The Goldfinch: A Novel (Pulitzer Prize for Fiction)

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.

Even the wise and good cannot see the end of all actions.

A self one does not want. A heart one cannot help.

There wasn’t a single meaning. There were many meanings. It was a riddle expanding out and out and out.

Probability was one thing, but some events fell so far outside the actuarial tables that even insurance underwriters were compelled to haul in the supernatural in order to explain them—rotten luck, as my father had said mournfully one night out by the pool, dusk falling hard, smoking Viceroy after Viceroy to keep the mosquitoes away, one of the few

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.

earth is you.”

Or—like Boris—is it better to throw yourself head

The silence that followed this was excruciating.

She was the golden thread running through everything, a lens that magnified beauty so that the whole world stood transfigured in relation to her, and her alone.