Donna Tartt Quotes

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

Variant: It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.
Source: The Secret History

“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.”

Source: The Secret History

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

Source: The Goldfinch

Donna Tartt Quotes

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

Source: The Goldfinch

“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.”

Source: The Goldfinch

“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.”

Source: The Secret History

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

Source: The Secret History

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

Source: The Goldfinch

“… 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.”

Source: The Secret History

“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.”

Source: The Goldfinch

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

Source: The Secret History

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

Source: The Secret History

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

Source: The Secret History

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

Source: The Secret History

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

Source: The Secret History

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

Source: The Secret History

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

Source: The Goldfinch

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

Source: The Secret History

“All those layers of silence upon silence.”

Source: The Secret History

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

Source: The Secret History

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

Source: The Secret History

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

Source: The Goldfinch

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

Source: The Goldfinch

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

Source: The Secret History

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

Source: The Secret History

“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.”

Source: The Secret History

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

Source: The Secret History

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

Source: The Secret History

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

Source: The Secret History

“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?”

Source: The Secret History

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

Source: The Goldfinch

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

Source: The Goldfinch

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

Source: The Goldfinch

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

Source: The Goldfinch

“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.”

Source: The Goldfinch

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

Source: The Goldfinch

“He was a planet without an atmosphere.”

Source: The Secret History

“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.”

Source: The Goldfinch

“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.”

Source: The Secret History

“Over 2,000 reptiles await you.”

Source: The Secret History

“Your silence is not acceptable.”

The Goldfinch

“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.”

On what novels convey to Tartt in “Interview with Donna Tartt” https://medium.com/@Powells/interview-with-donna-tartt-8d86a2438b41 in Medium (2015 Jul 13)

“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.”

On how writers should avoid analyzing their own work in “Donna Tartt on The Goldfinch, Inspiration, and the Perils of Literary Fame” https://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/arts-and-culture/a29022016/donna-tartt-goldfinch-interview/ in Town & Country (2019 Sep 12)