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. .Donna Tartt
About This Quote
A quote from the play Antigone by Sophocles. In this quote, the speaker says that beauty is not only his physical appearance but also his soul and spirit. That beautiful things can and do happen and they are beautiful and beautiful things should be appreciated.
Source: The Secret History
Some Similar Quotes
- And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
- Sometimes God allows what he hates to accomplish what he loves.
- No woman wants to be in submission to a man who isn't in submission to God!
- His hands are holding my cheeks, and he pulls back just to look me in the eye and his chest is heaving and he says, "I think, " he says, "my heart is going to explode, " and I wish, more than ever, that I...
- Why is there ever this perverse cruelty in humankind, that makes us hurt most those we love best?
More Quotes By Donna Tartt
- Because I don’t care what anyone says or how often or winningly they say it: no one will ever, ever be able to persuade me that life is some awesome, rewarding treat. Because, here’s the truth: life is a catastrophe. The basic fact of existence...
- Putting your time in at the office; dutifully spawning your two point five; smiling politely at your retirement party; then chewing on your bedsheet and choking on your canned peaches at the nursing home. It was better never to have been born-never to have wanted...
- Whenever you see flies or insects in a still life–a wilted petal, a black spot on the apple–the painter is giving you a secret message. He’s telling you that living things don’t last–it’s all temporary. Death in life. That’s why they’re called natures mortes. <span...
- What are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a dead star? That, by the way, is a phrase of Julian's. I remember it from a lecture of his on the Iliad, when Patroklos appears to Achilles in a dream. There is...
- 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...