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.
I would not enter on my list of friends_x000D_ _x000D_ (Though graced with polished manners and fine sense,_x000D_ _x000D_ Yet wanting sensibility) the man_x000D_ _x000D_ Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm.
All Americans believe that they are born fishermen. For a man to admit a distaste for fishing would be like denouncing mother-love or hating moonlight.
Clergyman: A ticket speculator outside the gates of Heaven.
I guess the definition of a lunatic is a man surrounded by them.
It is necessary for all of us to awaken in ourselves this spirit of cooperation, for then it will not be a mere plan or agreement which causes us to work together, but an extraordinary feeling of togetherness, the sense of joy in being and doing together without any thought of reward or punishment.
Accept no one's definition of your life; define yourself.
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