The best Quotes from The Secret History

Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.

It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.

There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty - unless she is wed to something more meaningful - is always superficial.

When you feel homesick, just look up. Because the moon is the same wherever you go.

Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.

We don’t get to choose our own hearts. We can’t make ourselves want what’s good for us or what’s good for other people. We don’t get to choose the people we are.

Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you.

I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.

Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us.

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 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.

She warned him not to be deceived by appearances, for beauty is found within.

Every girl is beautiful. Sometimes it just takes the right guy to see it.

She was beautiful, but not like those girls in the magazines. She was beautiful, for the way she thought. She was beautiful, for the sparkle in her eyes when she talked about something she loved. She was beautiful, for her ability to make other people smile, even if she was sad. No, she wasn't beautiful for something as temporary as her looks. She was beautiful, deep down to her soul.

Like so many things, it's not what is outside, but what is inside that counts.

That's always seemed so ridiculous to me, that people want to be around someone because they're pretty. It's like picking your breakfeast cereals based on color instead of taste.

He called you pretty... That's practically an insult, the way you look right now... You're much more than beautiful.

A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone.

"One must always be careful of books," said Tessa, "and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us."

If you have never spent whole afternoons with burning ears and rumpled hair, forgetting the world around you over a book, forgetting cold and hunger-

If you have never read secretly under the bedclothes with a flashlight, because your father or mother or some other well-meaning person has switched off the lamp on the plausible ground that it was time to sleep because you had to get up so early-

If you have never wept bitter tears because a wonderful story has come to an end and you must take your leave of the characters with whom you have shared so many adventures, whom you have loved and admired, for whom you have hoped and feared, and without whose company life seems empty and meaningless-

If such things have not been part of your own experience, you probably won't understand what Bastian did next.

But he was home. Hogwarts was the first and best home he had known. He and Voldemort and Snape, the abandoned boys, had all found home here.

It's like you're homesick for a place that doesn't even exist.

I look at you, and I... and I'm home. Please! I don't want that to go away. I don't want to forget.

Walk until the darkness is a memory, and you become the sun on the next traveler's horizon.