I first heard of The Goldfinch when it was highly recommended by a high school English teacher I met at a wedding last fall. I finally finished it. The Goldfinch is a lot like The Brothers Karamazov in that the authors of both books are good at depicting the internal turmoil characters face between right and wrong at so many moments of their lives. It's rare to find books that capture the constant battle one faces while trying to do the right thing in a world of moral complexity. Books like these aren't easy write or read - both in terms of the explicit content and the endurance required to finish. But these are the books where you feel compelled to see them through. It feels wrong not to. And like crossing the finish line of a race, it's an amazing feeling when you finally get to the end. You've grown in the process. I won't do the book justice with a review, so instead, I'll share some of my favorite quotes. Quote 1: “Worse: the thought of returning to any kind of normal routine seemed disloyal, wrong. It kept being a shock every time I remembered it, a fresh slap: she was gone. Every new event—everything I did for the rest of my life—would only separate us more and more: days she was no longer a part of, an ever-growing distance between us. Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away.” This passage takes place after the main character Theo's mother passed away. Theo, thirteen at the time, had been feeling lost for weeks, lacking any routine. Andy, his best friend's mother, was gently trying to persuade him to return to school. Quote 2: “The problem (as I’d learned, repeatedly) was that thirty-six hours in, with your body in full revolt, and the remainder of your un-opiated life stretching out bleakly ahead of you like a prison corridor, you needed some fairly compelling reason to keep moving forward into darkness, rather than falling straight back into the gorgeous feather mattress you’d so foolishly abandoned.” Theo, now an older teen, recently learned of his friend Andy's death. For some time, he had been consuming opioids, a habit that began when his absent father took him away from NYC to live with him and his girlfriend in Las Vegas. Quote 3: “Who knew it was in my power to make anyone so happy? Or that I could ever be so happy myself?” Theo, now an adult, found himself engaged to Kitsey, Andy's younger sister. He couldn't quite recall who had proposed to whom. But seeing the happiness he brought her, he couldn't help but smile. Quote 4: “Worry! What a waste of time. All the holy books were right. Clearly ‘worry’ was the mark of a primitive and spiritually unevolved person. What was that line from Yeats, about the bemused Chinese sages? All things fall and are built again. Ancient glittering eyes. This was wisdom. People had been raging and weeping and destroying things for centuries and wailing about their puny individual lives, when—what was the point? All this useless sorrow? Consider the lilies of the field. Why did anyone ever worry about anything? Weren’t we, as sentient beings, put upon the earth to be happy, in the brief time allotted to us?” I didn't highlight much during the middle of the book. Theo, acting in self-defense, had killed two dangerous men. In the aftermath, he noticed a blotch of blood on his shirt. He sent it to be dry cleaned but was worried that the police would arrive at his doorstep at any moment. Then he took some drugs and the worry briefly went away. The following quotes are mostly from the last few chapters and close out Theo’s inner dialogue: Quote 5: “I didn’t matter much in the scheme of things and Martin [one of the men Theo killed] didn’t either. We were easily forgotten. It was a social and moral lesson, if nothing else. But for all foreseeable time to come—for as long as history was written, until the icecaps melted and the streets of Amsterdam were awash with water—the painting would be remembered and mourned. Who knew, or cared, the names of the Turks who blew the roof off the Parthenon? the mullahs who had ordered the destruction of the Buddhas at Bamiyan? Yet living or dead: their acts stood. It was the worst kind of immortality. Intentionally or no: I had extinguished a light at the heart of the world.” Quote 6: “George Sanders’s had been the best, an Old Hollywood classic, my father had known it by heart and liked to quote from it. Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored.” Quote 7: "What if all your actions and choices, good or bad, make no difference to God? What if the pattern is pre-set? No no—hang on—this is a question worth struggling with. What if our badness and mistakes are the very thing that set our fate and bring us round to good? What if, for some of us, we can't get there any other way? … Understand, by saying 'God,' I am merely using 'God' as reference to long-term pattern we can't decipher. Huge, slow-moving weather system rolling in on us from afar, blowing us randomly like—" Eloquently, he batted at the air as if at a blown leaf. "But—maybe not so random and impersonal as all that, if you get me." Quote 8: “Who was it said that coincidence was just God’s way of remaining anonymous?” Quote 9: “… beauty alters the grain of reality. And I keep thinking too of the more conventional wisdom: namely, that the pursuit of pure beauty is a trap, a fast track to bitterness and sorrow, that beauty has to be wedded to something more meaningful.” Quote 10: “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.” Quote 11: “There’s no moral or story. There’s no resolution. There’s only a double abyss: between painter and imprisoned bird; between the record he left of the bird and our experience of it, centuries later.” Quote 12: “For me—and I’ll keep repeating it doggedly till I die, till I fall over on my ungrateful nihilistic face and am too weak to say it: better never born, than born into this cesspool.” Quote 13: “And—maybe it’s ridiculous to go on in this vein, although it doesn’t matter since no one’s ever going to see this—but does it make any sense at all to know that it ends badly for all of us, even the happiest of us, and that we all lose everything that matters in the end—and yet to know as well, despite all this, as cruelly as the game is stacked, that it’s possible to play it with a kind of joy?” Quote 14: “To try to make some meaning out of all this seems unbelievably quaint. Maybe I only see a pattern because I’ve been staring too long. But then again, to paraphrase Boris, maybe I see a pattern because it’s there.” Quote 15: “And as much as I’d like to believe there’s a truth beyond illusion, I’ve come to believe that there’s no truth beyond illusion. Because, between ‘reality’ on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there’s a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic.” Quote 16: “… 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 struck pure otherness and created something sublime.” Quote 17: “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.”