Top 100 Donna Tartt Quotes
#1. I really like all of the characters in 'The Secret History' by Donna Tartt, especially Camilla, the one girl. I find her fascinating.
Hannah Murray
#2. About the Author Donna Tartt was born in Greenwood, Mississippi, and is a graduate of Bennington College. She is the author of the novels The Secret History and The Little Friend, which have been translated into thirty languages.
Anonymous
#3. My wife, the actress Megan Mullally, was an English major at Northwestern University and loves fiction. Like so many things in my life, she curates things for me. For example, I have the daunting prospect of Donna Tartt's "The Goldfinch" waiting for me when I get through my current reading pile.
Nick Offerman
#4. We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it?" "To live," said Camilla. "To live forever,
Donna Tartt
#5. Well, is true. I did know. Because if possible to paint fakes that look like that? Las Vegas would be the most beautiful city in the history of earth!
Donna Tartt
#6. You amaze me," he said. "You think nothing exists if you can't see it.
Donna Tartt
#7. Good doesn't always follow from good deeds, nor bad deeds result from bad, does it? Even the wise and good cannot see the end of all actions.
Donna Tartt
#8. God has tortured Theo plenty. If suffering makes noble, then he is a prince.
Donna Tartt
#9. Our large age difference made us shy with each other; there was a formality, a generational reserve;
Donna Tartt
#10. Things will come to you and you're not going to know exactly how they fit in. You have to trust in the way they all fit together, that your subconscious knows what you're doing.
Donna Tartt
#11. Well, whatever one thinks of the Roman Church, it is a worthy and powerful foe. I could accept that sort of conversion with grace. But I shall be very disappointed indeed if we lose him to the Presbyterians.
Donna Tartt
#12. Flapping crows. Shiny beetles crawling in the undergrowth. A patch of sky, frozen in a cloudy retina, reflected in a puddle on the ground. Yoo-hoo. Being and nothingness.
Donna Tartt
#13. 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.
Donna Tartt
#14. 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
#15. 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;
Donna Tartt
#16. Here is my experience. Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you. What you want to live and be happy in the world is a woman who has her own life and lets you have yours.
Donna Tartt
#17. It's so heartbreaking and unnecessary how we lose things. From pure carelessness. Fires, wars. The Parthenon, used as a munitions storehouse. I guess that anything we manage to save from history is a miracle. p28
Donna Tartt
#18. 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
#19. We had trench warfare in America way before World War I. Most people don't know that.
Donna Tartt
#20. Side by side they were very much alike, in similarity less of lineament than of manner and bearing, a correspondence of gestures which bounced and echoed between them so that a blink seemed to reverberate, moments later, in a twitch of the other's eyelid.
Donna Tartt
#21. But, if I dare say it, it wasn't until I had helped kill a man that I realized how elusive and complex an act a murder can actually be, and not necessarily attributable to one dramatic motive.
Donna Tartt
#22. I lost sight of any landmark that might have led me someplace happier,
Donna Tartt
#23. The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.
Donna Tartt
#24. But then, six months ago, my dad hauled me with him to this shaddy town in Alaska. Seward Peninsula, just below Arctic Circle? And then, middle of May - we flew to Fairbanks on a prop plane, and then we came here.
Donna Tartt
#25. How could the apartment have seemed so permanent and solid-looking when it was only a stage set, waiting to be struck and carried away by movers in uniform?
Donna Tartt
#26. I waited for him to pick up the thread again - and when he didn't, we sat there peacefully, while I sipped my cooling tea (Lapsang Souchong, smoky and peculiar) and felt the strangeness of my life, and where I was.
Donna Tartt
#27. You had to hand it to her: she was as cool as dammit.
Donna Tartt
#28. That surge of power and delight, of confidence, of control. That sudden sense of the richness of the world. Its infinite possibility.
Donna Tartt
#29. 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
#30. And what does a person with such romantic temperament seek in the study of the classics?
If by romantic you mean solitary and introspective, I think romantics are frequently the best classicists.
