Quotes from Donna Tartt

The dead appear to us in dreams, said Julian, because that's the only way they can make us see them; what we see is only a projection, beamed from a great distance, light shining at us from a dead star

morning light can make the most vulgar things tolerable.

It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we find beautiful, we quiver before it.

Wedding Obergruppenführer

Henry, in coat and tie, waded out to where Francis stood, his trousers rolled to the knee, and old-fashioned banker in a surrealist painting.

And the heart-shock of believing, for only a moment, that you might just have what could never be yours.

cloudbursts of memory and hallucination crashing in on me from all sides

I hope I die in the night.

I am not unused to being confronted with my ow lies, but those of others never fail to throw me for a loop.

The silence between us was happy and strange, connected by the cord and the icy voices thinly echoing. "You don't have to talk," she said. "If you don't feel like it." Her eyelids were heavy and her voice was drowsy and like a secret. "People always want to talk but I like being quiet.

He was one of those language teachers who rely heavily on mnemonics. ("Agathon. Do you know how I remember that word? 'Agatha Christie writes good mysteries.' Ã¢â'¬Â) Henry's look of contempt was indescribable. The rest of us were silent and humiliated

Because, what I am trying to say—what I was thinking in the car from Antwerp last night—good doesn't always follow from good deeds, nor bad deeds result from bad, does it? Even the wise and good cannot see the end of all actions. Scary idea!

For if disaster and oblivion have followed this painting down through time—so too has love.

and among the many, many things I've had time to think about (such as what's worth living for? what's worth dying for? what's completely foolish to pursue?) I've been thinking a lot about what Hobie said: about those images that strike the heart and set it blooming like a flower, images that open up some much, much larger beauty that you can spend your whole life looking for and never find.

It has always been hard for me to talk about Julian without romanticizing him. In many ways, I loved him the most of all; and it is with him that I am most tempted to embroider, to flatter, to basically reinvent.

the King Cole room, and the Oyster Bar at Grand Central.

Es muy ruso quejarse continuamente de lo mal que van las cosas. Si la vida te va bien, cállatelo. No vayas a tentar al diablo...

Well -- think about this. What if all your actions and choices, good or bad, make no difference to God? What if the pattern is pre-set? No no -- hang on -- this is a question worth struggling with. What if our badness and mistakes are the very thing that set our fate and bring us round to good? What if, for some of us, we can't get there any other way?

And what would I do ? Part of me was immobile, stunned with despair, like those rats that lose hope in laboratory experiments and lie down in the maze to starve.

Catfish's high spirits were inexhaustible; he was cheerful no matter what happened, and he was unable to understand that not everyone was so resilient.

She was breathing hard, and deep circles of red burned high on her bright cheeks; in all my life I had never seen anyone so maddeningly beautiful as she was at that moment.

Welty's instruction; that I'd had a concussion. That I hadn't

Starched shirts and suits fresh from the cleaners' went a long, long way toward hiding a multitude of sins.

I had nothing to offer her. I was illness, instability, everything she wanted to get away from.