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  • #1
    Donna Tartt
    “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

  • #2
    Donna Tartt
    “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.”
    Donna Tartt, The Secret History

  • #3
    Donna Tartt
    “In short: I felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way.”
    Donna Tartt, The Secret History

  • #4
    Olivie Blake
    “She is in all of his spaces and all of his thoughts. He contemplates formulas and degrees of rationality and they all turn into her. He thinks about time, which has only recently begun, or at least now feels different. He thinks: the Babylonians were wrong; time is made of her.”
    Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

  • #5
    Olivie Blake
    “Whatever you are made of, Charlotte Regan, I am made of it, too.”
    Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

  • #6
    Olivie Blake
    “Pretty, that's what you think this is? You think that's all she's capable of? You fool, she's done the impossible. She has explained everything there is to know about the world in less than the time it took for your eyes to filly focus, and do you realize that I will spend a lifetime trying to do the same never come close? This is an opus!, this is a triumph!, this is the meaning of life and you would think the answer would be satire, but it isn't, its Truth. She tomd the Truth like you could never dream of telling it, and I pity you, that you could see the inside of your own soul and reduce it like this, so pitylessly. So carelessly.”
    Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

  • #7
    Olivie Blake
    “I could study you for a lifetime, carrying all your peculiarities and discretions in the webs of my spidery palms, and still feel empty-handed”
    Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

  • #8
    Olivie Blake
    “When you learn a new word, you suddenly see it everywhere. The mind comforts itself by believing this to be coincidence but isn’t—it’s ignorance falling away. Your future self will always see what your present self is blind to. This is the problem with mortality, which is in fact a problem of time.”
    Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

  • #9
    Olivie Blake
    “Because we have agreed, collectively, that to proceed without knowledge or understanding is a stupid kind of bravery, an impulsive kind of blindness, but that to be alone without wonder or curiosity is to chip away any possible value we might discover in existing.”
    Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

  • #10
    Olivie Blake
    “It was at moments like this, high enough to inhale the promise of risk, that the whittled lines of city streets brought out his lingering melancholy; that l'appel du vide, the call of the void.”
    Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

  • #11
    Olivie Blake
    “Eventually she looked down at her empty hands and thought: Damn it. Damn it, I love him. Then, after the smoke cleared, she could see nothing else.”
    Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

  • #12
    Olivie Blake
    “Things were always stranger in retrospect, which was a funny little consequence of time.”
    Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

  • #13
    Olivie Blake
    “Either yes, it mattered very much, because everything was a consequence of something and therefore what became of them was somehow predetermined, or no, it did not matter at all, because beginnings and endings were not as important as the moments that could have happened or the outcomes that might have been.”
    Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

  • #14
    Olivie Blake
    “Art, a voice buzzed in her ear, was creation. It was dissecting a piece of herself and leaving it out for consumption, for speculation. For the possibility of misinterpretation and the inevitability of judgment. For the abandonment of fear the reward would have to be the possibility of ruin, and that was the inherent sacrifice.”
    Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

  • #15
    Olivie Blake
    “So when people say were alone in the ether?" "Alone in everything. In time and space, in existence, in religion.”
    Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

  • #16
    Rainer Maria Rilke
    “I am too alone in the world, and yet not alone enough
    to make every moment holy.
    I am too tiny in this world, and not tiny enough
    just to lie before you like a thing,
    shrewd and secretive.
    I want my own will, and I want simply to be with my will,
    as it goes toward action;
    and in those quiet, sometimes hardly moving times,
    when something is coming near,
    I want to be with those who know secret things
    or else alone.
    I want to be a mirror for your whole body,
    and I never want to be blind, or to be too old
    to hold up your heavy and swaying picture.
    I want to unfold.
    I don’t want to stay folded anywhere,
    because where I am folded, there I am a lie.
    and I want my grasp of things to be
    true before you. I want to describe myself
    like a painting that I looked at
    closely for a long time,
    like a saying that I finally understood,
    like the pitcher I use every day,
    like the face of my mother,
    like a ship
    that carried me
    through the wildest storm of all.”
    Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

  • #17
    Rainer Maria Rilke
    “I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world.”
    Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

  • #18
    Rainer Maria Rilke
    “I am circling around God, around the ancient tower, and I have been circling for a thousand years, and I still don't know if I am a falcon, or a storm, or a great song.”
    Rainer Maria Rilke, Rainer Maria Rilke's The Book of Hours: A New Translation with Commentary (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

  • #19
    Rainer Maria Rilke
    “You see, I want a lot.
    Perhaps I want everything
    the darkness that comes with every infinite fall
    and the shivering blaze of every step up.
    So many live on and want nothing
    And are raised to the rank of prince
    By the slippery ease of their light judgments
    But what you love to see are faces
    that do work and feel thirst.
    You love most of all those who need you
    as they need a crowbar or a hoe.
    You have not grown old, and it is not too late
    To dive into your increasing depths
    where life calmly gives out its own secret.”
    Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

  • #20
    Rainer Maria Rilke
    “If we surrendered
    to earth’s intelligence
    we could rise up rooted, like trees.

    Instead we entangle ourselves
    in knots of our own making
    and struggle, lonely and confused.

    So like children, we begin again...

    to fall,
    patiently to trust our heaviness.
    Even a bird has to do that
    before he can fly.”
    Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

  • #21
    Rainer Maria Rilke
    “I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone enough.”
    Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

  • #22
    Rainer Maria Rilke
    “You, darkness, of whom I am born- I love you more than the flame that limits the world to the circle it illumines and excludes the rest.”
    Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

  • #23
    Rainer Maria Rilke
    “So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp.”
    Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

  • #24
    Rainer Maria Rilke
    “Often when I imagine you,
    your wholeness cascades into many shapes.
    You run like a herd of luminous deer,
    and I am dark;
    I am forest.”
    Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

  • #25
    Rainer Maria Rilke
    “I would describe myself like a landscape I’ve studied at length, in detail; like a word I’m coming to understand; like a pitcher I pour from at mealtime; like my mother’s face; like a ship that carried me when the waters raged.”
    Rainer Maria Rilke, Das Stunden-Buch

  • #26
    Rainer Maria Rilke
    “No, my life is not this precipitous hour
    through which you see me passing at a run.”
    Rainer Maria Rilke, Poems from the Book of Hours

  • #27
    Rainer Maria Rilke
    “I want to utter you. I want to portray you
    not with lapis or gold, but with colors made of apple bark.
    There is no image I could invent
    that your presence would not eclipse.”
    Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

  • #28
    Rainer Maria Rilke
    “This is what the things can teach us: to fall,
    patiently to trust our heaviness. Even a bird has to do that before he can fly.”
    Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God
    tags: life

  • #29
    Olivie Blake
    “Write me a tragedy, Lev Fedorov,” she whispered to him. “Write me a litany of sins. Write me a plague of devastation. Write me lonely, write me wanting, write me shattered and fearful and lost. Then write me finding myself in your arms, if only for a night, and then write it again. Write it over and over, Lev, until we both know the pages by heart. Isn’t that a story, too?” she asked him softly.”
    Olivie Blake, One for My Enemy

  • #30
    Olivie Blake
    “Hate and love were so very similar. Both were intestinal, visceral. Both left scars, vestiges of pain. Hate could not be born from a place of indifference. Hate was only born from opposite sides of the same coin.”
    Olivie Blake, One for My Enemy



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