The Goldfinch
by Donna Tartt
(Little, Brown, 2013)
"People die, sure," my mother was saying. "But it's heartbreaking and unnecessary how we lose things. From pure carelessness. Fires, wars. The Parthenon, used as a munitions storehouse. I guess that anything we manage to save form history is a miracle.
Page 34.
I was fascinated by strangers, wanted to know what food they ate and what dishes they ate it from, what movies they watched and what music they listened to, wanted to look under their beds and in their secret drawers and night tables and inside the pockets of their coats.
Pages 34-35.
I was very taken with the idea that a person might notice in passing some bewitching stranger and remember her for the rest of his life.
Page 37.
The invisible part was the important pat.
Page 45.
Trying to stop thinking about it was like trying to stop thinking of a purple cow.
Page 83.
Sometimes, unexpectedly, grief pounded over me in waves that left me gasping; and when the waves washed back, I found myself looking out over a brackish wreck which was illumined in a light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead.
Page 114.
He was a planet without an atmosphere.
Page 195.
I was miserable; and my determination to suffer in secret had made me uncommunicative.
Page 251.
Pretty doesn't matter if she's nice.
Page 252.
We don't hit women in America. ... No, Americans just persecute smaller countries that believe different from them.
Page 311.
When we are sad - at least I am like this - it can be comforting to cling to familiar objects, to the things that don't change.
Page 346.
People promise to write, and they don't.
Page 347.
None of us ever find enough kindness in the world, do we?
Page 348.
I liked knowing it was there for the depth and solidity it gave things, the reinforcement to infrastructure, an invisible, bedrock rightness that reassured me just as it was reassuring to know that far away, whales swam untroubled in Baltic waters and monks in arcane time zones chanted ceaselessly for the salvation of the world.
Page 376.
... dumb, shifty, home-schooled look.
Page 465.
There had been nights in the desert where I was so sick with laughter, convulsed and doubled over with aching stomach for hours on end, I would happily have thrown myself in front of a car to make it stop.
Page 475.
The thought of her gave me such continual anguish that I could no more forget her than an aching tooth. It was involuntary, hopeless, compulsive. For years she had been the first thing I remembered when I woke up, the last thing that drifted through my mind as I went to sleep, and dring the day she came to me obtrusively, obsessively, always with a painful shock.
Page 574.
My longing for her was like a bad cold that had hung on for years dspite my conviction that I was sure to get over it at any moment.
Page 577.
His warmth, which seemed to presume upon some happy old intimacy we did not share, had thrown me into awkwardness.
Page 579.
The fetishism of secrecy.
Page 656.
Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you. What you want to live and be happy in the world is a woman who has her own life and lets you have yours.
Page 740.
It could have been a foxhole in the Somme being shelled by the Germans and all that mattered was her next to me in the dark, her arm beside mine.
Page 757.
In whatever wink of consciousness that remained to me I felt I understood the secret grandeur of dying, all the knowledge held back from all humankind until the very end: no pain, no fear, magnificent detachment, lying in state upon the death barge and receding into the grand immensities like an emperor, gone, gone, observing all the distant scurryers on shore, freed from all the old human pettiness of love and fear and grief and death.
Page 863.
Why did anyone ever worry about anything? Weren't we, as sentient beings, put upon the earth to be happy, in the brief time allotted to us?
Page 864.
For humans - trapped in biology - there was no mercy: we lived a while, we fussed around for a bit and died, we rotted in the ground like garbage. time destroyed us all soon enough. But to destroy, or lose, a deathless thing - to break bonds stronger than the temporal - was a metaphysical uncoupling all its own, a startling new flavor of despair.
Page 867.
If you scratch very deep at the idea of pattern (which apparently he had never taken the trouble to do), you hit an emptiness so dark that it destroyed, categorically, anything you'd ever looked at or thought of as light.
Page 867.
By saying 'God,' I am merely using 'God' as reference to long-term pattern we can't decipher.
Page 930.
Idolatry! Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only - if you care for thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn't it? And isn't the whole point of things - beautiful things - that they connect you to some larger beauty?
Page 944-945.
The only truths that matter to me are the ones I don't, or can't, understand.
Page 956.
No one will ever, ever be able to persuade me that life is some awesome, rewarding treat. Because, here's the truth: life is catastrophe. The basic fact of existence - of walking around trying to feed ourselves and find friends and whatever else we do - is catastrophe. ... No way forward bug a and loss, and no way out but death.
Page 957.
Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it's going to kill us. We can't escape who we are.
Page 960.
Between 'reality' on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there's a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all are exists, and all magic.
Page 961.
Whatever teaches us to talk to ourselves is important.
Page 961.
It is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn't touch.
Page 962.
I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them.
Page 962.