The Goldfinch: A Novel (Pulitzer Prize for Fiction)

The absurd does not liberate; it binds. —ALBERT CAMUS

the Hart Crane we’d been reading in English. Brooklyn Bridge.

I waited, as it seemed she was trying to formulate a thought, but instead she only took a sip of her wine (white; Pippa drank red) then touched me on the back of the wrist.

really great painting is fluid enough to work its way into the mind and heart through all kinds of different angles,

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.

of things—beautiful things—that they connect you to some larger beauty? Those first images that crack your heart wide open and you spend the rest of your life chasing, or trying to recapture, in one way or another? Because, I mean—mending old things, preserving them, looking after them—on some level there’s no rational grounds for it—”

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

first and laughing into the holy rage calling your name?

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 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 an