Donna Tartt Quotes

Other means) claiming to Hobie that I'd already sold the ~ Donna Tartt

Or
to quote another paradoxical gem of my dad's: sometimes you have to lose to win. ~ Donna Tartt

Welty's instruction; that I'd had a concussion. That I hadn't ~ Donna Tartt

With a grief no less sharp for not being intimate with its object. ~ Donna Tartt

With the striped umbrella and the pistachio ices? ~ Donna Tartt

I don't know. I suppose I should have had a better idea of what I was letting myself in for. Still, the first murder – the farmer – seemed to have been so simple, a dropped stone falling to the lakebed with scarcely a ripple. The second one was also easy, at least at first, but I had no inkling how different it would be. What we took for a docile, ordinary weight (gentle plunk, swift rush to the bottom, dark waters closing over it without a trace) was in fact a depth charge, one that exploded quite without warning beneath the glassy surface, and the repercussions of which may not be entirely over, even now. ~ Donna Tartt

it was a clear night, with crickets and a million stars ~ Donna Tartt

I'd given up trying to explain Hobie to Boris: the house, the workshop, his thoughtful way of listening (...) but more than anything a sort of pleasing atmosphere of mind: foggy, autumnal, a mild and welcoming micro-climate that made me feel safe and comfortable in his company. ~ Donna Tartt

What are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a dead star?

That, by the way, is a phrase of Julian's. I remember it from a lecture of his on the Iliad, when Patroklos appears to Achilles in a dream. There is a very moving passage where Achilles overjoyed at the sight of the apparition – tries to throw his arms around the ghost of his old friend, and it vanishes. The dead appear to us in dreams, said Julian, 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…

Which reminds me, by the way, of a dream I had a couple of weeks ago.

I found myself in a strange deserted city – an old city, like London – underpopulated by war or disease. It was night; the streets were dark, bombed-out, abandoned. For a long time, I wandered aimlessly – past ruined parks, blasted statuary, vacant lots overgrown with weeds and collapsed apartment houses with rusted girders poking out of their sides like ribs. But here and there, interspersed among the desolate shells of the heavy old public buildings, I began to see new buildings, too, which were connected by futuristic walkways lit from beneath. Long, cool perspectives of modern architecture, rising phosphorescent and eerie from the rubble.

I went inside one of these new buildings. It was like a laboratory, maybe, or a museum. My footsteps echoed on the tile floors.There was a cluste ~ Donna Tartt

Even Proust - there's a famous passage where Odette opens the door with a cold, she's sulky, her hair is loose and undone, her skin is patchy, and Swann, who has never cared about her until that moment, falls in love with her because she looks like a Botticelli girl from a slightly damaged fresco. Which Proust himself only knew from a reproduction. He never saw the original, in the Sistine Chapel. But even so - the whole novel is in some ways about that moment. And the damage is part of the attraction, the painting's blotchy cheeks. Even through a copy Proust was able to re-dream that image, re-shape reality with it, pull something all his own from it into the world. Because - the line of beauty is the line of beauty. It doesn't matter if it's been through the Xerox machine a hundred times. ~ Donna Tartt

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 of, an ever-growing distance between us. Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away. ~ Donna Tartt

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

He was the kind of man people liked to entrust with their sadnesses. ~ Donna Tartt

else it is - is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not ~ Donna Tartt

And someplace, if there is a place where lists are kept, and credit given, I am sure there is a gold star by his name. ~ Donna Tartt

Maybe, I thought- reaching in the bag, taking out a stack of money and looking it over- maybe good luck was like bad luck in that it took a while to sink in. You didn't feel anything at first. ~ Donna Tartt

On game day, until five o'clock or so, the white desert light held off the essential Sunday gloom - autumn sinking into winter, loneliness of October dusk with school the next day - but there was always a long still moment toward the end of those football afternoons where the mood of the crowd turned and everything grew desolate and uncertain, onscreen and off, the sheet-metal glare off the patio glass fading to gold and then gray, long shadows and night falling into desert stillness, a sadness I couldn't shake off, a sense of silent people filing toward the stadium exits and cold rain falling in college towns back east. ~ Donna Tartt

In whatever wink of consciousness that remained to me I felt I understood the secret grandeur of dying, all the knowledge held back from all humankind until the very end: no pain, no fear, magnificent detachment, lying in state upon the death barge and receding into the grand immensities like an emperor, gone, gone, observing all the distant scurryers on shore, freed from all the old human pettiness of love and fear and grief and death. ~ Donna Tartt

An object - any object - was worth whatever you could get somebody to pay for it. ~ Donna Tartt

