Quotes from 'The Secret History'

I just finished a book which I really enjoyed. It's called The Secret History, by Donna Tartt. My friend Katrina recommended it to me. Below are a few (but by no means a complete collection) of my favourite quotes:

Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw', that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.

And the nights, bigger than imagining: black and gusty and enormous, disordered and wild with stars.

The cufflinks were beaten up and had someone else's initials on them, but they looked like real gold, glinting in the drowsy autumn sun which poured through the window and soaked in yellow pools on the oak floor - voluptuous, rich, intoxicating.

Though, at the time, I found those dinners wearing and troublesome, now I find something very wonderful in my memory of them: that dark cavern of a room, with vaulted ceilings and a fire crackling in the fireplace, our faces luminous somehow, and ghostly pale. The firelight magnified our shadows, glinted off the silver, flickered high upon the walls; its reflection roared orange in the windowpanes as if a city were burning outside. The whoosh of the flames was like a flock of birds, trapped and beating in a whirlwind near the ceiling. And I wouldn't have been at all surprised if the long mahogany banquet table, draped in linen, laden with china and candles and fruit and flowers, had simply vanished into thin air, like a magic casket in a fairy story.

She was a living reverie for me: the mere sight of her sparked an almost infinite range of fantasy, from Greek to Gothic, from vulgar to divine.

All that night it rained and all the next morning: warm, gray, soft and steady as a dream.

Walking around campus, the wet grass squishing beneath your feet, you felt as if you were in Olympus, Valhalla, some old abandoned land above the clouds; the landmarks that you knew - clock tower, houses- floating up like memories from a former life, isolated and disconnected in the mist.

We drank our tea. The lamplight was warm and the apartment still and snug. At home in bed, in my private abyss of longing, the scenes I dreamed of always began like this: drowsy drunken hour, the two of us alone, scenarios in which invariably she would brush against me as if by chance, or lean conveniently close, cheek touching mine, to point out a passage in a book; opportunities which I would seize, gently but manfully, as exordium to more violent pleasures.

The teacup was too hot; it burned my fingertips. I set it down and looked at her - oblivious, smoking a cigarette, scarcely two feet away.

I liked especially going down to the little country grocery in North Hampden... to buy a bottle of wine, and wandering down to the riverbank to drink it, then roaming around drunk all the rest of those glorious, golden, blazing afternoons - a waste of time, of course.


That was a cozy night, a happy night; lamps lit, sparkle of glasses, rain falling heavy on the roof. Outside, the treetops tumbled and tossed, with a foamy whoosh like club soda bubbling up in the glass. The windows were open and a damp cool breeze swirled through the curtains, bewitchingly wild and sweet.

We went back in the house -dim now with twilight- and sat by the window on a long davenport that had a sheet thrown over it. The warm air smelled like lilac. Across the lawn, we could hear Mr Hatch trying to get the lawn mower started up again.

I lay flat on my back in the ambulance, feeling the summer night flash by warm and mysterious - kids on bikes, moths haunting the street lamps - and wondering if this was what it was like, if life sped up when you were about to die. Bleeding richly. Sensations fading round the edges. I kept thinking how funny, this dark ride to the underworld, the tunnel illuminated by Shell Oil, Burger King. The paramedic riding in the back wasn't much older than I was; a kid, really, with bad skin and a downy little moustache. He had never seen a gunshot wound. He kept asking what it felt like? dull or sharp? an ache or burn? My head was spinning and naturally I could give him no kind of coherent answer but I remember thinking dimly that it was sort of like the first time I got drunk, or slept with a girl; not quite what one expected, really, but once it happened one realised it couldn't be any other way. Neon lights: Motel 6, Dairy Queen. Colours so bright, they nearly broke my heart.

It was a hazy, gorgeous summer twilight and the gravel parking lots were packed with trucks...

And I went to Brooklyn, with my guts taped up like a gangster ('Well!' said the professor, 'this is Brooklyn Heights, not Bensonhurst!') and spent the summer drowsing on his rooftop deck, smoking cigarettes, reading Proust, dreaming about death and indolence and beauty and time. The gunshot healed, leaving a char mark on my stomach. I went back to school in the fall: a dry gorgeous September, you wouldn't believe how beautiful the trees were that year: clear skies, littered groves, people whispering whenever I walked by.

I spent all my time in the library, reading the Jacobean dramatists. Webster and Middleton, Tourneur and Ford. It was an obscure specialisation, but the candlelit and treacherous universe in which they moved -of sin unpunished, of innocence destroyed- was one I found appealing. Even the titles of their plays were strangely seductive, trapdoors to something beautiful and wicked that trickled beneath the surface of mortality: 'The Malcontent.' 'The White Devil.' 'The Broken Heart.'

Mood: hunting for a new book to read and so happy it's Friday tomorrow.