Arielle Lipset

“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

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“It seemed my whole
life was composed of these disjointed
fractions of time, hanging around in one
public place and then another, as if I were
waiting for trains that never came. And, like
one of those ghosts who are said to linger
around depots late at night, asking
passersby for the timetable of the Midnight
Express that derailed twenty years before, I
wandered from light to light until that
dreaded hour when all the doors closed and,
stepping from the world of warmth and
people and conversation overheard, I felt
the old familiar cold twist through my bones
again and then it was all forgotten, the
warmth, the lights; I had never been warm
in my life, ever.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“White Sky. Trees fading at the skyline, the mountains gone. My hands dangled from the cuffs of my jacket as if they weren’t my own. I never got used to the way the horizon there could just erase itself and leave you marooned, adrift, in an incomplete dreamscape that was like a sketch for the world you knew -the outline of a single tree standing in for a grove, lamp-posts and chimneys floating up out of context before the surrounding canvas was filled in-an amnesia-land, a kind of skewed Heaven where the old landmarks were recognizable but spaced too far apart, and disarranged, and made terrible by the emptiness around them.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History