Brandon Stumpf

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Brandon’s Bookshelves

to-read‎ (220)
currently-reading‎ (0)

read‎ (74)
did-not-finish‎ (0)

fiction‎ (34)
non-fiction‎ (31)

favorites‎ (11)
biography-memoir‎ (9)

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“What if — is more complicated than that? What if maybe opposite is true as well? Because, if bad can sometimes come from good actions—? where does it ever say, anywhere, that only bad can come from bad actions? Maybe sometimes — the wrong way is the right way? You can take the wrong path and it still comes out where you want to be? Or, spin it another way, sometimes you can do everything wrong and it still turns out to be right?”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

tags: bad, bad-deeds, black-and-white, good, good-deeds, what-is-bad, what-is-good, wrong

150 likes

“Whenever you see flies or insects in a still life—a wilted petal, a black spot on the apple—the painter is giving you a secret message. He’s telling you that living things don’t last—it’s all temporary. Death in life. That’s why they’re called natures mortes. Maybe you don’t see it at first with all the beauty and bloom, the little speck of rot. But if you look closer—there it is.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

tags: death, mortality

110 likes

“You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

1079 likes

“And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky - so the space where I exist, and I want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

256 likes

“And I'm hoping there's some larger truth about suffering here, or at least my understanding of it - although I've come to realize that the only truths that matter to me are the ones I don't, and can't, understand.

What's mysterious, ambiguous, inexplicable. What doesn't fit into a story, what doesn't have a story. Glint of brightness on a barely-there chain. Patch of sunlight on a yellow wall. The loneliness that separates every living creature from every other living creature. Sorrow inseparable from joy.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

tags: gold-finch, loneliness, sorrow, sunlight, yellow

94 likes

More of Brandon’s quotes…