Quotes from Donna Tartt

The sky was a fierce, burning blue, the trees ferocious shades of red and yellow.

A moi. L'histoire d'une de mes folies.

The vitality of the act was entirely obfuscated, the beauty, the terror, the sacrifice.' He took one last drag of this cigarette and put it out. 'Quite simply,' he said, 'we didn't believe. And belief was the one condition which was absolutely necessary. Belief, and absolute surrender.

affectionate exasperated breath I knew

His hands, folded on the desk before him, were gnarled with veins and had a bluish, pearly sheen around the knuckles. I stared at them.

It's crazy," she'd said, "but I'd be perfectly happy if I could sit looking at the same half dozen paintings for the rest of my life. I can't think of a better way to go insane.

Suddenly, I was struck by a horrible thought: is this what it's like? Is this the way it's going to be from now on?

It's crazy," she'd said, "but I'd be perfectly happy if I could sit looking at the same half dozen paintings for the rest of my life. I can't think of a better

That life—whatever else it is—is short.

commonplace happiness that was lost when I lost her.

And the farther I walked away, the more upset I got, at the loss of one of the few stable and unchanging docking-points in the world that I had taken for granted: familiar faces, glad greetings: hey manito! For I had thought that this last touchstone of the past, at least, would be where I'd left it.

And here he was, the great one himself, scorching us all with his rays of glory.

Even on the highest levels it was smoke and mirrors; everyone was furnishing a stage set.

Nature red in tooth and claw.' Perhaps she doesn't

my endless cramming felt a lot more like self destruction than any glue-sniffing I'd ever done;

Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that, sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent.

everything was soft and kind and infinitely forgiving. I noted a strange beauty in the faces of people previously repulsive to me. I smiled at everyone and everyone smiled back.

I think of something I read about Sargent: how in portraiture, Sargent always looked for the animal in the sitter (a tendency that, once I knew to look for it, I saw everywhere in his work: in the long foxy noses and pointed ears of Sargent's heiresses, in his rabbit-toothed intellectuals and leonine captains of industry, his plump, owl-faced children).

La belleza altera la textura de la realidad.

Todos los grandes cuadros son en realidad autorretratos.

See?" said Boris, interrupting Vitya right in

Everything was bathed in a celestial light. I listened to Jack and Lars talk about pinball, motorcycles, female kick-boxing, and was heartwarmed at their attempts to include me in the conversation. Lars offered me a bong hit. The gesture was, to me, tremendously touching and all of a sudden I realized I had been wrong about these people. These were good people, common people; the salt of the earth; people whom I should count myself fortunate to know.

I never realized, you know, how much we rely on appearances," he said. "It's not that we're so smart, it's just that we don't look like we did it. We might as well be a bunch of Sunday-school teachers as far as everyone else is concerned. But these guys won't be taken in by that.

The line of beauty is the line of beauty. It doesn't matter if it's been through the Xerox machine a hundred times. [...] You know what Picasso says. 'Bad artists copy, good artists steal.' Still with real greatness, there's a jolt at the end of the wire. It doesn't matter how often you grab hold of the line, or how many people have grabbed hold of it before you. It's the same line. Fallen from a higher life. It still carries some of the same shock.