Donna Tartt, The Secret History

"Occasionally a car swooshed by in the rain and its headlights would swing round momentarily and illuminate the room-the pool table, snowshoes on the wall and the rowing machine, the armchair in which Henry sat, motionless, a glass in his hand and the cigarette burning low between his fingers. For a moment his face, pale and watchful as a ghost's, would be caught in the headlights and then, very gradually, it would slide back into the dark."

"I like the idea of living in a city - any city, especially a strange one - like the thought of traffic and crowds, of working in a bookstore, waiting tables in a coffee shop, who knew what kind of odd, solitary life I might slip into? Meals alone, waling the dogs in the evenings; and nobody knowing who I was."

"But while I have never considered myself a very good person, neither can I bring myself to believe that I am spectacularly bad one. Perhaps it's simply impossible to think of oneself in such a way."

"It seemed my wholelife was composed of these disjointedfractions of time, hanging around in onepublic place and then another, as if I werewaiting for trains that never came. And, likeone of those ghosts who are said to lingeraround depots late at night, askingpassersby for the timetable of the Midnight Express that derailed twenty years before, Iwandered from light to light until thatdreaded hour when all the doors closed and,stepping from the world of warmth andpeople and conversation overheard, I feltthe old familiar cold twist through my bonesagain and then it was all forgotten, thewarmth, the lights; I had never been warmin my life, ever."

"Yet my longing for her was like a bad cold that had hung on for years despite my conviction that I was sure to get over it at any moment."

"I suppose the shock of recognition is one of the nastiest shocks of all."

"The dead appear to us in dreams because that's the only way they can make us see them; what we see is only a projection, beamed from a great distance, light shining at us from a dead star..."

"Mais, vrai, J'ai trop pleure! Les aubes sont navrantes. What a sad and beautiful line that is. I'd always hoped that someday I'd be able to use it."

"It's a terrible thing, what we did,” said Francis abruptly. “I mean, this man was not Voltaire we killed. But still. It’s a shame. I feel bad about it.”“Well, of course, I do too,” said Henry matter-of-factly. “But not bad enough to want to go to jail for it.”Francis snorted and poured himself another shot of whiskey and drank it straight off. “No,” he said. “Not that bad."

"Asparagus is in season."

"Grown children (an oxymoron, I realize) veer instinctively to extremes: the young scholar is much more a pedant than his older counterpart. And I, being young myself, took these pronouncements of Henry's very seriously. I doubt if Milton himself could have impressed me more."

"I suppose there is a certain crucial interval in everyone's life when character is fixed forever."

"It was a clear, black morning, encrusted with stars."

"I was jarred - a little spooked as well - at so blatant a reference to something referred to, by mutual agreement, almost exclusively with codes, catchwords, a hundred different euphemisms."It was the most important night of my life," he said calmly. "It enabled me to do what I've always wanted most."Which is"To live without thinking."

"Out on the lawn, Bunny had just knocked Henry's ball about seventy feet outside the court. There was a ragged burst of laughter; faint, but clear, it floated back across the evening air. That laughter haunts me still."

"They too, knew this beautiful and harrowing landscape; they'd had the same experience of looking up from their books with fifth-century eyes and finding the world disconcertingly sluggish and alien, as if it were not their home."

"The most satisfying of languages, Latin."

"For that you should read the original. In very great poetry the music often comes through even when one doesn't know language. I loved Dante passionately before I knew a word of Italian."

"One's thought patterns become different, he said, when forced into the confines of a rigid and unfamiliar tongue. Certain common ideas become inexpressible; other, previously undreamt-of ones spring to life, finding miraculous new articulation."

"And beauty is terror,' said Julian, 'then what is desire? We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it''To live,' said Camilla.'To live forever,' said Bunny, chin cupped in palm."