Donna Tartt citations

“Mais, vrai, j’ai trop pleuré! Les aubes sont navrantes.”

“Elle ne s'intéressait pas aux livres dans lesquels les enfants grandissaient, car (dans la vie comme en littérature) ce processus entrainait un affaiblissement accéléré et inexplicable du caractère; de façon totalement inattendue, les héros et les héroïnes renonçaient à leurs aventures pour un amour insipide, se mariaient et fondaient une famille, et, en général, se comportaient comme un troupeau de vaches.”

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

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

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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;”

“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.”