Thesecrethistory Quotes

“But I am getting sentimental. Sometimes, when I think about these things, I do.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“But – just when I've managed to harden my heart, he'll turn around and be so sweet. I always fall for it. I don't know why.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

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

“The larger of the two - and he was quite large, well over six feet - was dark-haired, with a square jaw and coarse, pale skin. He might have been handsome had his features been less set, or his eyes, behind the glasses, less expressionless and blank. He wore dark English suits and carried an umbrella (a bizarre sight in Hampden) and he walked stiffly through the throngs of hippies an beatniks and preppies and punks with the self-conscious formality of an old ballerina, surprising in one so large as he. "Henry Winter," said my friends when I pointed him out, at a distance, making a wide circle to avoid a group of bongo players on the lawn.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Why does that obstinate little voice in our heads torment us so?' he said, looking around the table. 'Could it be because it reminds us that we are alive, of our mortality, of our individual souls - which, after all, we are too afraid to surrender but yet makes us feel more miserable than any other thing?”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Some things are too terrible to grasp at once. Other things - naked, spluttering, indelible in their horror - are too terrible to grasp at all. It is only later, in solitude, in memory that the realisation 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.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“I don’t believe in the mood landing, at least not for me.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History