Donna Tartt Quotes

Even now I remember those pictures, like pictures in a storybook one loved as a child. Radiant meado...

The idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than almo...

Well -- think about this. What if all your actions and choices, good or bad, make no difference to G...

It was heart-shaking. Glorious. Torches, dizziness, singing. Wolves howling around us and a bull bel...

...life - whatever else it is - is short... maybe even if we're not always so glad to be here, it's ...

But romantic vision can also lead one away from certain very hard, ugly truths about life that are i...

Everyone basically has one aria to sing over their entire life.

Everything takes me longer than I expect. It's the sad truth about life.

Over and over I played her favorite Arvo Pärt, as a way of being with her; and she had only to menti...

What’s worth living for? what’s worth dying for? what’s completely foolish to pursue?

Whenever you see flies or insects in a still life—a wilted petal, a black spot on the apple—the pain...

Everything was hysterically funny, even the playground slide was smiling at us, and at some point, d...

I missed her so much I wanted to die: a hard, physical longing, like a craving for air underwater. L...

[T]hough the darkness sometimes lifted just enough so I could construe my surroundings, familiar sha...

They were playing old Bob Dylan, more than perfect for narrow Village streets close to Christmas and...

What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakab...

Who knew it was in my power to make anyone so happy? Or that I could ever be so happy myself? My moo...

. . . is it better to throw yourself head first and laughing into the holy rage calling your name?

During the next week, everyone noticed that my appetite had improved, even Toddy. “Are you done with...

What if — is more complicated than that? What if maybe opposite is true as well? Because, if bad can...

Putting your time in at the office; dutifully spawning your two point five; smiling politely at your...

But when she was annoyed with me, she had a cold way of saying “Apparently” in answer to almost anyt...

Do you have any idea why you might be feeling better?”“No, not really,” I said curtly. Better wasn’t...

When we are sad...it can be comforting to cling to familiar objects, to things that don't change.

And, lying on my bed in some biscuit-colored hotel room in Nice, with a balcony facing the Promenade...

The thought of her gave me such a continual anguish that I could no more forget her than an aching t...

Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us.

Maybe the one had to be lost for the others to be found?

. . . it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn't touch.

What do you think about America?""Everyone always smiles so big! Well—most people. Maybe not so much...

The shame that tormented me was all the more corrosive for having no very clear origin: I didn't kno...

It's not as if we're running a hospital for sick children down here, let's put it that way. Where's ...

And I'm hoping there's some larger truth about suffering here, or at least my understanding of it - ...

When we are sad—at least I am like this—it can be comforting to cling to familiar objects, to the th...

Well, girls always love assholes,” said Platt, not bothering to dispute this. “Haven't you noticed?”...

Though I would have died rather than told anyone, I was worried my exuberant drug use had damaged my...

And though it's a bleak thing to admit all these years later, still I've never met anyone who made m...

How much did she remember? I wondered, afire with humiliation yet unable to tear my eyes from her. I...

...it's so heartbreaking and unnecessary how we lose things. From pure carelessness. Fires, wars. Th...

A different and much deeper sort of beauty altogether. The thing and yet not the thing.

And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space b...

You'd be surprised, Theo." she said, leaning back in her shawl-shaped chair, "what small, everyday t...

You could study the connections for years and never work it out-it was all about things coming toget...

Who knew, or cared, the names of the Turks who blew the roof off the Parthenon? the mullahs who had ...

It’s a long story. I’ll make it short as I can.

It's commonplace to say that we 'love' a book, but when we say it, we mean all sorts of things. Some...

It's a terrible thing, what we did,” said Francis abruptly. “I mean, this man was not Voltaire we ki...

All of a sudden, images from every crime movie I'd ever seen began to pop into my mind—the windowles...

The dead appear to us in dreams because that's the only way they can make us see them; what we see i...

Though Julian could be marvelously kind in difficult circumstances of all sorts, I sometimes got the...

The little white bundle—toddling dutifully down the hall to the front door—froze. Then a high-pitche...

For humans—trapped in biology—there was no mercy: we lived a while, we fussed around for a bit and d...

Because I don’t care what anyone says or how often or winningly they say it: no one will ever, ever ...

…I’ve come to realize that the only truths that matter to me are the ones I don’t, and can’t, unders...

I wanted her to know just how much I loved her while also letting her know that she bore not one par...

Great paintings—people flock to see them, they draw crowds, they’re reproduced endlessly on coffee m...

It happened in New York, April 10th, nineteen years ago. Even my hand balks at the date. I had to pu...

...real age, as I came to see from the genuine pieces that passed through my hands, was variable, cr...

It's a terrible thing, what we did,” said Francis abruptly. “I mean, this man was not Voltaire we ki...

After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great,' he said. 'To ...

Occasionally a car swooshed by in the rain and its headlights would swing round momentarily and illu...

Maybe that's why I tend to equate physical beauty with qualities with which it has absolutely nothin...

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

I sometimes get the feeling that he was less pleased by kindness itself than by the elegance of the ...

I suppose there is a certain crucial interval in everyone's life when character is fixed forever.

We don't like to admit it, but the idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people s...

I mean we think of phenomenal change as being the very essence of time, when it's not at all. Time i...

And beauty is terror,' said Julian, 'then what is desire? We think we have many desires, but in fact...

That surge of power and delight, of confidence, of control. That sudden sense of the richness of the...

The lamplight was eerie, and, standing there motionless in our bathrobes, sleepy, with shadows flick...

I suppose the shock of recognition is one of the nastiest shocks of all.

Yet my longing for her was like a bad cold that had hung on for years despite my conviction that I w...

their reality was far more interesting than any idealized version could possibly be

The chronological sorting of memories is an interesting business. Prior to this first weekend in the...

Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exis...

Maybe that's why I tend to equate physical beauty with qualities with which it has absolutely nothin...

Out on the lawn, Bunny had just knocked Henry's ball about seventy feet outside the court. There was...

The vitality of the act was entirely obfuscated, the beauty, the terror, the sacrifice.' He took one...

It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. An...

Mais, vrai, J'ai trop pleure! Les aubes sont navrantes. What a sad and beautiful line that is. I'd a...

Asparagus is in season.

He did touch people's lives, the lives of strangers, in an entirely unanticipated way. It was they w...

I like the idea of living in a city - any city, especially a strange one - like the thought of traff...

Grown children (an oxymoron, I realize) veer instinctively to extremes: the young scholar is much mo...

But walking through it all was one thing; walking away, unfortunately, has proved to be quite anothe...

The most satisfying of languages, Latin.

I was jarred - a little spooked as well - at so blatant a reference to something referred to, by mut...

I think politics is deadly to write about, frankly. If you have a political agenda and you set out t...

People loved to think they were getting a deal. Four times out of five they would look right past wh...

And as much as I wanted to, I knew I couldn't turn around, that to look at her directly was to viola...

Why does that obstinate little voice in our heads torment us so?' he said, looking round the table. ...

But, if I dare say it, it wasn't until I had helped kill a man that I realized how elusive and compl...

The ceilings had set off a ghostly echo, giving all that desperate hilarity the quality of a memory ...

But while I have never considered myself a very good person, neither can I bring myself to believe t...

Do you remember what we were speaking of earlier, of how bloody, terrible things are sometimes the m...

It was like waking from a nightmare to a worse nightmare.

And what does a person with such romantic temperament seek in the study of the classics?"If by roman...

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

Richard Papen: As it happened, I knew Gartrell. He was a bad painter and a vicious gossip, with a vo...

This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nause...

Wade straight through life, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and heart open.