Secret History Donna Tartt Quotes

#1. 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

#2. No woman has ever written enough.

Bell Hooks

#3. The ceilings had set off a ghostly echo, giving all that desperate hilarity the quality of a memory even as I sat listening to it, memories of things I'd never known.

Donna Tartt

#4. In short: I felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way.

Donna Tartt

#5. But one mustn't underestimate the primal appeal - to lose one's self, lose it utterly. And in losing it be born to the principle of continuous life, outside the prison of mortality and time.

Donna Tartt

#6. I'm not in the Lifetime Achievement area yet-I'm still battling it out in the trenches.

Michael Caine

#7. 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

#8. Persia is 7,000 years old and will fight to survive.

Richard Engel

#9. Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones that I did not.

Donna Tartt

#10. It seems to me that psychology is only another word for what the ancients called fate.

Donna Tartt

#11. I have only to glance over my shoulder for all those years to drop away and I see it behind me again, the ravine, rising all green and black through the saplings, a picture that will never leave me.

Donna Tartt

#12. But i know a lot about the kind of men you mean. They're the same everywhere.

Cornelia Funke

#13. In fact, I can't think of much I'd like better than for him to step into the room right now, glasses fogged and smelling of damp wool, shaking the rain from his hair like an old dog and saying: 'Dickie, my boy, what you got for a thirsty old man to drink tonight?

Donna Tartt

#14. Yes. I wish to be with you until the breath leaves my body, until the last stars burn out, and the earth falls into the dying sun.

Jordan L. Hawk

#15. I slept all day, face down in the pillow, a comfortable dead-man's float only remotely disturbed by a chill undertow of reality - talk, footsteps, slamming doors - which threaded fitfully through the dark, blood-warm waters of dream.

Donna Tartt

#16. Hallucinations and illusions are not facts useful for scientific investigation.

Goparaju Ramachandra Rao

#17. 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

#18. It was a clear, black morning, encrusted with stars.

Donna Tartt

#19. 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

#20. In my own humorless state I failed to see anything except what I construed as certain tragic similarities between Gatsby and myself.

Donna Tartt

#21. I don't believe in fear - I live my life without regrets.

Sean Combs

#22. I was as depressed as I have ever been in my life.

Donna Tartt

#23. Some people, myself in particular, have an adversarial relationship with the camera, and it sprouts up in every photograph.

Nick Cave

#24. Richard Papen: As it happened, I knew Gartrell. He was a bad painter and a vicious gossip, with a vocabulary composed almost entirely of obscenities, gutteral verbs, and the world postmodernist.

Donna Tartt

#25. I think every character I've ever come up with has been based on someone or something I've known.

Dav Pilkey

#26. Though Julian could be marvelously kind in difficult circumstances of all sorts, I sometimes got the feeling that he was less pleased by kindness itself than by the elegance of the gesture.

Donna Tartt

#27. 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

#28. Periods of inactivity, I don't know such things. I'm consistently writing. My life is busy. It always is. There are hardly any moments for self-indulgent laziness.

John Lydon

#29. Time, and repeated screenings, have endowed the memory with a menace the original did not possess. -The Secret History, pg. 260

Donna Tartt

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. 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