Matias

“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

“The problem was that he’d found out along the way, through a pretty long string of lovers, that you could burn out on passion and romance the same way you could burn out on bad dope or optimism or any other damn thing. It happened. And once it happened it was forever. So that then, even when something undisputably good came along, you maintained a kind of reserve. Not that you didn’t mine it for everything it was worth. Sure you did. But you stayed a little aloof from it too. Because mines had a tendency to come crumbling down in the course of time and when they did it was a whole lot better to be sitting on top of one than to get caught in the dark deep inside.”
― Jack Ketchum, Joyride

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

“Are you happy here?" I said at last.
He considered this for a moment. "Not particularly," he said. "But you're not very happy where you are, either.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History