Donna Tartt: Trending quotes (page 3)

“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 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

“…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…”

“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.”