The Secret History Quotes

This article is related to The Secret History book, which is written by Donna Tartt. Here we have collected all the best quotes from the book. This is our next article which is related to history quotes. Check out below the secret history quotes.

Best The Secret History Quotes

“And what is beauty?” “Terror.”

“Death is the mother of beauty,” said Henry. “And what is beauty?” “Terror.”

“We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it?” “To live,” said Camilla. “To live forever,”

A light that made me think of long hours in dusty libraries, and old books, and silence.

A short, fiery mop of the reddest hair I had ever seen.

A truck shot past in a whine of spray.

After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great.

All my life, people have taken my shyness for sullenness, snobbery, bad temper of one sort or another.

All of a sudden, images from every crime movie I’d ever seen began to pop into my mind—the windowless room, the harsh lights and narrow hallways, images which did not seem so much theatrical or foreign as imbued with the indelible quality of memory, of experience lived.

All right,” said Julian, looking around the table. “I hope we’re all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?

All those layers of silence upon silence.

And always, always, that same toast. Live forever.

And as we leave Donne and Walton on the shores of Metahemeralism, we wave a fond farewell to those famous chums of yore.

And besides, is death really so terrible a thing? It seems terrible to you, because you are young, but who is to say he is not better off now than you are? Or – if death is a journey to another place – that you will not see him again?

And it may be a superhuman effort to lose oneself so completely, but that’s nothing compared to the effort of getting oneself back again.

And someplace, if there is a place where lists are kept, and credit given, I am sure there is a gold star by his name.

And standing outside the Lyceum, I was struck with a black, incredulous horror, which in fact was not at all unlike the horror I had felt at twelve, sitting on a bar stool in our sunny little kitchen in Plano. Who is in control here? I thought, dismayed. Who is flying this plane?

And the nights, bigger than imagining: black and gusty and enormous, disordered and wild with stars.

Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.

Anything is grand if it’s done on a large enough scale.

“Are you always up this early?’ I asked him.
‘Almost always,’ he said without looking up. ‘It’s beautiful here, but morning light can make the most vulgar things tolerable.”

“Are you happy here?”” I said at last.
He considered this for a moment. “”Not particularly,”” he said. “”But you’re not very happy where you are, either.”

As is true of most incipient bad things in life, i had not really prepared myself for this possibility.

Asparagus is in season.

At first I thought they were playing to an

Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.

Beauty is terror.

Beauty is terror. We want to be devoured by it, to hide ourselves in that fire which refines us.

Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.

Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it… We want to be devoured by it, to hide ourselves in that fire which refines us.

Beauty—unless she is wed to something more meaningful—is always superficial.

Besides I think it’s good to change the place where one sleeps from time to time. I believe it gives one more interesting dreams.

Bunny put away his copy of The Bride of Fu Manchu and started carrying around a volume of Homer instead.

But Beauty—unless she is wed to something more meaningful—is always superficial.

“But how,” said Charles, who was close to tears, “how can you possibly justify cold-blooded murder?’
Henry lit a cigarette. “I prefer to think of it,” he had said, “as redistribution of matter.”

But I am getting sentimental. Sometimes, when I think about these things, I do.

But it was excruciating to emerge from my eerie submarine existence into this harsh stampede of noise and light.

But of course I didn’t see this crucial moment for what it actually was; I suppose we never do. Instead, I only yawned, and shook myself from the momentary daze that had come upon me, and went on my way down the stairs.

But one mustn’t underestimate the primal appeal—to lose one’s self, lose it utterly. And in losing it be born to the principle of continuous life, outside the prison of mortality and time.

But these are fundamentally sex rituals, aren’t they?

But though I can digress with the best of them, I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.

But, if I dare say it, it wasn’t until I had helped kill a man that I realized how elusive and complex an act a murder can actually be, and not necessarily attributable to one dramatic motive.

Colors so bright, they nearly broke my heart.

Death is the mother of beauty.

Death is the mother of Beauty. And what is Beauty? Terror.

Does such a thing as “the fatal flaw,” that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?

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.

Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us.

For a few delirious moments I wondered if I was dead.

For if the modern mind is whimsical and discursive, the classical mind is narrow, unhesitating, relentless.

For if the modern mind is whimsical and discursive, the classical mind is narrow, unhesitating, relentless. It is not a quality of intelligence that one encounters frequently these days. But though I can digress with the best of them, I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.

For the miserable find comfort in the philosophy that not on them alone has evil fallen.

Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones that I did not.

From the sound of it, had I stayed in California I might have ended up in a cult or at the very least practicing some weird dietary restriction.

Garden hoes, there was a small but conspicuous headline.

Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.

Go see him again why don’t you, said Bunny, take him some flowers and tell him you love Plato and he’ll be eating out of your hand.

Had I stayed in California I might have ended up in a cult or at the very least practicing some weird dietary restriction.

Had something to say? At any rate. We left our rooms pretty much.

He was a little drunk; the Chopin was slurred and fluid, the notes melting sleepily into one another.

He was about as erotic as an old football coach.

Henry’s a perfectionist, I mean, really-really kind of inhuman — very brilliant, very erratic and enigmatic. He’s a stiff, cold person, Machiavellian, ascetic and he’s made himself what he is by sheer strength of will.