Donna Tartt citations

Page 2

“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.”

“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.”

“Who cares? If he is good to you? None of us ever find enough kindness in the world, do we?”

“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”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”