Mar 7
A great sorrow,
and one that I am only beginning to understand: 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.
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-held common virtues
and instead straight towards a beautiful flare of ruin, selfimmolation, disaster?
— Donna Tartt, 'The Goldfinch'
