Time is something which defies spring and winter, birth and decay, the
good and the bad, indifferently. Something changeless and joyous and
absolutely indestructible. Duality ceases to exist; there is no ego,
no "I," and yet it's not at all like those horrid comparisons one
sometimes hears in Eastern religions, the self being a drop of water
swallowed by the ocean of the universe. It's more as if the universe
expands to fill the boundaries of the self.
-- Donna Tartt. The Secret History (158)
White sky. Trees fading at the skyline, the mountains gone. My hands
dangled from the cuffs of my jacket as if they weren't my own. I never
got used to the way the horizon there could just erase itself and
leave you marooned , adrift, in an incomplete dreamscape that was
like a sketch for the world you knew -- the outline of a single tree
standing in for a grove, lamp-posts and chimneys floating up out of
context before the surrounding canvas was filled in -- an
amnesia-land, a kind of skewed Heaven where the old landmarks were
recognizable but spaced too far apart, and disarranged, and made
terrible by the emptiness around them.
-- Donna Tartt. The Secret History (352)
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.
-- Donna Tartt. The Secret History (430)
I too appear as something of a stranger in these
early memories: watchful and grudging, oddly
silent. All my life, people have taken my shyness
for sullenness, snobbery, bad temper of one sort
or another. "Stop looking so superior!" my father
sometimes used to shout at me when I was eating,
watching television, or otherwise minding my own
business. But this facial cast of mine (that's
what I think it is, really, a way my mouth has of
turning down at the corners, it has little to do
with my actual moods) has worked as often to my
favor as to my disadvantage.
-- Donna Tartt. The Secret History (novel, 1992)
page 80.
"What you need," he said, "is an ice-cream float."
"You and your ice-cream floats."
"They work, I tell you. It's very scientific. Cold things are good for
nausea and--"
"You're always saying that, Charles, but I just don't think it's true."
"Would you just listen to me for a second? The ice cream slows
down your digestion. The Coke settles your stomach and the caffeine
cures your headache. Sugar gives you energy. And besides, it makes you
metabolize the alcohol faster. It's the perfect food."
-- Donna Tartt. The Secret History (novel, 1992)
page 96.
The assignment was a two-page essay, in Greek, on any
epigram or Callimachus that we chose. I'd done only a page
and I started to hurry through the rest in impatient and
slightly dishonest fashion, writing out the English and
translating word by word. It was something Julian asked us
not to do. The value of Greek prose composition, he said,
was not that it gave one any particular facility in the
language that could not be gained as easily by other methods
but that if done properly, off the top of one's head, it
taught one to think in Greek. One's thought patterns become
different, he said, when forced into the confines of a rigid
and unfamiliar tongue. Certain common ideas become
inexpressible; other, previously undreamt-of ones spring to
life, finding miraculous new articulation. By necessity, I
suppose, it is difficult for me to explain in English
exactly what I mean. I can only say that an
incendium
is in its nature entirely different from the
feu with
which a Frenchman lights his cigarette, and both are very
different from the stark, inhuman pur that the Greeks knew,
the
pur that roared from the towers of Ilion or leapt
and screamed on that desolate, windy beach, from the funeral
pyre of Patroklos.
Pur: that one word contains for me the secret, the
bright, terrible clarity of ancient Greek. How can I make
you see it, this strange harsh light which pervades Homer's
landscapes and illumines the dialogues of Plato, an alien
light, inarticulable in our common tongue? Our shared
language is a language of the intricate, the peculiar, the
home of pumpkins and ragamuffins and bodkins and beer, the
tongue of Ahab and Falstaff and Mrs. Gamp; and while I find
it entirely suitable for reflections such as these, it fails
me utterly when I attempt to describe in it what I love
about Greek, that language innocent of all quirks and
cranks; a language obsessed with action, and with the joy of
seeing action multiply from action, action marching
relentlessly ahead and with yet more actions filing in from
either side to fall into neat step at the rear, in a long
straight rank of cause and effect toward what will be
inevitable, the only possible end.
-- Donna Tartt. The Secret History (novel, 1992)
page 200.