Donna Tartt

"Death is the mother of beauty," said Henry.

"And what is beauty?"

"Terror."

[...]

"And if 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 his palm.

Someone who didn't know there was such a thing in the world as Death; who couldn't believe it even when he saw it; had never dreamed it would come to him.

Flapping crows. Shiny beetles crawling in the undergrowth. A patch of sky, frozen in a cloudy retina, reflected in a puddle on the ground. Yoo-hoo. Being and nothingness.

...I am the Resurrection and the life; he who believeth in Me, even if he die, shall live; and whoseover liveth and believeth in Me shall never die....

"Don't say 'fuck' anymore," said Henry, in a quiet, but ominous voice.

"Fuck? What's the matter, Henry? You never heard that word before? Isn't that what you do to my sister every night?"

"The Greeks were different. They had a passion for order and symmetry, much like the Romans, but they knew how foolish it was to deny the unseen world, the old gods. Emotion, darkness, barbarism." He looked at the ceiling for a moment, his face almost troubled. "Do you remember what we were speaking of earlier, of how bloody, terrible things are sometimes the most beautiful?" he said. "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 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."

Those first days before classes started I spent alone in my whitewashed room, in the bright meadows of Hampden. And I was happy in those first days as really I'd never been before, roaming like a sleepwalker, stunned and drunk with beauty.

In this swarm of cigarettes and dark sophistication they appeared here and there like figures from an allegory; or long-dead celebrants from some forgotten garden party.

"But do you really think," he said, concerned, "that one can call psychology a science?"

"Certainly. What else is it?"

"But even Plato knew that class and conditioning and so forth have an inalterable effect on the individual. It seems to me that psychology is only another word for what the ancients called fate."

"Psychology is a terrible word."