Turquoise > Turquoise 's Quotes

“Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Sorry about the blood in your mouth. I wish it was mine.

I couldn't get the boy to kill me, but I wore his jacket for the longest time.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“Heterosexuality=marriage=death,”
― Andrea Lawlor, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

“Is reality a consensual hallucination? And is a nervous breakdown in fact a refusal to consent? Go on, don't be shy, tell me what you think.”
― Edward St. Aubyn, At Last

“I cried sobbingly until at last those visions reeking with blood came to comfort me. And then I surrendered myself to them, to those deplorably brutal visions, my most intimate friends.”
― Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask

“It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? Euripides speaks of the Maenads: head thrown I back, throat to the stars, "more like deer than human being." To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! These are powerful mysteries. The bellowing of bulls. Springs of honey bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“In the elevator Paul just as often imagined the hand-holding, the running down the rainy streets with, his hot palm on the striped shoulder of some boy, the being cruised, the reading Proust to, the picnicking, the kissing, the eating takeout, the spending the day in a borrowed bed- not that anyone needed to know that.”
― Andrea Lawlor, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

“And yet (this was the murky part, this was what bothered me) there had also been other, way more confusing and fucked-up nights, grappling around half-dressed, weak light sliding in from the bathroom and everything haloed and unstable without my glasses: hands on each other, rough and fast, kicked-over beers foaming on the carpet – fun and not that big of a deal when it was actually happening, more than worth it for the sharp gasp when my eyes rolled back and I forgot about everything; but when we woke the next morning stomach-down and groaning on opposite sides of the bed it receded into an incoherence of backlit flickers, choppy and poorly lit like some experimental film, the unfamiliar twist of Boris’s features fading from memory already and none of it with any more bearing on our actual lives than a dream. We never spoke of it; it wasn’t quite real; getting ready for school we threw shoes, splashed water at each other, chewed aspirin for our hangovers, laughed and joked around all the way to the bus stop. I knew people would think the wrong thing if they knew, I didn’t want anyone to find out and I knew Boris didn’t either, but all the same he seemed so completely untroubled by it that I was fairly sure it was just a laugh, nothing to take too seriously or get worked up about. And”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“You know that apple Adam ate in the Garden of Eden, referred to in the Bible?' he asked. 'You know what was in that apple? Logic. Logic and intellectual stuff. That was all that was in it. So—this is my point—what you have to do is vomit it up if you want to see things as they really are....'

The trouble is,' Teddy said, 'most people don't want to see things the way they are. They don't even want to stop getting born and dying all the time, instead of stopping and staying with God, where it's really nice.' He reflected. 'I never saw such a bunch of apple-eaters,' he said. He shook his head.”
― J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories

“You killed your grandfather, Erik?'

'Yes, did you not know? I thought it was well known. I was very young at the time and had taken a lot of sixty per cent. It was with a chopper.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Scoop

“But how,” said Charles, who was close to tears, “how can you possibly justify cold-blooded murder?’
Henry lit a cigarette. “I prefer to think of it,” he had said, “as redistribution of matter.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“What I wrote about in the essay was about grass growing from the mouths of corpses.”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes

“There are such things as ghosts. People everywhere have always known that. And we believe in them every bit as much as Homer did. Only now, we call them by different names. Memory. The unconscious.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“It's not fatal when it's a shallow dive. Was that the sum of my philosophy? ... Maybe all that I wanted, all along, was to dabble, to dip toes only, to skim for dross instead of plunging deep.”
― Sarah Henstra, The Red Word

“One likes to think there's something in it, that old platitude amor vincit omnia. But if I've learned one thing in my short sad life, it is that that particular platitude is a lie. Love doesn't conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven..”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“I don’t know where Henry was. Probably looking at the moon and reciting some poem from the T’ang Dynasty.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“He was a planet without an atmosphere.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“And then I'll read one of your letters and think, People have no idea what I'm like. I mean the gap between what people see and what's actually in my head sort of shocks me when I read your letters. I guess everyone has this gap. It's just that they don't come face-to-face with it very often.”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes

“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.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“...my head in the rainclouds, my heart in the sky.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“I was worried that my exuberant drug use had damaged my brain and my nervous system and maybe even my soul in some irreparable and perhaps not readily apparent way.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“The freedom to be happy restricts human freedom if you are not free to be not happy.”
― Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

“You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won’t tell you that he loves you, but he loves you. And you feel like you’ve done something terrible, like robbed a liquor store, or swallowed pills, or shoveled yourself a grave in the dirt, and you’re tired. You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and you’re trying not to tell him that you love him, and you’re trying to choke down the feeling, and you’re trembling, but he reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you’ve discovered something you didn’t even have a name for.”
― richard siken

“Maybe I am "queer as in weird", as you theorize so eloquently. But my weirdness is merely a natural by-product of having my sight in something beyond high school, namely poetry.”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes

“Who am I? Who am I?”
“You’re Jude St. Francis. You are my oldest, dearest friend. You’re the son of Harold Stein and Julia Altman. You’re the friend of Malcolm Irvine, of Jean-Baptiste Marion, of Richard Goldfarb, of Andy Contractor, of Lucien Voigt, of Citizen van Straaten, of Rhodes Arrowsmith, of Elijah Kozma, of Phaedra de los Santos, of the Henry Youngs. You’re a New Yorker. You live in SoHo. You volunteer for an arts organization; you volunteer for a food kitchen. You’re a swimmer. You’re a baker. You’re a cook. You’re a reader. You have a beautiful voice, though you never sing anymore. You’re an excellent pianist. You’re an art collector. You write me lovely messages when I’m away. You’re patient. You’re generous. You’re the best listener I know. You’re the smartest person I know, in every way. You’re the bravest person I know, in every way. You’re a lawyer. You’re the chair of the litigation department at Rosen Pritchard and Klein. You love your job; you work hard at it. You’re a mathematician. You’re a logician. You’ve tried to teach me, again and again. You were treated horribly. You came out on the other end. You were always you.”

"And who are you?"
"I'm Willem Ragnarsson. And I will never let you go.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“A teahouse amid the cherry blossoms, on the way to death.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“small, everyday things can lift us out of despair. But nobody can do it for you. You’re the one who has to watch for the open door.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“Books are the mirrors of the soul.”
― Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts

“Adonis approacheth”
― Sarah Henstra