Quotes from Donna Tartt

he had an indefinable look of privilege gone wrong

As tiny as she was, the resemblance sounded: her coloring, her eyes, her head cocked at the same angle and hair as red as his.

After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great,' he said. 'To escape the cognitive mode of experience, to transcend the accident to one's moment of being. There are other advantages, more difficult to speak of, things which ancient sources only hint at and which I myself only understood after the fact.

hard to believe that the world had ended and yet somehow these ridiculous activities kept grinding on.

Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away.

something about the place inspired a magnificent laziness I hadn't known since childhood.

Heebiejeebieville.

No reconocimos la gravedad de nuestra situación hasta varias semanas después, cuando la nieve de las montañas ya se estaba fundiendo. Bunny llevaba diez días muerto cuando lo encontraron.

Hobie had an iron constitution. Whenever he came down with something himself, he drank a Fernet-Branca and kept going.

Trees are schizophrenic now and beginning to lose control, enraged with the shock of their fiery new colors. Someone—was it van Gogh?—said that orange is the color of insanity. Beauty is terror. We want to be devoured by it, to hide ourselves in that fire which refines us.

is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty—unless she is wed to something more meaningful—is always superficial.

Ever since I'd started riding the train by myself I'd loved to go there alone and roam around until I got lost, wandering deeper and deeper in the maze of galleries until sometimes I found myself in forgotten halls of armor and porcelain that I'd never seen before (and, occasionally, was unable to find again).

and there she was, turning and smiling at me, at me! and there were way too many people in the theater because it was the seven o'clock show, way more people than I was comfortable with my generalized anxiety and hatred of crowded places and more people trickling in even after the show had started but I didn't care, it could have been a foxhole in the Somme being shelled by the Germans and all that mattered was her next to me in the dark, her arm beside mine.

First rule of restorations. Never do what you can't undo.

The more cultivated a person is, the more intelligent, the more repressed, then the more he needs some method of channeling the primitive impulses he's worked so hard to subdue.

Her death the dividing mark: Before and After.

back there or maybe even taken an actual shit, and then tried to cover it up with a bunch of coconut air freshener that smelled like suntan lotion. The seats were greasy, and patched with duct tape, and the shocks were nearly gone. Whenever we struck a

Esas imágenes que te llegan al corazón y lo abren como una flor, imágenes que se abren a una belleza tan grande que puedes pasarte toda la vida buscando sin encontrarla.

a gunpowder factory exploded at Delft in the 1600s, that the painter had been so haunted and obsessed by the destruction of his city that he painted it over and over.

It was one of the reasons I loved him: for that flattering light in which he saw me, for the person I was when I was with him, for what it was he allowed me to be.

a short, fiery mop of the reddest hair I had ever seen

whatever reason, an evening nodding and unconscious in my bedroom at Hobie's had begun to seem like a perfectly reasonable response to the holiday lights, the holiday crowds, the incessant Christmas bells with their morbid funeral note, Kitsey's candy-pink notebook from Kate's Paperie with tabs

Also they have rattlesnakes, and the death penalty, which I think is primitive and unethical

though some of those casual remarks and private jokes assumed a horrific significance much later. Towards the end of that term, for instance, Bunny had a maddening habit of breaking out into choruses of "The Farmer in the Dell"; I found it merely annoying and could not understand the violent agitation to which it provoked the rest of them: not knowing then, as I do now, that it must have chilled them all to the bone.