Author of quotes: Donna Of Tartt

- A quiet insistent voice in our head - why does it torment us so much? he asked and paused. - Maybe it reminds us that we are alive, that we are mortal, that each of us is endowed with a unique soul, which we are so afraid to part with, although it makes us feel more unhappy than all other creatures? Besides, what, if not pain, sharpens our sense of self? It is terrible when a child suddenly realizes that he is a being isolated from the whole world, that no one and nothing suffers when he burned his tongue or skinned his knee, that his pain belongs only to him alone. It is even worse when, with age, you begin to realize that no one, even the closest and beloved person, will ever be able to understand you for real. The ego makes us extremely unhappy, and is that why we are so eager to get rid of it?

And no matter how much I wanted to believe that there is truth behind illusions, I finally realized that there is no truth behind illusions. Because between “reality” on the one hand and the point at which reality and reason converge, there is a certain intermediate zone, an iridescent edge where beauty comes to life, where two completely different surfaces merge, are captured and give us something that life cannot give us : in this very space all art, all magic exists. And - I bet that's all love. Or, to be more precise, the intermediate zone shows us the fundamental paradox of love. Close up: A freckled hand on a black coat, an origami frog flopped to one side. A step back - and again an immortal illusion creeps in: about life is greater than life. And between them - the gap - is Pippa herself, she is both love and non-love, she is here and not here. Photos on the wall, a crumpled sock under the sofa. The moment when I reached out to remove the fluff from her hair, and she laughed and dodged me. And just as music is an internotic space, just as the stars are beautiful due to the distances between them, just as the sun at a certain angle beats a ray into a raindrop and throws a prism of light into the sky - so is the space in which I exist, where I would like to stay further, is exactly in that middle zone, where despair clashes with the purest otherness and something sublime is born.

And how remarkable how limp his world was without him. It's strange, I thought, jumping away from the stream of water rushing along the curb, how everything can change in just a few hours - or, rather, how strange that such a bright fragment of the past can get stuck in the present, broken, broken, but never disappeared to end. Andy was kind to me when I had no one else. And I could at least repay his mother and sister with kindness. Now I understand this, but then it did not even occur to me that I had not crawled out of my cocoon of grief and self-digging for years, and behind this anomie of mine, behind stupor, apathy, isolation and heartache, I missed many everyday, small , imperceptible manifestations of kindness; and even this very word, kindness, reminded of a way out of a coma, from the hum of sensors - into a hospital reality of voices and people.

But even though I understood that I was very lucky, I still did not feel either happiness or even gratitude for such luck. The feeling was that my spirit itself had changed at some chemical level: as if the acid balance in my soul had been disturbed and life had burned out of me - irreparably, irreversibly, like a frond of a coral polyp turned to stone to the very core.

The temptation to stop yourself, even for a brief moment, is very great.

All thoughts immediately responded with an unreasonable sense of danger and contradicted each other so much that I lost the ability to make any assumptions and was only stupidly amazed at what was happening.

In the suffocating smog of cigarettes and gloomy speculations, they flickered here and there, like allegorical figures from an old production or the ghosts of guests of a long-past tea-drinking in the garden.

He sailed through life, guided only by the dim lights of habits and stimuli, in full confidence that, having come across an obstacle on the way, he would easily overcome it by the force of inertia alone.

The dead appear to us in a dream, because our perception does not allow us to see them in reality. These night guests are images projected into our consciousness from an incredible distance, in a certain sense they can be likened to the light of a long extinct star ...

After all, if you think about it, what are ghosts? Particles and waves, radiation... The light of an extinct star.

She was no longer in the least like that carefree girl with whom I had once fallen in love, but that is why she was no less beautiful - a beauty that not so much aroused emotions as dominated my whole being.

The trouble is not that your Julian is focused only on some, sublime aspects of reality, but that he prefers to ignore all the others, which are no less important.

There is splendor in everything that has been done on a grand scale.

I think I can get us all out. True, success will depend on a certain set of circumstances, and you will have to wait for it. Also, to some extent, the question is about how far we are ultimately willing to go.