{"author":"Donna Tartt","author_id":"Donna+Tartt","total_quotes":131,"quotes":[{"text":"Everything was hysterically funny, even the playground slide was smiling at us, and at some point, deep in the night, when we were winging on the jungle gym and showers of sparks were flying out of our mouths, I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.","author":"Donna Tartt","tags":["acid","laughter","light","tripping"],"id":1972,"author_id":"Donna+Tartt"},{"text":"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?","author":"Donna Tartt","tags":["bad-boys","heartbreak","love","unrequited-love"],"id":2412,"author_id":"Donna+Tartt"},{"text":"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.","author":"Donna Tartt","tags":["city"],"id":3132,"author_id":"Donna+Tartt"},{"text":"Everyone basically has one aria to sing over their entire life.","author":"Donna Tartt","tags":["destiny","life"],"id":4205,"author_id":"Donna+Tartt"},{"text":"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.","author":"Donna Tartt","tags":["donna-tartt","motive","murder","psychology","the-secret-history"],"id":8714,"author_id":"Donna+Tartt"},{"text":"But walking through it all was one thing; walking away, unfortunately, has proved to be quite another, and though once I thought I had left that ravine forever on an April afternoon long ago, now I am not so sure. Now the searchers have departed, and life has grown quiet around me, I have come to realize that while for years I might have imagined myself to be somewhere else, in reality I have been there all the time: up at the top by the muddy wheel-ruts in the new grass, where the sky is dark over the shivering apple blossoms and the first chill of the snow that will fall that night is already in the air.","author":"Donna Tartt","tags":["beginning","donna-tartt","haunted","memory","prologue","the-secret-history","trapped"],"id":13098,"author_id":"Donna+Tartt"},{"text":"What are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a dead star?That, by the way, is a phrase of Julian's. I remember it from a lecture of his on the Iliad, when Patroklos appears to Achilles in a dream. There is a very moving passage where Achilles overjoyed at the sight of the apparition – tries to throw his arms around the ghost of his old friend, and it vanishes. The dead appear to us in dreams, said Julian, because that's the only way they can make us see them; what we see is only a projection, beamed from a great distance, light shining at us from a dead star…Which reminds me, by the way, of a dream I had a couple of weeks ago.I found myself in a strange deserted city – an old city, like London – underpopulated by war or disease. It was night; the streets were dark, bombed-out, abandoned. For a long time, I wandered aimlessly – past ruined parks, blasted statuary, vacant lots overgrown with weeds and collapsed apartment houses with rusted girders poking out of their sides like ribs. But here and there, interspersed among the desolate shells of the heavy old public buildings, I began to see new buildings, too, which were connected by futuristic walkways lit from beneath. Long, cool perspectives of modern architecture, rising phosphorescent and eerie from the rubble.I went inside one of these new buildings. It was like a laboratory, maybe, or a museum. My footsteps echoed on the tile floors.There was a cluster of men, all smoking pipes, gathered around an exhibit in a glass case that gleamed in the dim light and lit their faces ghoulishly from below.I drew nearer. In the case was a machine revolving slowly on a turntable, a machine with metal parts that slid in and out and collapsed in upon themselves to form new images. An Inca temple… click click click… the Pyramids… the Parthenon.History passing beneath my very eyes, changing every moment.'I thought I'd find you here,' said a voice at my elbow.It was Henry. His gaze was steady and impassive in the dim light. Above his ear, beneath the wire stem of his spectacles, I could just make out the powder burn and the dark hole in his right temple.I was glad to see him, though not exactly surprised. 'You know,' I said to him, 'everybody is saying that you're dead.'He stared down at the machine. The Colosseum… click click click… the Pantheon. 'I'm not dead,' he said. 'I'm only having a bit of trouble with my passport.''What?'He cleared his throat. 'My movements are restricted,' he said.'I no longer have the ability to travel as freely as I would like.'Hagia Sophia. St. Mark's, in Venice. 'What is this place?' I asked him.'That information is classified, I'm afraid.'1 looked around curiously. It seemed that I was the only visitor.'Is it open to the public?' I said.'Not generally, no.'I looked at him. There was so much I wanted to ask him, so much I wanted to say; but somehow I knew there wasn't time and even if there was, that it was all, somehow, beside the point.'Are you happy here?' I said at last.He considered this for a moment. 'Not particularly,' he said.'But you're not very happy where you are, either.'St. Basil's, in Moscow. Chartres. Salisbury and Amiens. He glanced at his watch.'I hope you'll excuse me,' he said, 'but I'm late for an appointment.'He turned from me and walked away. I watched his back receding down the long, gleaming hall.","author":"Donna Tartt","tags":["architecture","classics","death","dreams","museum","unhappiness"],"id":14572,"author_id":"Donna+Tartt"},{"text":"It's not about outward appearances but inward significance. A grandeur in the world, but not of the world, a grandeur that the world doesn't understand. That first glimpse of pure otherness, in whose presence you bloom out and out and out.A self one does not want. A heart one cannot help.","author":"Donna Tartt","tags":["bloom","grandeur","heart","help","inward","inward-significance","otherness","outward-appearances","self","understand","want","world"],"id":16296,"author_id":"Donna+Tartt"},{"text":"It’s a long story. I’ll make it short as I can.","author":"Donna Tartt","tags":["story"],"id":21204,"author_id":"Donna+Tartt"},{"text":"The lamplight was eerie, and, standing there motionless in our bathrobes, sleepy, with shadows flickering all around, I felt as though I had woken from one dream into an even more remote one, some bizarre wartime bomb shelter of the unconscious.","author":"Donna Tartt","tags":["atmospheric","descriptive","donna-tartt","dream-within-a-dream","dreams","eerie","the-secret-history"],"id":21396,"author_id":"Donna+Tartt"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":131,"pages":14,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}