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.
When mind controls man, it’s ... Bhoga (bondage). But when man controls mind, it’s...Yoga
Character is "a stamp of good repute on a person."
With so many thousand joys, is it not black ingratitude to call the world a place of sorrow and torment?
Not because Socrates said so, but because it is in truth my own disposition — and perchance to some excess — I look upon all men as my compatriots, and embrace a Pole as a Frenchman, making less account of the national than of the universal and common bond.
Ignorance is an evil weed, which dictators may cultivate among their dupes, but which no democracy can afford among its citizens.
What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope?
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