Top 100 Tartt's Quotes
#1. 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
#2. Twelve years after Robin's death, no one knew any more about how he had ended up hanged from a tree in his own yard than they had on the day it happened.
Donna Tartt
#3. What's worth living for? what's worth dying for? what's completely foolish to pursue?
Donna Tartt
#4. My novels aren't really generated by a single conceptual spark; it's more a process of many different elements that come together unexpectedly over a long period of time.
Donna Tartt
#5. Children love secret club houses. They love secrecy even when there's no need for secrecy.
Donna Tartt
#6. 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
#7. It's a perfectly handy skill for any boy to know." "Certainly it is, if he needs to hail a passing tugboat.
Donna Tartt
#8. It's not about outward appearances but inward significance. A grandeur in the world, but not of the world, a grandeur that the world doesn't understand. That first glimpse of pure otherness, in whose presence you bloom out and out and out.
A self one does not want. A heart one cannot help.
Donna Tartt
#9. Life is catastrophe ... Everything is unfair. Who do we complain to in this shitty place? ... We all lose everything that matters in the end ... it's possible to play it with a kind of joy.p.767, The Goldfinch
Donna Tartt
#10. When she went back to the telephone Hely's breath, on the other end, was ragged and secretive.
Donna Tartt
#11. I think it's hard to write about children and to have an idea of innocence.
Donna Tartt
#12. Hobie's presence below stairs was an anchor, a friendly weight ...
Donna Tartt
#13. It's hard for me to show work while I'm writing, because other people's comments will influence what happens.
Donna Tartt
#14. And it's a temptation for any intelligent person, and especially for perfectionists such as the ancients and ourselves, to try to murder the primitive, emotive, appetitive self. But that is a mistake.
Donna Tartt
#15. I would be less frightened of death (not just my own death but Welty's death, Andy's death, Death in general) if I thought a familiar person came to meet us at the door,
Donna Tartt
#16. I'd yearned for the darkness and repose of Hobie's house, its crowded rooms and old-wood smell, tea leaves and tobacco smoke, bowls of oranges on the sideboard and candlesticks scalloped with puddled beeswax.
Donna Tartt
#17. Besides I think it's good to change the place where one sleeps from time to time. I believe it gives one more interesting dreams.
Donna Tartt
#18. ("It's crazy," she'd said, "but I'd be perfectly happy if I could sit looking at the same half dozen paintings for the rest of my life. I can't think of a better way to go insane.")
Donna Tartt
#19. 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
#20. Years ago, in an old notebook, I wrote: "One of Julian's most attractive qualities is his inability to see anyone, or anything, in its true light." And under it, in a different ink, "maybe one of my most attractive qualities, as well(?)" -Richard
Donna Tartt
#21. I am an alcoholic. I'm the first to admit that. I can't drink at all. One drink is too many and a thousand's not enough.
Donna Tartt
#22. With real greatness, there's a jolt at the end of the wire. It doesn't matter how often you grab hold of the line, or how many people have grabbed hold of it before you. It's the same line. Fallen from a higher life. It still carries some of the same shock.
Donna Tartt
#23. Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it's going to kill us.
Donna Tartt
#24. Taking on challenging projects is the way that one grows and extends one's range as a writer, one's technical command, so I consider the time well-spent.
Donna Tartt
#25. By happy contrast, Hobie's whole day revolved around dinner.
Donna Tartt
#26. Well, I've already got ten thousand set aside. That's a good start. If you think about it when we get home, give me your Social and next time I drop by the bank, I'll open an account in your name, okay?
Donna Tartt
#27. I suppose there is a certain crucial interval in everyone's life when character is fixed forever; for me, it was that first fall term I spent at Hampden.
Donna Tartt
#28. There's an expectation these days that novels - like any other consumer product - should be made on a production line, with one dropping from the conveyor belt every couple of years.
Donna Tartt
#29. But it's for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work.
Donna Tartt
#30. Always remember, the person we're really working for is the person who's restoring the piece a hundred years from now. He's the one we want to impress.
Donna Tartt
#31. The dead appear to us in dreams because that's the only way they can make us see them; what we see is only a projection, beamed from a great distance, light shining at us from a dead star ...
Donna Tartt
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. Who was it that said that coincidence was just God's way of remaining anonymous?
Donna Tartt
#35. I supposed that when anyone accustomed to working with the mind is faced with a straightforward action, there's a tendency to embellish, to make it overly clever. On paper there's a certain symmetry. Now that I'm faced with the prospect of executing it I realize how hideously complicated it is.
Donna Tartt
#36. You should never get a person's name tattooed on you, because then you lose the person. I was too young to know that when I got the tattoo.
Donna Tartt
#37. Whatever reason, an evening nodding and unconscious in my bedroom at Hobie's had begun to seem like a perfectly reasonable response to the holiday lights, the holiday crowds, the incessant Christmas bells with their morbid funeral note, Kitsey's candy-pink notebook from Kate's Paperie with tabs
Donna Tartt
#38. 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
#39. Anything is grand if it's done on a large enough scale.
Donna Tartt
#40. Or
to quote another paradoxical gem of my dad's: sometimes you have to lose to win.
Donna Tartt
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. I see that as usual I've gone on too long and that I'm running out of room, but I do hope that you are happy and well, and it's all a little less lonely out there than you may have feared. If there's anything I can do for you back here, or if I can help you in any way, please know that I will.
