Donna Tartt Quotes

“though I can digress with the best of them, I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.”

“But how,” said Charles, who was close to tears, “how can you possibly justify cold-blooded murder?’
Henry lit a cigarette. “I prefer to think of it,” he had said, “as redistribution of matter.”

“Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you.”

“Even if it meant that she had failed, she was glad. And if what she'd wanted had been impossible from the start, still there was a certain lonely comfort in the fact that she'd known it was impossible and had gone ahead and done it anyway.”

“I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only—if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn’t it? And isn’t the whole point of things—beautiful things—that they connect you to some larger beauty?”

“Here is my experience. Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you. What you want to live and be happy in the world is a woman who has her own life and lets you have yours.”

“…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…”

“They too, knew this beautiful and harrowing landscape; they'd had the same experience of looking up from their books with fifth-century eyes and finding the world disconcertingly sluggish and alien, as if it were not their home.”

“To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole;”

“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.”

“The world won't come to me… so I must go to it.”

“As a writer, I think I’m more an eye than an ear — the world comes mainly in for me at the eye. So I’m glad the visuals came through for you. As I’m writing my books, I really do see them almost literally — I experience scenes almost as an onlooker, watching from the outside.”

“Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.”

“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.”

“When you feel homesick,’ he said, ‘just look up. Because the moon is the same wherever you go.”

“The first duty of the novelist is to entertain. It is a moral duty. People who read your books are sick, sad, traveling, in the hospital waiting room while someone is dying. Books are written by the alone for the alone.”

“Are you happy here?" I said at last.
He considered this for a moment. "Not particularly," he said. "But you're not very happy where you are, either.”

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

“Sometimes it's about playing a poor hand well.”

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

“… 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.”

“There are such things as ghosts. People everywhere have always known that. And we believe in them every bit as much as Homer did. Only now, we call them by different names. Memory. The unconscious.”

“Anything is grand if it's done on a large enough scale.”

“Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones that I did not.”

“Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?”

“Love doesn't conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.”

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

“Who was it that said that coincidence was just God’s way of remaining anonymous?”

“Death is the mother of beauty,” said Henry. “And what is beauty?” “Terror.”

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

“All those layers of silence upon silence.”

“Not quite what one expected, but once it happened one realized it couldn't be any other way.”

“We are so customed to disguise ourselves to others that, in the end, we become disguised to ourselves.”

“Can’t good come around sometimes through some strange back doors?”

“We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it?” “To live,” said Camilla. “To live forever”

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

“And as we leave Donne and Walton on the shores of Metahemeralism, we wave a fond farewell to those famous chums of yore.”

“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.”

“How quickly he fell; how soon it was over.”

“After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great.”

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

“My hopes for a relationship with her were wholly unreal, whereas my ongoing misery, and frustration, were an all-too-horrible reality. Was groundless, hopeless romantic obsession any way to waste the rest of my life?”

“… my head in the rainclouds, my heart in the sky.”

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

“… and yet isn't it always the inappropriate thing, the thing that doesn't quite work, that's oddly the dearest?”

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

“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.”

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

“He was a planet without an atmosphere.”

“The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.”

“If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.”

“Over 2,000 reptiles await you.”

“Your silence is not acceptable.”

“This is something that the novel does better than any other art form: reproducing the inner life and the inner experience of another person, particularly extreme forms of consciousness like grief, dreams, drunkenness, spiritual revelations, even insanity. Unlike movies, where we’re always onlookers, in novels we have the experience of being someone else: knowing another person’s soul from the inside. No other art form does that. And I like dealing with particularly intense inner experiences because I think that in many ways, this is what the novel does best.”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea for a writer to psychoanalyze herself or try to explain why she writes what she writes—it’s a reductive way of looking at oneself and one’s work. Readers really participate in the writing of a book. As a writer I’m giving the reader signs to help create the story with me. The reader is bringing his or her own memories, intelligence, preconceptions, prejudices, likes, dislikes. So the characters in your copy of the book are going to look and sound different than in mine. I have my own ideas, but once the book is out there it’s not really mine anymore, and my own idea isn’t any more valid than yours. And then I begin the long process of disengaging.”

“I’m a bit of a lone wolf…I don’t give interviews or do publicity unless I have a book out—too distracting. My desk is where the real work happens.”