Top 100 Donna Tartt Quotes
#1. You amaze me," he said. "You think nothing exists if you can't see it.
Donna Tartt
#2. 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.
Donna Tartt
#3. And as we leave Donne and Walton on the shores of Metahemeralism, we wave a fond farewell to those famous chums of yore.
Donna Tartt
#4. That surge of power and delight, of confidence, of control. That sudden sense of the richness of the world. Its infinite possibility.
Donna Tartt
#5. Isn't the whole point 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?
Donna Tartt
#6. Bunny put away his copy of The Bride of Fu Manchu and started carrying around a volume of Homer instead.
Donna Tartt
#7. Her eyes
lined with black makeup
stared blankly at the ceiling; and her tan was obviously sprayed on since her skin had a healthy apricot glow even though the top of her head was missing.
Donna Tartt
#8. For weeks, I'd been frozen, sealed-off; now, in the shower, I would turn up the water as hard as it would go and howl, silently. Everything was raw and painful and confusing and wrong and yet it was as if I'd been dragged from freezing water through a break in the ice, into sun and blazing cold.
Donna Tartt
#9. Lights and moods and seasons was to see it a thousand different ways and to keep it shut in the dark - a thing made of light, that only lived in light - was wrong in more ways than I knew how to explain. More than wrong: it was crazy.
Donna Tartt
#10. I was wide awake, and yet part of me was so glassed-off and numb I was practically in a coma.
Donna Tartt
#11. Everything takes me longer than I expect. It's the sad truth about life.
Donna Tartt
#12. It would be a long, long time before I heard anything from Boris again.
Donna Tartt
#14. Right, I said, after an off-balance pause. A knocker, in the trade, was a shark who charmed his way into old people's homes: to cheat them of valuables
Donna Tartt
#15. But while I have never considered myself a very good person, neither can I bring myself to believe that I am spectacularly bad one. Perhaps it's simply impossible to think of oneself in such a way.
Donna Tartt
#16. But it was excruciating to emerge from my eerie submarine existence into this harsh stampede of noise and light.
Donna Tartt
#17. But romantic vision can also lead one away from certain very hard, ugly truths about life that are important to know.
Donna Tartt
#18. That's the first law of magic, Specs. Misdirection. Never forget it.
Donna Tartt
#19. Three years is a long time." "It is to us. But in the scheme of things - not at all. I mean," said Andy reasonably, "look at some poor dumb bunny like Sabine Ingersoll or that idiot James Villiers. Forrest fucking Longstreet.
Donna Tartt
#20. And what would I do ? Part of me was immobile, stunned with despair, like those rats that lose hope in laboratory experiments and lie down in the maze to starve.
Donna Tartt
#21. There was a strong sense of being alone, in wintry deadness. Nothing made sense in any direction.
Donna Tartt
#22. That Mossberg," Boris said to me, accepting the bottle passed over the front seat. "Evil dirty thing. Sawed off
? sprays pellets here to Hamburg. Aim it way the fuck away from everyone and still you will hit half the people in the room.
Donna Tartt
#23. I was confused by this sudden glare of attention; it was as if the characters in a favorite painting, absorbed in their own concerns, had looked up out of the canvas and spoken to me.
Donna Tartt
#24. They took the wrong ones! Mistake was made! Everything is unfair! Who do we complain to, in this shitty place? Who is in charge here?]
Donna Tartt
#25. They were playing old Bob Dylan, more than perfect for narrow Village streets close to Christmas and the snow whirling down in big feathery flakes, the kind of winter where you want to be walking down a city street with your arm around a girl like on the old record cover
Donna Tartt
#26. (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn't mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we're not
Donna Tartt
#27. I called, my voice false-sounding and hoarse, slipping the painting into an extra pillowcase and hiding it under the bed before hurrying out of the room.
Donna Tartt
#28. To try to make some meaning out of all this seems
Donna Tartt
#29. When I'm writing, I am concentrating almost wholly on concrete detail: the color a room is painted, the way a drop of water rolls off a wet leaf after a rain.
Donna Tartt
#31. The idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than almost anything.
Donna Tartt
#32. All those layers of silence upon silence.
Donna Tartt
#33. Sky darkened rapidly, darker every second; the wind rustled the trees in the park and the new leaves on the trees stood out tender and yellow against black clouds.
