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.
There is no present or future-only the past, happening over and over again-now.
INTERPRETER, n. One who enables two persons of different languages to understand each other by repeating to each what it would have been to the interpreter's advantage for the other to have said.
Oppression thrives on distance - on not actually meeting or seeing the oppressed.
Imagination is a danger thus every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination to keep on conjouring and proposing alternative futures to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.
We often think we express negative emotions, not because we cannot help it, but because we should express them.
If you use your mind to study reality, you won't understand either your mind or reality. If you study reality without using your mind, you'll understand both.
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