The Goldfinch: A Novel (Pulitzer Prize for Fiction)

white, arms like carved marble. Definitely she looked athletic, though too pale to be a tennis player; maybe she was a ballerina or a gymnast or even a high diver, practicing late in shadowy indoor pools, echoes and refractions, dark tile. Plunging with arched chest and pointed toes to the bottom of the pool, a silent pow, shiny black swimsuit, bub

And yes—” he said theatrically, over my objection—“yes, he stole from you, or tried to, I know it, but do you know what? I stole from you too and got away with it. Which is worse? Because I’m telling you—” prodding the bag with his toe—“the world is much stranger than we know or can say. And I know how you think, or how you like to think, but maybe

To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole; but ever since the painting had vanished from under me I’d felt drowned and extinguished by vastness—not just the predictable vastness of time, and space, but the impassable distances betwe

Why did you start? Why does anyone? My girl left me! Girl at the time. Wanted to be all bad and self-destructive, hah. Got my wish.

she moved with more assurance than most of the girls I knew; and the sly, composed glance that she slid over me as she brushed past drove me crazy.

At home, my mother had known how to suffocate my dad’s anger by growing silent, a low, unwavering flame of contempt that sucked all the oxygen out of the room and made everything he said and did seem ridiculous.

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 willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-

And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky—so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair

And—I would argue as well—all love. Or, perhaps more accurately, this middle zone illustrates the fundamental discrepancy of love.

despite all this, as cruelly as the game is stacked, that it’s possible to play it with a kind of joy?