Donna Tartt
#31. Bunny put away his copy of The Bride of Fu Manchu and started carrying around a volume of Homer instead.
Donna Tartt
#32. No money, holes in my socks, living off oatmeal.
Donna Tartt
#33. And yet isn't it always the inappropriate thing, the thing that doesn't quite work, that's oddly the dearest?
Donna Tartt
#34. A month or two before, I would have been appalled at the idea of any murder at all. But that Sunday afternoon, as I actually stood watching one, it seemed the easiest thing in the world.
Donna Tartt
#35. 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
#36. In this swarm of cigarettes and dark sophistication they appeared here and there like figures from an allegory; or long-dead celebrants from some forgotten garden party
Donna Tartt
#37. There had been a trapped thought about to emerge, something essential and unspeakable, released by the mention of those blank-faced soldiers. Now it was all gone but the image: dead boys with limbs akimbo, staring into the sky.
Donna Tartt
#38. Chlorotic, with a sunken chest, he smoked incessantly, wore cheap shirts that had grayed in the wash, drank endless cups of sugary tea.
Donna Tartt
#39. He was about as erotic as an old football coach.
Donna Tartt
#40. 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
#41. Maybe good luck was like bad luck in that it took a while to sink in.
Donna Tartt
#42. Let's both be good, and truthful, and kind to each other, and let's be happy together and have fun always.
Donna Tartt
#43. 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
#44. All my life, people have taken my shyness for sullenness, snobbery, bad temper of one sort or another.
Donna Tartt
#45. I'd been assured, at age 21 or so, by a well-known editor who saw the first part of The Secret History in what was basically its final form, that it would never be published because "no woman has ever written a successful novel from a male point of view."
Donna Tartt
#46. I see so little of you these days, Richard," he said. "I feel that you're becoming just a shadow in my life.
Donna Tartt
#47. I was wide awake, and yet part of me was so glassed-off and numb I was practically in a coma.
Donna Tartt
#48. Overly sensitive to the souls of rooms and objects, the emanations
Donna Tartt
#49. Other means) claiming to Hobie that I'd already sold the
Donna Tartt
#50. Yet my longing for her was like a bad cold that had hung on for years despite my conviction that I was sure to get over it at any moment.
Donna Tartt
#51. Everything takes me longer than I expect. It's the sad truth about life.
Donna Tartt
#52. The storytelling gift is innate: one has it or one doesn't. But style is at least partly a learned thing: one refines it by looking and listening and reading and practice - by work.
Donna Tartt
#53. We were heading into the clumsy territory of my mother's funeral, stretched-out silences, wrong smiles, the place where words didn't work.
Donna Tartt
#54. Hely's feelings didn't run very deep; he lived in sunny shallows where it was always warm and bright.
Donna Tartt
#55. Strenuous occasions where (jumpy, un-opiated, wracked to the last synapse),
Donna Tartt
#56. No, he's asleep. Where's my mother? Is
Donna Tartt
#57. Is it easy to see things in retrospect. But I was ignorant then of everything but my own happiness.
Donna Tartt
#59. I hope we're all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?
Donna Tartt
#60. Time, and repeated screenings, have endowed the memory with a menace the original did not possess. -The Secret History, pg. 260
Donna Tartt
#61. The Little Friend is a long book. It's also completely different from my first novel: different landscape, different characters, different use of language and diction, different approach to story.
Donna Tartt
#62. It would be a long, long time before I heard anything from Boris again.
Donna Tartt
#63. When we are sad ... it can be comforting to cling to familiar objects, to things that don't change.
Donna Tartt
#64. I was struck by something rather obvious - namely, that any religious ritual is arbitrary unless one is able to see past it to a deeper meaning.
Donna Tartt
#65. Well, hey, you don't have anything to worry about then, do you?
Donna Tartt
#67. I thought they spoke Russian in the Ukraine." "Well, yes. Depends what part of Ukraine. They're not so different languages, the two.
Donna Tartt
#68. And sharp-faced, like Boris, but with an evil red-rimmed gaze and tiny, brownish sawteeth. He made me think of a rabid fox.