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

At any rate, this was the weekend that things started to change, that the dark gaps between the street lamps begin to grow smaller and smaller, and farther apart, the first sign that one's train is approaching familiar territory, and will soon be passing through the well-known, well-lighted streets of town. The house was their trump card, their fondest treasure, and that weekend they revealed it to me slyly, by degrees – the dizzy little turret rooms, the high-beamed attic, the old sleigh in the cellar, big enough to be pulled by four horses, astring with bells. ~ Donna Tartt

What if you had never seen the sea before? What if the only thing you'd ever seen was a child's picture - blue crayon, choppy waves? Would you know the real sea if you only knew the picture? Would you be able to recognize the real thing even if you saw it? You don't know what Dionysus looks like. We're talking about God here. God is serious business. ~ Donna Tartt

Fact it seemed we had been doing things, such as stringing necklaces of rainbow-colored candy while the radio played Belle and Sebastian ~ Donna Tartt

She was the golden thread running through everything, a lens that magnified beauty so that the whole world stood transfigured in relation to her, and her alone. ~ Donna Tartt

We had trench warfare in America way before World War I. Most people don't know that. ~ Donna Tartt

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

I began to see new buildings, too, which were connected by futuristic walkways lit from beneath. Long, cool perspectives of modern architecture, rising phosphorescent and eerie from the rubble. ~ Donna Tartt

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

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

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

throw up his hands and say, 'Who, me? I had nothing to do with it.' ~ Donna Tartt

Charles Portis shows his mastery of place and the more complicated subtleties of time. ~ Donna Tartt

It made me feel less mortal, less ordinary. It was support and vindication; it was sustenance and sum. It was the keystone that held the whole cathedral up. And it was awful to learn, by having it so suddenly vanish from under me, that all my adult life I'd been privately sustained by that great, hidden, savage joy: the conviction that my whole life was balanced atop a secret that might at any movement blow me part. ~ Donna Tartt

Why does that obstinate little voice in our heads torment us so?' he said, looking round the table. 'Could it be because it reminds us that we are alive, of our mortality, of our individual souls - which, after all, we are too afraid to surrender but yet make us feel more miserable than any other thing? But isn't it also pain that often makes us most aware of self? ~ Donna Tartt

Worry! What a waste of time. All the holy books were right. Clearly 'worry' was the mark of a primitive and spiritually unevolved person. What was that line from Yeats, about the bemused Chinese sages? All things fall and are built again. Ancient glittering eyes. This was wisdom. People had been raging and weeping and destroying things for centuries and wailing about their puny individual lives, when - what was the point? All this useless sorrow? Consider the lilies of the field. Why did anyone ever worry about anything? Weren't we, as sentient beings, put upon the earth to be happy, in the brief time allotted to us? ~ Donna Tartt

I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive. ~ Donna Tartt

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

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

Even if life is great--keep it to yourself. You don't want to tempt the devil. ~ Donna Tartt

There's a big anti-intellectual strain in the American south, and there always has been. We're not big on thought. ~ Donna Tartt

Love doesn't conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool. ~ Donna Tartt

That life - whatever else it is - is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn't mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe 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. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn't touch. ~ Donna Tartt

We being round thee, forget to die. ~ Donna Tartt

Some things are too terrible to grasp at once. Other things - naked, sputtering, indelible in their horror - are too terrible to really grasp ever at all.It is only later, in solitude, in memory that the realization dawns: when the ashes are cold; when the mourners have departed; when one looks around and finds oneself - quite to one's surprise - in an entirely different world. ~ Donna Tartt

Could it be because it reminds us that we are alive, of our mortality, of our individual souls- which, after all, we are too afraid to surrender but yet make us feel more miserable than any other thing? But isn't it also pain that often makes us most aware of self? It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one's burned tongues and skinned knees, that one's aches and pains are all one's own. Even more terrible, as we grow old, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us. Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that's why we're so anxious to lose them, don't you think? ~ Donna Tartt

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

And though there was something pathetic about it - taking comfort in her left-behind things like a puppy snuggled in an old coat ... ~ Donna Tartt

She closed her eyes, dark-lidded, dark shadows beneath them; she really was older, not the glancing-eyed girl I had fallen in love with but no less beautiful for that; beautiful now in a way that less excited my senses than tore at my very heart. ~ Donna Tartt

And how can we lose this maddening self, lose it entirely? Love? Yes, but as old Cephalus once heard Sophocles say, the least of us know that love is a cruel and terrible master. One loses oneself for the sake of the other, but in doing so becomes enslaved and miserable to the most capricious of all the gods. ~ Donna Tartt

Time slid from under me in drifts like ice skids on the highway, punctuated by sudden sharp flashes where my wheels caught and I was flung into ordinary time: ~ Donna Tartt

Children love secret club houses. They love secrecy even when there's no need for secrecy. ~ Donna Tartt

Pragmatists are often strangely superstitious. ~ Donna Tartt

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

jeans jacket, catching him in a chokehold, pistol at ~ Donna Tartt

We have art in order not to die from the truth. - NIETZSCHE ~ Donna Tartt

That little guy, said Boris in the car on the way to Antwerp. You know the painter saw him-he wasn't painting that bird from his mind, you know? That's a real little guy, chained up on the wall, there. If I saw him mixed up with dozen other birds all the same kind, I could pick him out, no problem.
And he's right. So could I. And if I could go back in time I'd clip the chain in a heartbeat and never care a minute that the picture was never painted. ~ Donna Tartt

By happy contrast, Hobie's whole day revolved around dinner. ~ Donna Tartt

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

Actually, I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel. ~ Donna Tartt

You see one painting, I see another, the art book puts it at another remove still, the lady buying the greeting card at the museum gift shop sees something else entire, and that's not even to mention the people separated from us by time - four hundred years before us, four hundred years after we're gone - it'll never strike anybody the same way and the great majority of people it'll never strike in any deep way at all but - a really great painting is fluid enough to work its way into the mind and heart through all kinds of different angles, in ways that are unique and very particular. Yours, yours. I was painted for you. ~ Donna Tartt

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

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

...it was complicated, she wasn't thinking only of herself but me too, since we'd both been through so many of the same things, she and I, and we were an awful lot alike-too much. And because we'd both been hurt so badly, so early on, in violent and irremediable ways that most people didn't, and couldn't, understand, wasn't it a bit… precarious? A matter of self-preservation? Two rickety and death-driven persons who would need to lean on each other quite so much? not to say she wasn't doing well at the moment, because she was, but all that could change in a flash with either of us, couldn't it? the reversal, the sharp downward slide, and wasn't that the danger? since our flaws and weaknesses were so much the same, and one of us could bring the other down way too quick? and though this was left to float in the air a bit, I realized instantly, and with some considerable astonishment, what she was getting at. (Dumb of me not to have seen it earlier, after all the injuries, the crushed leg, the multiple surgeries; adorable drag in the voice, adorable drag in the step, the arm-hugging and the pallor, the scarves and sweaters and multiple layers of clothes, slow drowsy smile: she herself, the dreamy childhood her, was sublimity and disaster, the morphine lollipop I'd chased for all those years.) ~ Donna Tartt

They all shared a certain coolness, a cruel, mannered charm which was not modern in the least but had the strange cold breath of the ancient world : they were magnificent creatures, such eyes, such hands, such looks - sic oculos, sic ille manus, sic ora ferebat. ~ Donna Tartt

We don't like to admit it, but the idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than almost anything. All truly civilized people – the ancients no less than us – have civilized themselves through the wilful repression of the old, animal self. ~ Donna Tartt

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

Only it was complicated, she wasn't thinking only of herself but me too, since we'd both been through so many of the same things, she and I, and we were an awful lot alike - too much. And because we'd both been hurt so badly, so early on, in violent and irremediable ways that most people didn't, and couldn't, understand, wasn't it a bit ... precarious? A matter of self-preservation? Two rickety and death-driven persons who would need to lean on each other quite so much? not to say she wasn't doing well at the moment, because she was, but all that could change in a flash with either of us, couldn't it? the reversal, the sharp downward slide, and wasn't that the danger? since our flaws and weaknesses were so much the same, and one of us could bring the other down way too quick? and though this was left to float in the air a bit, I realized instantly, and with some considerable astonishment, what she was getting at. ~ Donna Tartt

I am sorry, as well, to present such a sketchy and disappointing exegesis of what is in fact the central part of my story. ~ Donna Tartt

Hard to believe that the world had ended and yet somehow these ridiculous activities kept grinding on. ~ Donna Tartt

Children - if you think back really what it was like to be a child and what it was like to know other children - children lie all the time. ~ Donna Tartt

I think it's hard to write about children and to have an idea of innocence. ~ Donna Tartt

He was a marvelous talker, a magical talker, and I wish I were able to give a better idea what he said, but it is impossible for a mediocre intellect to render the speech of a superior one ~ Donna Tartt

I've been thinking a lot about what Hobie said: about those images that strike the heart and set it blooming like a flower, images that open up some much, much larger beauty that you can spend your whole life looking for and never find. ~ Donna Tartt

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

Clearly 'worry' was the mark of a primitive and spiritually unevolved person. ~ Donna Tartt

The world and everything in it was intolerably and permanently fucked and nothing had ever been good or okay, unbearable claustrophobia of the soul, the windowless room, no way out, waves of shame and horror, leave me alone. ~ Donna Tartt

It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially. ~ Donna Tartt

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

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

The most satisfying of languages, Latin. ~ Donna Tartt

Not long before, I had stayed up late with my mother and watched Citizen Kane, and I was very taken with the idea that a person might notice in passing some bewitching stranger and remember her for the rest of his life. Someday I too might be like the old man in the movie, leaning back in my chair with a far-off look in my eyes, and saying: You know, that was sixty years ago, and I never saw that girl with the red hair again, but you know what? Not a month has gone by in all that time when I haven't thought of her. ~ Donna Tartt

You don't feel a great deal of emotions for other people, do you?"
I was taken aback. "What are you talking about?" I said. "Of course I do."
"Do you?" He raised an eyebrow. "I don't think so. It doesn't matter," he said, after a long, tense pause. "I don't, either. ~ Donna Tartt

I was as depressed as I have ever been in my life. ~ Donna Tartt

Janet who said excellent! in answer to everything and drank coffee from a pink mug that said Janet. ~ Donna Tartt

He sailed through the world guided only by the dim lights of impulse and habit, confident that his course would throw up no obstacles so large that they could not be plowed over with sheer force of momentum. ~ Donna Tartt

Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally believed to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petrie dish of melodrama and distortion. I remember well, for instance, the blind animal terror which ensued when some townie set off the civil defense sirens as a joke. Someone said it was a nuclear attack; TV and radio reception, never good there in the mountains, happened to be particularly bad that night, and in the ensuing stampede for the telephones the switchboard shorted out, plunging the school into a violent and almost unimaginable panic. Cars collided in the parking lot. People sceamed, wept, gave away t heir possessions, huddled in small groups for comfort and warmth. Some hippies barricaded themselves in the Science Building, in the lone bomb shelter, and refused to let anyone in who didn't know the world to "Sugar Magnolia." Factions formed, leaders rose from the chaos. Though the world, in fact, was not destroyed, everyone had a marvelous time and people spoke fondly of the event for years afterward. ~ Donna Tartt

What if - is more complicated than that? What if maybe opposite is true as well? Because, if bad can sometimes come from good actions - ? where does it ever say, anywhere, that only bad can come from bad actions? Maybe sometimes - the wrong way is the right way? You can take the wrong path and it still comes out where you want to be? Or, spin it another way, sometimes you can do everything wrong and it still turns out to be right? ~ Donna Tartt

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

There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty-unless she is wed to something more meaningful-is always superficial ~ Donna Tartt

With distaste, Harriet reflected upon how life had beaten down the adults she knew, every single grown-up. Something strangled them as they grew older, made them doubt their own powers-laziness? Habit? Their grip slackened; they stopped fighting and resigned themselves to what happened. "That's Life." That's what they all said. "That's Life, Harriet, that's just how it is, you'll see. ~ Donna Tartt

The walls billowed with printed fabric - yellow, green, indigo, purple - and a red hammer-and-sickle flag hung over the batik-draped mattress. It was as if a Russian cosmonaut had crashed in the jungle and fashioned himself a shelter of his nation's flag and whatever native sarongs and textiles he could find. ~ Donna Tartt

It's a long story. I'll make it short as I can. ~ Donna Tartt

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

Who cares? If he is good to you? None of us ever find enough kindness in the world, do we? ~ Donna Tartt

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

I think innocence is something that adults project upon children that's not really there. ~ Donna Tartt

If he really wanted to be happy in the world, Horst? To have any kind of joyful or happy life? He should pay twenty grand to go back to his rapid detox place and then come here and smoke Buddha Haze and stand in a museum all day long. ~ Donna Tartt

After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great. To escape the cognitive mode of experience, to transcend the accident of one's moment of being. There are other advantages, more difficult to speak of, things which ancient sources only hint at and which I myself only understood after the fact. ~ Donna Tartt

The group mind was such (private jokes and bemusement, everyone clustered round vacation videos on the iPhone) that it was hard to imagine any of them going to a movie by themselves or eating alone at a bar; sometimes, the affable sense of committee among the men particularly gave me the slight feeling of being interviewed for a job. ~ Donna Tartt

The little white bundle - toddling dutifully down the hall to the front door - froze. Then a high-pitched scream as he began to run as fast as he could (which was not very fast at all, any more) and Boris - whooping with laughter - dropped to his knees.
"Oh!" snatching him up, as Popchik wriggled and struggled. "You got fat! He got fat!" he said indignantly as Popchik jumped up and kissed him on the face. "You let him get fat! Yes, hello, poustyshka, little bit of fluff you, hello! You remember me, don't you?" He had toppled over on his back, stretched out and laughing, as Popchik - still screaming with joy - jumped all over him. "He remembers me! ~ Donna Tartt