Donna Tartt
#34. A scrap of seventeenth-century sunlight compressed into dots and pixels,
Donna Tartt
#35. There is no truth beyond illusion ... between 'reality' on the one hand, and the point where reality 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 magic.
Donna Tartt
#36. I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.
Donna Tartt
#37. I've come to believe that there's no truth beyond
Donna Tartt
#38. Boris laughed, and threw out some fake-looking gang sign. "Suit yourself, yo," he said, in his "gangsta" voice (discernible from his regular voice only by the hand gesture and the "yo") as he got up and roll-walked out. "Nigga gotz to eat.
Donna Tartt
#39. Waiting at the wrong place, most like.
Donna Tartt
#41. an excuse to bring out the bottle of sherry and visit
Donna Tartt
#42. She was the missing kingdom, the unbruised part of myself I'd lost with my mother.
Donna Tartt
#43. I'm not sure whay I've been drawn to this subject, except that murder is a subject that has always drawn people for as long as people have been telling stories.
Donna Tartt
#44. Over to the Asia Society, and now she's out doing a bit of Christmas shopping. She says you, ah, you're meeting her later tonight?
Donna Tartt
#45. It may be a superhuman effort to lose oneself so completely, but that's nothing compared to the effort of getting oneself back again
Donna Tartt
#46. the world won't come to me,' he used to say, 'so I must go to it' -
Donna Tartt
#47. No matter how hard I tried to wish him out of the picture - for there he always was, in my hands and my voice and my walk ...
Donna Tartt
#48. Um, we don't hit women in America." He scowled, and spit out an apple seed. "No. Americans just persecute smaller countries that believe different from them.
Donna Tartt
#49. Well, the Dutch invented the microscope," she said. "They were jewelers, grinders of lenses. They want it all as detailed as possible because even the tiniest things mean something.
Donna Tartt
#50. You have an unusual equipment for fate, exercise with care!'
Donna Tartt
#51. Another trick - calculated to lure a different, more sophisticated customer - was to bury a piece in the back of the store, reverse the vacuum cleaner over it (instant antiquity!) and allow the nosy customer to ferret it out on his or her own - look,
Donna Tartt
#52. Grown children (an oxymoron, I realize) veer instinctively to extremes: the young scholar is much more a pedant than his older counterpart. And I, being young myself, took these pronouncements of Henry's very seriously. I doubt if Milton himself could have impressed me more.
Donna Tartt
#53. Even in some smoky post-catastrophe Manhattan you could imagine him swaying genially at the door in the rags of his former uniform, the Barbours up in the apartment burning old National Geographics for warmth, living off gin and tinned crabmeat.
Donna Tartt
#54. Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells awaited them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital.
Donna Tartt
#55. Welty's instruction; that I'd had a concussion. That I hadn't
Donna Tartt
#56. Their reality was far more interesting than any idealized version could possibly be
Donna Tartt
#57. when what she needed was something concrete, some small final memory to slip its hand in hers and accompany her - sightless now, stumbling - through this sudden desert of existence which stretched before her from the present moment until the end of life.
Donna Tartt
#58. I had nothing to offer her. I was illness, instability, everything she wanted to get away from.
Donna Tartt
#59. They too, knew this beautiful and harrowing landscape; they'd had the same experience of looking up from their books with fifth-century eyes and finding the world disconcertingly sluggish and alien, as if it were not their home.
Donna Tartt
#61. With the striped umbrella and the pistachio ices?
Donna Tartt
#62. The novel is about five students of classics who are studying with a classics professor, and they take the ideas of the things that they're learning from him a bit too seriously, with terrible consequences.
Donna Tartt
#64. And the nights, bigger than imagining: black and gusty and enormous, disordered and wild with stars.
Donna Tartt
#65. But how," said Charles, who was close to tears, "how can you possibly justify cold-blooded murder?'
Henry lit a cigarette. "I prefer to think of it," he had said, "as redistribution of matter.
Donna Tartt
#67. Even when I leaned in as far as I dared without being obvious,
Donna Tartt
#68. People loved to think they were getting a deal. Four times out of five they would look right past what they didn't want to see.