Donna Tartt
#69. 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
#70. furniture polish: 16 parts beeswax, 4 parts resin, 1 part Venice turpentine,
Donna Tartt
#71. 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
#73. He was a bad painter and a vicious gossip, with a vocabulary composed almost entirely of obscenities, guttural verbs, and the word postmodernist.
Donna Tartt
#74. The first duty of the novelist is to entertain. It is a moral duty. People who read your books are sick, sad, traveling, in the hospital waiting room while someone is dying. Books are written by the alone for the alone.
Donna Tartt
#76. But it was excruciating to emerge from my eerie submarine existence into this harsh stampede of noise and light.
Donna Tartt
#77. 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.
Donna Tartt
#78. A goodbye at the gate," said Hobie. He seemed to be talking partly to himself. "That's what he would have wanted. The parting glimpse, the death haiku - he wouldn't have liked to leave without stopping to speak to someone along the way. 'A teahouse amid the cherry blossoms on the way to death.
Donna Tartt
#80. You are - all your experience just kind of accumulates, and the novel takes a richness of its own simply because it has the weight of all those years that one's put into it.
Donna Tartt
#81. Had I stayed in California I might have ended up in a cult or at the very least practicing some weird dietary restriction.
Donna Tartt
#82. People die, sure," my mother was saying. "But it's so heartbreaking and unnecessary how we lose things. From pure carelessness. Fires, wars. The Parthenon, used as a munitions storehouse. I guess that anything we manage to save from history is a miracle.
Donna Tartt
#83. And besides (I told myself) wasn't it time to Move Forward, Let Go, turn from the garden that was locked to me? Live In The Present, Focus On The Now instead of grieving for what I could never have?
Donna Tartt
#84. But romantic vision can also lead one away from certain very hard, ugly truths about life that are important to know.
Donna Tartt
#85. I think innocence is something that adults project upon children that's not really there.
Donna Tartt
#86. Storytelling and elegant style don't always go hand in hand.
Donna Tartt
#87. It does not do to be frightened of things about which you know nothing," he said. "You are like children. Afraid of the dark.
Donna Tartt
#88. His subconscious mind knocked loose from its perch and flapping in the hollow corridors of his skull as erratically as a bat
Donna Tartt
#89. That's the first law of magic, Specs. Misdirection. Never forget it.
Donna Tartt
#90. Pragmatists are often strangely superstitious.
Donna Tartt
#91. Children have very sharp powers of observation - probably sharper than adults - yet at the same time their emotional reactions are murky and much more primitive.
Donna Tartt
#92. My hopes for a relationship with her were wholly unreal, whereas my ongoing misery, and frustration, were an all-too-horrible reality. Was groundless, hopeless romantic obsession any way to waste the rest of my life?
Donna Tartt
#93. She was still a girl, a slight lovely girl who lay in bed and ate chocolates, a girl whose hair smelled like hyacinth and whose white scarves fluttered jauntily in the breeze;
Donna Tartt
#94. From the window, above the clatter of pots and the slamming of cabinets, Francis was singing, as though it was the happiest song in the world: 'We are the little black sheep who have gone astray ... Baa baa baa ... Gentlemen songsters off on a spree ... Doomed from here to eternity ...
Donna Tartt
#95. The vitality of the act was entirely obfuscated, the beauty, the terror, the sacrifice.' He took one last drag of this cigarette and put it out. 'Quite simply,' he said, 'we didn't believe. And belief was the one condition which was absolutely necessary. Belief, and absolute surrender.
Donna Tartt
#96. rain - was grappling for her wallet. "Maybe
Donna Tartt
#97. Love doesn't conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.
Donna Tartt
#98. 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
#99. It's beautiful here, but morning light can make the most vulgar things tolerable.
Donna Tartt
#100. He would deny this is confronted, citing evasively his affection for Dante and Giotto, but anything overtly religious filled him with a pagan alarm; and I believe that like Pliny, whom he resembled in so many respects, he secretly thought it to be a degenerate cult carried to extravagant lengths.
Donna Tartt
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
