Donna Tartt: Trending quotes

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.”

“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.”

“You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life”

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

“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.”

“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.”