Donna Tartt

It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to lose control completely? To throw off all the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves?

[T]hough the darkness sometimes lifted just enough so I could construe my surroundings, familiar shapes solidifying like bedroom furniture at dawn, my relief was never more than temporary because somehow the full morning never came, things always went black before I could orient myself and there I was again with ink poured in my eyes, guttering around in the dark.

I hated being around people, couldn__ pay attention to what anyone was saying, couldn__ talk to clients, couldn__ tag my pieces, couldn__ ride the subway, human activity seemed pointless, incomprehensible, some blackly swarming ant hill in the wilderness, there was not a squeak of light anywhere I looked, the antidepressants I__ been dutifully swallowing for eight weeks hadn__ helped a bit, nor had the ones before that (but then, I__ tried them all; apparently I was among the twenty unfortunates who didn__ get the daisy fields and the butterflies but the Sever Headaches and the Suicidal Thoughts); and though the darkness sometimes lifted just enough so I could construe my surroundings, familiar shapes solidifying the bedroom furniture at dawn, my relief was never more than temporary because somehow the full morning never came, things always went black before I could orient myself and there I was again with ink poured in my eyes, guttering around in the dark.

Who knew it was in my power to make anyone so happy? Or that I could ever be so happy myself? My moods were a slingshot; after being locked-down and anesthetized for years my heart was zinging and slamming itself around like a bee under a glass, everything bright, sharp, confusing, wrong - but it was a clean pain as opposed to the dull misery that had plagued me for years under the drugs like a rotten tooth, the sick dirty ache of something spoiled. The clarity was exhilarating; it was as if I'd removed a pair of smudged-up glasses that fuzzed everything I saw. All summer long I had been practically delirious: tingling, daffy, energized, running on gin and shrimp cocktail and the invigorating whock of tennis balls. And all I could think was Kitsey, Kitsey, Kitsey!

Do you have any idea why you might be feeling better?___o, not really,_ I said curtly. Better wasn__ even the word for how I felt. There wasn__ a word for it. It was more that things too small to mention__aughter in the hall at school, a live gecko scurrying in a tank in the science lab__ade me feel happy one moment and the next like crying. Sometimes, in the evenings, a damp, gritty wind blew in the windows from Park Avenue, just as the rush hour traffic was thinning and the city was emptying for the night; it was rainy, trees leafing out, spring deepening into summer; and the forlorn cry of horns on the street, the dank smell of the wet pavement had an electricity about it, a sense of crowds and static, lonely secretaries and fat guys with bags of carry-out, everywhere the ungainly sadness of creatures pushing and struggling to live. For weeks, I__ been frozen, sealed-off; now, in the shower, I would turn up the water as hard as it would go and howl, silently. Everything was raw and painful and confusing and wrong and yet it was as if_I__ been dragged from freezing water through a break in the ice, into sun and blazing cold.

And what does a person with such romantic temperament seek in the study of the classics?"If by romantic you mean solitary and introspective, I think romantics are frequently the best classicists.

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

The vitality of the act was entirely obfuscated, the beauty, the terror, the sacrifice.' He took one last drag of this cigarette and put it out. 'Quite simply,' he said, 'we didn't believe. And belief was the one condition which was absolutely necessary. Belief, and absolute surrender.

Fate is cruel but maybe not random. Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn't mean we have to bow and gravel to it.

Everyone basically has one aria to sing over their entire life.

What__ worth living for? what__ worth dying for? what__ completely foolish to pursue?

It seems to me that psychology is only another word for what the ancients called fate.

But, if I dare say it, it wasn't until I had helped kill a man that I realized how elusive and complex an act a murder can actually be, and not necessarily attributable to one dramatic motive.

What do you think about America?""Everyone always smiles so big! Well__ost people. Maybe not so much you. I think it looks stupid.

Richard Papen: As it happened, I knew Gartrell. He was a bad painter and a vicious gossip, with a vocabulary composed almost entirely of obscenities, gutteral verbs, and the world "postmodernist.

But does it make any sense at all to know that it ends badly for all of us, even the happiest of us, and that we all lose everything that matters in the end-and yet to know as well, despite all this, as cruelly as the game is stacked, that it's possible to play it with a kind of joy?To try to make some meaning out of all this seems unbelievably quaint. Maybe I only see a pattern because I've been staring too long. But then again, to paraphrase Boris, maybe I see a pattern because it's there.

The little white bundle__oddling dutifully down the hall to the front door__roze. Then a high-pitched scream as he began to run as fast as he could (which was not very fast at all, any more) and Boris__hooping with laughter__ropped to his knees.__h!_ snatching him up, as Popchik wriggled and struggled. __ou got fat! He got fat!_ he said indignantly as Popchik jumped up and kissed him on the face. __ou let him get fat! Yes, hello, poustyshka, little bit of fluff you, hello! You remember me, don__ you?_ He had toppled over on his back, stretched out and laughing, as Popchik__till screaming with joy__umped all over him. __e remembers me!

I was deluded, and I knew it. Worse: my love for Pippa was muddied-up below the waterline with my mother, with my mother's death, with losing my mother and not being able to get her back. All that blind, infantile hunger to save and be saved, to repeat the past and make it different, had somehow attached itself, ravenously, to her. There was an instability in it, a sickness. I was seeing things that weren't there. I was only one step away from some trailer park loner stalking a girl he'd spotted in the mall. 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 were wholly unreal, whereas my ongoing misery, and frustration, were an all-too-horrible reality. Was groundless, hopeless, unrequited obsession any way to waste the rest of my life?