("The Goldfinch")

[fiefoe]

Donna Tartt at least afforded me the pleasure of not finishing a book. Where should I start with my complaints? The prolixity that doesn't serve any purpose? The ersatz Dickensonian charm? The tedium of reading about Theo getting high/out of his mind again and again? And to think back on the overstuffed first chapters, when things held so much promise!

• a dark edge to the clangor, an inwrought fairy-tale sense of doom.
• in miniature: whitewash and Protestant probity, co-mingled with deep-dyed luxury brought in merchant ships from the East.
• when I lost her I lost sight of any landmark that might have led me someplace happier, to some more populated or congenial life.
• “They really knew how to work this edge, the Dutch painters—ripeness sliding into rot.
• “Well, the Dutch invented the microscope,”
• It was a direct and matter-of-fact little creature, with nothing sentimental about it; and something about the neat, compact way it tucked down inside itself—its brightness, its alert watchful expression—made me think of pictures I’d seen of my mother when she was small.
• “People die, sure,” my mother was saying. “But it’s so heartbreaking and unnecessary how we lose things.
• Carefully, with his bony old flat-pad fingers, he brushed the hair from my eyes and plucked a thorn of glass from my eyebrow and then patted me on the head. “There, there.” His voice was very faint, very scratchy, very cordial, with a ghastly pulmonary whistle.
• though she was not beautiful her calmness had the magnetic pull of beauty—a stillness so powerful that the molecules realigned themselves around her when she came into a room.
• Every new event—everything I did for the rest of my life—would only separate us more and more: days she was no longer a part of, an ever-growing distance between us. Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away.
• Considerest thou alone the burial of the stars?
• “Gettysburg? a soldier so mad with shock that he started burying birds and squirrels on the battlefield. You had a lot of little things killed too, in the crossfire, little animals. Many tiny graves.”
• he’d had no weakness for children to start with.”
• Just like acoustics, he said. The blast waves are like sound waves—they bounce and deflect.
• a sense of crowds and static, lonely secretaries and fat guys with bags of carry-out, everywhere the ungainly sadness of creatures pushing and struggling to live.
• Hobie of my first visit, with his bedraggled aspect of an elegant but mistreated polar bear.
• “Sure,” said Andy, in his wan, irritating voice. “You remember names, do the eye-contact stuff, shake hands when you’re supposed to. At school they all tie themselves in knots for you.”
• mahogany, dusty-smelling oak, black cherry with its characteristic tang and the flowery, amber-resin smell of rosewood.
• They were a pair of white mice, I thought—only Kitsey was a spun-sugar, fairy-princess mouse whereas Andy was more the kind of luckless, anemic, pet-shop mouse you might feed to your boa constrictor.
• A Lexus? Every day, I was struck by all sorts of matters large and small that I urgently needed to tell my mother.
• the atmosphere it breathed was like the light-rinsed airiness of a wall opposite an open window.
• he still had that crazed and slightly heroic look of schoolboy insolence, all the more stirring since it was drifting towards autumn, half-ruined and careless of itself.
• the change that came over Boris when he was speaking another language—a sort of livening, or alertness, a sense of a different and more efficient person occupying his body.
• When I looked at the painting I felt the same convergence on a single point: a sunstruck instant that existed now and forever... a freshness like the morning light in my old bedroom in New York which was serene yet exhilarating, a light that rendered everything sharp-edged and yet more tender and lovely than it actually was, and lovelier still because it was part of the past, and irretrievable
• his happy absorption floated up from the workshop and diffused through the house with the warmth of a wood-burning stove in winter.
• Somehow the present had shrunk into a smaller and much less interesting place.
• my father. Chinatown made me think of him in its flash and seediness, its slippery unreadable moods
• “Always remember, the person we’re really working for is the person who’s restoring the piece a hundred years from now. He’s the one we want to impress.”