Quotes from Donna Tartt

Dear me, you are being truthful today," he said, with remarkable perspicuity. "Life has got awfully dramatic all of a sudden, hasn't it? Just like a fiction.…

Strange, I thought, as I jumped a sheet of water at the curb, how a few hours could change everything—or rather, how strange to find that the present contained such a bright shard of the living past, damaged and eroded but not destroyed.

Will you tell us why John the Baptist went forth crying in the wilderness?" Hely writhed. "Because Jesus made him do it." "Not quite!" said Mr. Dial, rubbing his hands.

the fuck-up from which I would never recover.

It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially." ? Donna Tartt, The Secret History

I don't see why Allison can't say Hate, Mother," said Harriet. "Hate is a perfectly good word." "It's not polite." "It says Hate in the Bible. The Lord hateth this and the Lord hateth that. It says it practically on every page." "Well, don't you say it." "All right, then," Allison burst out. "I detest Mrs. Biggs." Mrs. Biggs was Allison's Sunday school teacher.

The twilights out there were florid and melodramatic, great sweeps of orange and crimson and Lawrence-in-the-desert vermilion, then night dropping dark and hard like a slammed door.

I was sitting on her porch and said: You must be thirsty, would you like to come in? Portraits, miniatures, daguerreotypes, old Aunt This, old Uncle Thus and So. That spiral staircase coming down. And there I was—in my lifeboat. I'd found it. You had to pinch yourself in that house sometimes to remind yourself it wasn't 1909.

Death is the mother of beauty, said Henry. And what is beauty? Terror. Well said, said Julian. Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.

a morbid longing for the picturesque at all cost.

I stood in the shadiest corner I could find with my mass-market paperback and, with a red pencil, went through and underlined a lot of particularly bracing sentences: "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." "A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind." What would Thoreau have made of Las Vegas: its lights and rackets, its trash and daydreams, its projections and hollow façades?

The Roman genius, and perhaps the Roman flaw,' he said, 'was an obsession with order. One sees it in their architecture, their literature, their laws - this fierce denial of darkness, unreason, chaos.

Because: if our secrets define us, as opposed to the face we show the world: then the painting was the secret that raised me above the surface of life and enabled me to know who I am. And it's there: in my notebooks, every page, even though it's not. Dream and magic, magic and delirium. The Unified Field Theory. A secret about a secret.

DAVE THE SHRINK HAD mentioned more than once that he wished I would develop a hobby—advice I resented, as the hobbies he suggested (racquetball, table tennis, bowling) all seemed incredibly lame. If he thought a game or two of table tennis was going to help me get over my mother, he was completely out to lunch.

She was a masterpeace of composure; nothing ever ruffled her or made her upset, and though she was not beatiful her calmness had the magnetic pull of beauty – a stillness so powerful that the molecules realigned themselves around her when she came into a room.

At this question, I felt a sharp rush of despair - for as bad as I felt there was nothing he could do for me, and from his face, I realized he knew that, too.

And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky...

La impresión espartana que transmitía correspondería a su naturaleza o a su bolsillo.

We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it? To live.

Because I don't care what anyone says or how often or winningly they say it: no one will ever, ever be able to persuade me that life is some awesome, rewarding treat. Because, here's the truth: life is catastrophe. The basic fact of existence—of walking around trying to feed ourselves and find friends and whatever else we do—is catastrophe.

And the flavor of Pippa's kiss—bittersweet and strange—stayed with me all the way back uptown, swaying and sleepy as I sailed home on the bus, melting with sorrow and loveliness, a starry ache that lifted me up above the windswept city like a kite: my head in the rainclouds, my heart in the sky.

It was as if I'd suffered a chemical change of the spirit: as if the acid balance of my psyche had shifted and leached the life out of me in aspects impossible to repair, or reverse, like a frond of living coral hardened to bone. I

I hate Gucci. It's so expensive, but it's so ugly too, isn't it? I think they make it ugly on purpose. And yet people buy it out of sheer perversity.

Nitric acid. Lampblack. Furniture, like all living things, acquired marks and scars over the course of time. The effects of time, visible and invisible.