Quotes from Donna Tartt

Waiting at the wrong place, most like.

Over and over, I kept thinking I've got to go home and then, for the millionth time, I can't.

passed—Snoopy, Ronald McDonald

if bad can sometimes come from good actions—? where does it ever say, anywhere, that only bad can come from bad actions? Maybe sometimes—the wrong way is the right way? You can take the wrong path and it still comes out where you want to be? Or, spin it another way, sometimes you can do everything wrong and it still turns out to be right?

other means) claiming to Hobie that I'd already sold the

As we walked outside together, into the Christmas crowds, I felt unsteady and sorrowful; and the ribbon-wrapped buildings, the glitter of windows only deepened the oppressive sadness: dark winter skies, gray canyon of jewels and furs and all the power and melancholy of wealth

When we are sad...it can be comforting to cling to familiar objects, to things that don't change.

Three coffees, two with milk, please," said Francis to the fat woman behind the counter. "No milk, just Cremora." "Well, then, just black, I guess." He turned to us. "Have you seen the paper this morning?

The candles, the orange gleam of firelight where she'd been standing made me think of the warmth of the wine bar, as if the light itself might be a passageway back to the night before and the little wooden table where we had sat knee to knee, her face washed with the same orange-tinged light.

as skilled a dissembler as I was, I could barely be civil to him;

I was floating around up there like a feather, a trick from early childhood that was fading as I got older.

My love was muddied-up below the waterline with my mother, with my mother's death, with losing my mother and not being able to get her back. All that blind, infantile hunger to save and be saved, to repeat the past and make it different, had somehow attached itself, ravenously, to her. There was an instability in it, a sickness.

Beauty alters the grain of reality.

At her tone, at once intimate and formal, a terrible sadness came over me, and when we looked at each other it seemed that the whole past was redefined and brought into focus by this moment, clear as glass, a complexity of stillness that was rainy afternoons in spring, a dark chair in the hallway, the light-as-air touch of her hand on the back of my head. "I'm

What if you had never seen the sea before? What if the only thing you'd ever seen was a child's picture—blue crayon, choppy waves? Would you know the real sea if you only knew the picture? Would you be able to recognize the real thing even if you saw it? You don't know what Dionysus looks like. We're talking about God here. God is serious business.

He was talking in a voice which didn't sound at all like James Bond, but which Harriet recognized as his James Bond voice.

because the thing he hadn't understood then (he was happier not knowing it) was that once you were in prison, you never got out. People treated you like a different person; you tended to backslide, the way people tended to backslide into malaria or bad alcoholism

I love this painting because it speaks to all mankind.' That's not the reason anyone loves a piece of art. It's a secret whisper from an alleyway. Psst, you. Hey kid. Yes you.

Months after I got to know the five of them, I found to my surprise that at the start they'd been nearly as bewildered by me as I by them.

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.

She was the Queen who finished out the suit of dark Jacks, dark King and Joker

And the sweetness of the thought struck her: how lovely to vanish off the face of the earth, what a sweet dream to vanish now, out of her body: poof, like a spirit. Chains clattering empty to the floor.

steep taper, seven day timetable, plenty of loperamide; magnesium supplements and free form amino acids to replenish my burnt-out neurotransmitters; protein powder, electrolyte powder, melatonin (and weed) for sleep as well as various herbal tinctures and potions my fashion intern swore by, licorice root and milk thistle, nettles and hops and black cumin seed oil, valerian root and skullcap extract. I had a shopping bag from the health food store with all the stuff

I never got used to the way the horizon there could just erase itself and leave you marooned, adrift, in an incomplete dreamscape that was like a sketch for the world you knew, in an amnesia-land, a kind of skewed Heaven where the old landmarks were recognizable but spaced too far apart, and disarranged, and made terrible by the emptiness around them.