Donna Tartt

But romantic vision can also lead one away from certain very hard, ugly truths about life that are important to know.

Everything takes me longer than I expect. It's the sad truth about life.

Occasionally a car swooshed by in the rain and its headlights would swing round momentarily and illuminate the room-the pool table, snowshoes on the wall and the rowing machine, the armchair in which Henry sat, motionless, a glass in his hand and the cigarette burning low between his fingers. For a moment his face, pale and watchful as a ghost's, would be caught in the headlights and then, very gradually, it would slide back into the dark.

Over and over I played her favorite Arvo Pärt, as a way of being with her; and she had only to mention recently read novel for me to grab it up hungrily, to be inside her thoughts, a sort of telepathy

I like the idea of living in a city - any city, especially a strange one - like the thought of traffic and crowds, of working in a bookstore, waiting tables in a coffee shop, who knew what kind of odd, solitary life I might slip into? Meals alone, waling the dogs in the evenings; and nobody knowing who I was.

Because I don__ 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__ 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 __ur 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__l 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 __o-overs_ to employ a favored phrase of Xandra__, no way forward but age and loss, and no way out but death.

I wanted her to know just how much I loved her while also letting her know that she bore not one particle of blame for not loving me back.But I wouldn__ say that. It was rosepetals I wanted to throw, not a poison dart.

For humans__rapped in biology__here was no mercy: we lived a while, we fussed around for a bit and died, we rotted in the ground like garbage.

But while I have never considered myself a very good person, neither can I bring myself to believe that I am spectacularly bad one. Perhaps it's simply impossible to think of oneself in such a way.

Well -- think about this. What if all your actions and choices, good or bad, make no difference to God? What if the pattern is pre-set? No no -- hang on -- this is a question worth struggling with. What if our badness and mistakes are the very thing that set our fate and bring us round to good? What if, for some of us, we can't get there any other way?

Wade straight through life, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and heart open.

. . . it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn't touch.

It's not as if we're running a hospital for sick children down here, let's put it that way. Where's the nobility in patching up a bunch of old tables and chairs? Corrosive to the soul, quite possibly. I've seen too many estates not to know that. Idolatry! Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only__f you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn't it? And isn't the whole point of things__eautiful things__hat they connect you to some larger beauty? Those first images that crack your heart wide open and you spend the rest of your life chasing, or trying to recapture, in one way or another?

They were playing old Bob Dylan, more than perfect for narrow Village streets close to Christmas and the snow whirling down in big feathery flakes, the kind of winter where you want to be walking down a city street with your arm around a girl like on the old record cover

It seemed my wholelife was composed of these disjointedfractions of time, hanging around in onepublic place and then another, as if I werewaiting for trains that never came. And, likeone of those ghosts who are said to lingeraround depots late at night, askingpassersby for the timetable of the MidnightExpress that derailed twenty years before, Iwandered from light to light until thatdreaded hour when all the doors closed and,stepping from the world of warmth andpeople and conversation overheard, I feltthe old familiar cold twist through my bonesagain and then it was all forgotten, thewarmth, the lights; I had never been warmin my life, ever.

And 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, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.

Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it__ going to kill us.

Maybe good luck was like bad luck in that it took a while to sink in.