it's always "I love you" and never "cubitum eamus?"
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"Some things are too terrible to grasp at once. Other things — naked, sputtering, indelible in their horror — are too terrible to really ever grasp at all. It is only later, in solitude, in memory, that the realization dawns: when the ashes are cold; when the mourners have departed; when one looks around and finds oneself — quite to one's surprise — in an entirely different world."
— The Secret History, Donna Tartt
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HELP I was thinking about the secret history saying ‘and what is beauty? terror.’ And Richard seeing Camilla and saying in all [his] life [he] had never seen anyone so maddeningly beautiful as she, and Ghost singing ‘your beauty never ever scared me…’
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“She was a living reverie for me: the mere sight of her sparked an almost infinite range of fantasy, from Greek to Gothic, from vulgar to divine.”
— Donna Tartt, The Secret History (1992)
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Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,'
that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?
I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does.
And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.
- The Secret History by Donna Tartt
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~ But strange and marvelous as she was, a wisp of silk in a forest of black wool, she was not the fragile creature one would have her seem.
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Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. - The Secret History (1992)
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Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones I did not.
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this is my version of the roman empire
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This side of tumblr is for those people who read a book in high school and based their entire personality around it.
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“Morning light can make the most vulgar things tolerable.”
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“Anything is grand if it’s done on a large enough scale.”
- Henry Winter, The Secret History by Donna Tartt
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“For if the modern mind is whimsical and discursive, the classical mind is narrow, unhesitating, relentless. It is not a quality of intelligence that one encounters frequently these days. But though I can digress with the best of them, I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.”
— Donna Tartt, The Secret History (1992)
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"What are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a dead star?"
- Donna Tartt, The Secret History
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