Donna Tartt
#44. I'd always rather stand or fall on my own mistakes. There's nothing worse than looking back, in a published book, at a line edit or a copy edit that you felt queasy about and didn't want to take, but took anyway.
Donna Tartt
#45. Sometimes, when there's been an accident and reality is too sudden and strange to comprehend, the surreal will take over. Action slows to a dreamlike glide, frame by frame; the motion of a hand, a sentence spoken, fills an eternity.
Donna Tartt
#46. Different cultures and all that, but it's true what they say about the Japanese being undemonstrative.
Donna Tartt
#47. Criticism at the wrong time, even if it's legitimate criticism, can be seriously damaging and make the writer lose faith in what he's doing. It's the timing that's all-important.
Donna Tartt
#48. And that was it: infinite loop; no alt-tab out. You could force close, shut down the computer, start all over and run it again, and the game would still lock up and freeze at the same place. "Where's Popper?" No cheat code. Game over. There was no way past that moment.
Donna Tartt
#49. Henry. Please." I was on the verge of tears. "What's the matter with you? Have you lost your mind? Don't you understand what's going on?" He stood up, dusted his hands on his trousers.
Donna Tartt
#50. Because: if our secrets define us, as opposed to the face we show the world: then the painting was the secret that raised me above the surface of life and enabled me to know who I am. And it's there: in my notebooks, every page, even though it's not.
Donna Tartt
#51. It's a big shift. I don't know quite how to explain it. Between wanting and not wanting, caring and not caring. Of course it's a lot more than that too. Shock and aura. Things are stronger and brighter and I feel on the edge of something inexpressible.
Donna Tartt
#52. 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
#53. He's telling you that living things don't last - it's all temporary. Death in life.
Donna Tartt
#54. This is the East Coast, boy. I know they're pretty laissez-faire about dress in your neck of the woods, but back here 52. they don't let you run around in your bathing suit all year long.
Blacks and blues, that's the ticket, blacks and blues ... (Bunny Corcoran to Richard Papen)
Donna Tartt
#55. hubris on Henry's, too much Greek prose composition - whatever
Donna Tartt
#56. It's beautiful here, but morning light can make the most vulgar things tolerable.
Donna Tartt
#57. That's the first law of magic, Specs. Misdirection. Never forget it.
Donna Tartt
#58. I think innocence is something that adults project upon children that's not really there.
Donna Tartt
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#65. It's our task to immerse ourselves ... while keeping eyes and hearts open ...
Donna Tartt
#66. No, he's asleep. Where's my mother? Is
Donna Tartt
#67. Hely's feelings didn't run very deep; he lived in sunny shallows where it was always warm and bright.
Donna Tartt
#68. 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
#69. Everything takes me longer than I expect. It's the sad truth about life.
Donna Tartt
#70. Let's both be good, and truthful, and kind to each other, and let's be happy together and have fun always.
Donna Tartt
#71. And yet isn't it always the inappropriate thing, the thing that doesn't quite work, that's oddly the dearest?
Donna Tartt
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. There's a big anti-intellectual strain in the American south, and there always has been. We're not big on thought.
Donna Tartt
#78. 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
Donna Tartt
#79. And the daughter. Bit of a social failure. Well, that's putting it delicately. Quite overweight. Collects the cats, if you know what I mean.
Donna Tartt
#80. Sometimes you can do all the right things and not succeed. And that's a hard lesson of reality.
Donna Tartt
#81. And that's why I've chosen to write these pages as I've written them. For only by stepping into the middle zone, the polychrome edge between truth and untruth, is it tolerable to be here and writing this at all.
Donna Tartt
#82. Why do I care about all the wrong things, and nothing at all for the right ones? Or, to tip it another way: how can I see so clearly that everything I love or care about is illusion, and yet - for me, anyway - all that's worth living for lies in that charm?
Donna Tartt
#83. It's a long story. I'll make it short as I can.
Donna Tartt
#84. Welty's instruction; that I'd had a concussion. That I hadn't
Donna Tartt
#85. Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction.
Donna Tartt
#86. She was beautiful, too. That's almost secondary; but still, she was.
Donna Tartt
#87. Because, here's the truth: life is catastrophe. The basic fact of existence - of walking around trying to feed ourselves and find friends and whatever else we do - is catastrophe.
Donna Tartt
#88. telephone, "Myriam's not my wife! This - " he handed
Donna Tartt
#89. Sometimes it's about playing a poor hand well.
Donna Tartt
#90. I'm not blaming anything on your mom, I'm way past that. It's just that she loved you so much, I always felt like kind of an interloper with you guys. Stranger-in-my-own-house kind of thing. You two were so close - " he laughed, sadly - "there wasn't much room for three.
Donna Tartt
#91. 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
#92. There's nothing like having a sympathetic reader who asks the right questions, who understands what you're trying to achieve and only wants to make it better.
Donna Tartt
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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.
Donna Tartt
#96. 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.
Donna Tartt
#97. I've come to believe that there's no truth beyond
Donna Tartt
#98. We can't choose what we want and don't want and that's the hard lonely truth. Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it's going to kill us. We can't escape who we are.
Donna Tartt
#99. If I'm not working, I'm not happy. That's it. That's the prerequisite for me for happiness.
Donna Tartt
#100. Then there's the business of standardized tests. Henry refused to take the SATs - he'd probably score off the charts if he did, but he's got some kind of aesthetic objection to them.
Donna Tartt
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