Emme Starkey > Emme's Quotes

“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

“I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“I liked the idea of living in a city — any city, especially a strange one — liked the thought of traffic and crowds, of working in a bookstore, waiting tables in a coffee shop, who knew what kind of solitary life I might slip into? Meals alone, walking the dogs in the evenings; and nobody knowing who I was.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“We don't like to admit it, but the idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than almost anything. All truly civilized people – the ancients no less than us – have civilized themselves through the wilful repression of the old, animal self.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“though I can digress with the best of them, I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“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

“It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from all the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one's burned tongues and skinned knees, that one's aches and pains are all one's own. Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us. Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that's why we're so anxious to lose them...”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“You want to know what Classics are?" said a drunk Dean of Admissions to me at a faculty party a couple of years ago. "I'll tell you what Classics are. Wars and homos.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“You amaze me," he said. "You think nothing exists if you can't see it.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“I was confused by this sudden glare of attention; it was as if the characters in a favorite painting, absorbed in their own concerns, had looked up out of the canvas and spoken to me.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great. To escape the cognitive mode of experience, to transcend the accident of one's moment of being.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“A picture that will never leave me. I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Reason is always apparent to a discerning eye. But luck? It’s invisible, erratic, angelic.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“It does not do to be frightened of things about which you know nothing.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“a light that made me think of long hours in dusty libraries, and old books, and silence.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“What are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a dead star?”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“had I stayed in California I might have ended up in a cult or at the very least practicing some weird dietary restriction.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Our deep longings remind us we have lost something vital and precious. Such yearnings are the stirring of hope. Of returning.” “Returning where?” “To this garden.”
― Wm. Paul Young, Eve

“I don't think," he insisted. "I feel.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“Who can know the heart of youth but youth itself?”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don't let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

“I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone enough.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

“So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

“Often when I imagine you,
your wholeness cascades into many shapes.
You run like a herd of luminous deer,
and I am dark;
I am forest.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

“I am a house gutted by fire where only the guilty sometimes sleep before the punishment that devours them hounds them out in the open. ”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray