Donna Tartt quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Donna Tartt on Wise Famous Quotes.

Only now was it starting to make sense why Lady Macbeth could never scrub the blood off her hands, why it was still there after she washed it away.

But it was excruciating to emerge from my eerie submarine existence into this harsh stampede of noise and light.

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

Well, I think storytellers have always found murder a fascinating device.

Even on the highest levels it was smoke and mirrors; everyone was furnishing a stage set.

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.

You amaze me," he said. "You think nothing exists if you can't see it.

... still when I lost her, I lost sight of any landmark that might have led me someplace happier, to some more populated or congenial life ...

Had I stayed in California I might have ended up in a cult or at the very least practicing some weird dietary restriction.

Can't good come around sometimes through some strange back doors?

There was a horrible, erratic thumping in my chest, as if a large bird was trapped inside my ribcage and beating itself to death.

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

Beauty is terror.

Never do what you can't undo.

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

The sky was a rich, mindless, never-ending blue, like a promise of some ridiculous glory that wasn't really there.

I lost sight of any landmark that might have led me someplace happier,

But if you close the door ... the night could last forever ...

At first I thought they were playing to an

I really do work in solitude.

the atmosphere it breathed was like the light-rinsed airiness of a wall opposite an open window.

We'd have to devise a plan, probably a rather Pyrrhic and unsatisfactory one.

Fate is cruel but maybe not random. Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn't mean we have to bow and gravel to it.

People loved to think they were getting a deal. Four times out of five they would look right past what they didn't want to see.

She looked up at me, her eyes large with compassion, with understanding of the solitude and incivility of grief.

Worrying, Potter! Don't stand there and look so unhappy! If we lose, we win, and if we win, we win! Everything is good!

As long as I am acting out of love, I feel I am doing best I know how.

No matter how hard I tried to wish him out of the picture - for there he always was, in my hands and my voice and my walk ...

They understand not only evil, it seemed, but the extravagance of tricks with which evil presents itself as good.

Hely's feelings didn't run very deep; he lived in sunny shallows where it was always warm and bright.

telephone, "Myriam's not my wife! This - " he handed

Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.

my own fatal tendency to try to make interesting people good. And

But it's for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work.

All things fall and are built again.

Safe trip. I love you. No kidding.

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

Minie balls and repeating rifles. That was why the body count was so high. We had trench warfare in America way before WW1. p128

And the nights, bigger than imagining: black and gusty and enormous, disordered and wild with stars.

For in the deepest, most unshakable part of myself reason was useless.

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

What is unthinkable is undoable

Matters progressed.

No, he's asleep. Where's my mother? Is

I see so little of you these days, Richard," he said. "I feel that you're becoming just a shadow in my life.

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

And if what they say is true
if every great painting is really a self-portrait
what, if anything, is Fabritius saying about himself?

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

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

hubris on Henry's, too much Greek prose composition - whatever

Whe can't escape who we are

What do you think about America?"
"Everyone always smiles so big! Well - most people. Maybe not so much you. I think it looks stupid.

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

He'd probably just crawl in the corner and starve. Like a hamster you forgot to feed.

What you want is to live and be happy in the world is a woman (or man) who has her (his) own life and lets you have yours

Beauty alters the grain of reality.

Well, she doesn't have anything to do with it, Richard, you're just like that guy in 'Dragnet' that always wants the facts.

He said well if you can't plan it out ahead of time, you'll just have to work it out as you go along

Is it easy to see things in retrospect. But I was ignorant then of everything but my own happiness.

That's the first law of magic, Specs. Misdirection. Never forget it.

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

When you feel homesick,' he said, 'just look up. Because the moon is the same wherever you go.

All that blind, infantile hunger to save and be saved, to repeat the past and make it different, had somehow attached itself, ravenously, to her.

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

I think this goes more to the idea of 'relentless irony' than 'divine providence.

And sharp-faced, like Boris, but with an evil red-rimmed gaze and tiny, brownish sawteeth. He made me think of a rabid fox.

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

But the first rule of restorations, as he'd taught me earlier on, was that you never did what you couldn't reverse.

He was a planet without an atmosphere.

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

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

All my life, people have taken my shyness for sullenness, snobbery, bad temper of one sort or another.

Different cultures and all that, but it's true what they say about the Japanese being undemonstrative.

I mean, this man was not /Voltaire/ we killed.

Although, I do have to say, it was difficult to imagine him

You are, and you are very very gifted at all the aspects of the business I don't care to deal with, and you

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

I loved her every minute of every day, heart and mind and soul and all of it, and it was getting late and I wanted the place never to close, never.

afterlife, the space between earth and not-earth, world and not-world, highly polished floors and glass-roof cathedral echoes and the whole anonymous

I could do what I had to. I'd done it before: gone blank, pushed forward.

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

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.

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

A teahouse amid the cherry blossoms, on the way to death. p136

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

I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much.

Honestly can't remember much else about those years

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

A sunstruck instant that existed now and forever.

You had to hand it to her: she was as cool as dammit.

It's a perfectly handy skill for any boy to know." "Certainly it is, if he needs to hail a passing tugboat.

She told me she loved him." "Well, girls always love assholes," said Platt, not bothering to dispute this. "Haven't you noticed?

Bunny put away his copy of The Bride of Fu Manchu and started carrying around a volume of Homer instead.

It's our task to immerse ourselves ... while keeping eyes and hearts open ...

Adrift in an air of charged significance, doubt struck me: was it a real memory, had he really spoken those words to me, or was I dreaming?

It may be a superhuman effort to lose oneself so completely, but that's nothing compared to the effort of getting oneself back again

Chlorotic, with a sunken chest, he smoked incessantly, wore cheap shirts that had grayed in the wash, drank endless cups of sugary tea.

It does not do to be frightened of things about which you know nothing," he said. "You are like children. Afraid of the dark.

Exactly that girl, not the prettiest, but the no-makeup and kind of ordinary-looking girl he'd chosen to be happy

You have an unusual equipment for fate, exercise with care!'