The Secret History

by Donna Tartt

I was consumed by a more general sense of dread, of imprisonment within the dreary round of school and home: circumstances which, to me at least, presented sound empirical argument for gloom.

I felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way.

“There is to me about this place a smell of rot, the smell of rot that ripe fruit makes. Nowhere, ever, have the hideous mechanics of birth and copulation and death—those monstrous upheavals of life that the Greeks call miasma, defilement—been so brutal or been painted up to look so pretty; have so many people put so much faith in lies and mutability and death death death.”

Secondary Analysis. Secondary Deviance. Secondary Groups. Secondary Schools.

I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.

one’s aches and pains are all one’s own.

the least of us know that love is a cruel and terrible master. One loses oneself for the sake of the other, but in doing so becomes enslaved and miserable to the most capricious of all the gods.

me, with my clumsy hands and suburban ways.