Donna Tartt
#69. aware that Allison's eyes were on him, stepped backwards and began instead to swivel his lower body in an oddly lascivious and adult-looking little dance.
Donna Tartt
#70. I was as depressed as I have ever been in my life.
Donna Tartt
#71. For that you should read the original. In very great poetry the music often comes through even when one doesn't know language. I loved Dante passionately before I knew a word of Italian.
Donna Tartt
#72. The lamplight was eerie, and, standing there motionless in our bathrobes, sleepy, with shadows flickering all around, I felt as though I had woken from one dream into an even more remote one, some bizarre wartime bomb shelter of the unconscious.
Donna Tartt
#73. Nothing is lonelier or more disorienting than insomnia.
Donna Tartt
#74. Hard to put things right. You don't often get that chance. Sometimes all you can do is not get caught.
Donna Tartt
#75. It's hard for me to show work while I'm writing, because other people's comments will influence what happens.
Donna Tartt
#76. He was a planet without an atmosphere.
Donna Tartt
#77. Understand, by saying 'God,' I am merely using 'God' as reference to long-term pattern we can't decipher.
Donna Tartt
#78. The light of long ago is different from the light of today, and yet here, in this house, I'm reminded of the past at every turn.
Donna Tartt
#79. It's a perfectly handy skill for any boy to know." "Certainly it is, if he needs to hail a passing tugboat.
Donna Tartt
#80. I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.
Donna Tartt
#81. Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.
Donna Tartt
#82. 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
Donna Tartt
#83. Even on the highest levels it was smoke and mirrors; everyone was furnishing a stage set.
Donna Tartt
#84. Mine, mine. Fear, idolatry, hoarding. The delight and terror of the fetishist.
Donna Tartt
#85. Goyen there. Sadly not for sale." "Van Goyen? I would have sworn that was a Corot." "From here, yes, you might." He was pleased at the comparison. "Very similar painters - Vincent
Donna Tartt
#86. And if what they say is true
if every great painting is really a self-portrait
what, if anything, is Fabritius saying about himself?
Donna Tartt
#87. It was like waking from a nightmare to a worse nightmare.
Donna Tartt
#88. If he had his wits about him Bunny would surely keep his mouth shut; but now, with his subconscious mind knocked loose from its perch and flapping in the hollow corridors of his skull as erratically as a bat, there was no way to be sure of anything he might do.
Donna Tartt
#89. I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive.
Donna Tartt
#90. What you want is to live and be happy in the world is a woman (or man) who has her (his) own life and lets you have yours
Donna Tartt
#91. [I] thought of that line from The Iliad I love so much, about Pallas Athene and the terrible eyes shining.
Donna Tartt
#92. How was it that a complex, a nervous and delicately calibrated mind like my own, was able to adjust itself perfectly after a shock like the murder, while Bunny's eminently more sturdy and ordinary one was knocked out of kilter?
Donna Tartt
#93. Out on the lawn, Bunny had just knocked Henry's ball about seventy feet outside the court. There was a ragged burst of laughter; faint, but clear, it floated back across the evening air. That laughter haunts me still.
Donna Tartt
#94. But poor Andy - even before he was skipped ahead a grade - had always been a chronically picked-upon kid: scrawny, twitchy, lactose-intolerant, with skin so pale it was almost transparent, and a penchant for throwing out words like 'noxious' and 'chthonic' in casual conversation.
Donna Tartt
#95. Who was it that said that coincidence was just God's way of remaining anonymous?
Donna Tartt
#96. I never realized, you know, how much we rely on appearances," he said. "It's not that we're so smart, it's just that we don't look like we did it. We might as well be a bunch of Sunday-school teachers as far as everyone else is concerned. But these guys won't be taken in by that.
Donna Tartt
#97. Because it is dangerous to ignore the existence of the irrational. The more cultivated a person is, the more intelligent, the more repressed, then the more he needs some method of channeling the primitive impulses he's worked so hard to subdue.
Donna Tartt
#98. Well if you wake up intending to murder someone at two o'clock, you hardly think what you're going to feed the corpse for dinner."
"Aspargus is in season," said Francis helpfully.
Donna Tartt
#100. Changing the plan at the last moment. "Oh, come on. The chicken can wait. Can't it? Sure it can." He was talking a mile a minute. "You can put the other thing back
Donna Tartt
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