Excerpts from The Goldfinch

So, I’ve read this amazing book and I obviously need to share it with all you lovely people. I am talking about The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. This book has been a journey for me and an amazing one at that.

It comes with a power packed story that is beautifully narrated. I am writing this post to put together some of the best quotes of this book- the ones that have created a soulful impact on me at least. I hope that in some way you also find meaning in it, albeit in a different context but I hope it strikes a chord.

Here goes:

– Because-isn’t it drilled in us from constantly, from childhood on, an unquestioned platitude in the culture-? From William Blake to Lady Gaga, from Rosseau to Rumi to Tosca to Mister Rogers, it’s a curiously uniform message, accepted from high to low: when in doubt, what to do? How do we know what’s right for us? Every shrink, every career counsellor, every Disney princess knows the answer: “Be yourself.” “Follow your heart.”

Only here’s what I really, really want someone to explain to me. What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can’t be trusted-? What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one wilfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight towards a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster? 

– And as much as I’d like to believe there’s a truth beyond illusion, I’ve come to believe that there’s no truth beyond illusion. Because, between ‘reality’ on the one hand, and the point where the mind trikes reality, there’s a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces might mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic.

– Whatever teaches us to talk to ourselves is important: whatever teaches us to sing ourselves out of despair. But the painting has also taught me that we can speak to each other across time. And I feel I have something very serious and urgent to say to you, my non-existent reader, and I feel I should say it as urgently as if I were standing in the room with you. That life- whatever else it is- is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean that we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch. For if disaster and oblivion have followed this painting down through time- so too has love. Insofar as it is immortal (and it is) I have a small bright immutable part in that immortality. It exists; and it keeps on existing. And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.

This is an amazing book people, beyond words. Go pick up a copy from your nearest store. I will be doing another post on this but I had to put this across. Maybe to archive it so I can go back and look at it in the future or to share it with you, well both but I don’t know which I feel for more strongly.

Read it and do tell me how spellbound you were because next on my list is to pick up the other novels by Donna Tartt.