individual heart-shock. Your dream, Welty’s dream, Vermeer’s dream. You see one painting, I see another, the art book puts it at another remove still, the lady buying the greeting card at the museum gift shop sees something else entire, and that’s not even to mention the people separated from us by time—four hundred years before us, four hundred years after we’re gone—it’ll never strike anybody the same way and the great majority of people it’ll never strike in any deep way at all but—a really great painting is fluid enough to work its way into the mind and heart through all kinds of different angles, in ways that are unique and very particular. Yours, yours. I was painted for you. And—oh, I don’t know, stop me if I’m rambling… but Welty himself used to talk about fateful objects. Every dealer and antiquaire recognizes them. The pieces that occur and recur. Maybe for someone else, not a dealer, it wouldn’t be an object. It’d be a city, a color, a time of day. The nail where your fate is liable to catch and snag.”

“Why am I made the way I am? Why do I care about all the wrong things, and nothing at all for the right ones? Or, to tip it another way: how can I see clearly that everything I love or care about is illusion, and yet – for me, anyway – all that’s worth living for lies in that charmA great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don't get to choose our own hearts. We can't make ourselves want what's good for us or what's good for other people. We don't get to choose the people we are.”

“The most satisfying of languages, Latin.”