Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that the experience of beauty often invokes a sense of fear or awe in us.
Donna Tartt's quote reveals the complex relationship between beauty and terror, implying that what we find beautiful can also be overwhelming. The contradiction lies in the emotional response beauty elicits; it can inspire admiration and fear simultaneously. This duality challenges us to consider how beauty may confront us with raw truths about existence, nature, and our own vulnerabilities.
In practice
In a discussion about the impact of nature's beauty on the human spirit.
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.
Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only—if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn’t it? And isn’t the whole point of things—beautiful things—that they connect you to some larger beauty?
But sometimes, unexpectedly, grief pounded over me in waves that left me gasping; and when the waves washed back, I found myself looking out over a brackish wreck which was illumined in a light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead.
And the flavor of Pippa's kiss--bittersweet and strange--stayed with me all the way back uptown, swaying and sleepy as I sailed home on the bus, melting with sorrow and loveliness, a starry ache that lifted me up above the windswept city like a kite: my head in the rainclouds, my heart in the sky.
Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?
I've written only two novels, but they're both long ones, and they each took a decade to write.
The river of truth is always splitting up into arms that reunite. Islanded between them, the inhabitants argue for a lifetime as to which is the mainstream.
You've always lived a life of pretense, not a real life-- a simulated existence, not a genuine existence. Everything about you, everything you are, has always been pretense, never genuine, never real.
I really believe that all of us, as Americans... we all need to be treated like fellow human beings.
Detainees were not allowed to talk to each other, but we enjoyed looking at each other. The punishment for talking was hanging the detainee by his hands with the feet barely touching the ground.
The suspicious mind believes more than it doubts. It believes in a formidable and ineradicable evil lurking in every person.
The rise of capitalist practice and morality brought with it a radical revision of how the commons are treated, and also of how they are conceived.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.