Quotes from Donna Tartt

one prisoner looking at another

It was getting warmer. The dirty snow was pockmarked from the warm rain, and melting in patches to expose the slimy, yellowed grass beneath it; icicles cracked and plunged like daggers from the sharp peaks of the roofs.

I had to say goodbye to her once before, but it took everything I had to say goodbye to her then, again, for the last time, like poor Orpheus turning for a last backwards glance at the ghost of his only love and in the same heartbeat losing her forever: hinc illae lacrimae, hence those tears.

In this swarm of cigarettes and dark sophistication they appeared here and there like figures from an allegory, or long-dead celebrants from some forgotten garden party.

It was an obscure specialization, but the candlelit and treacherous universe in which they moved - of sin unpunished, of innocence destroyed - was one I found appealing. Even the titles of their plays were strangely seductive, trapdoors to something beautiful and wicked that trickled beneath the surface of mortality: The Malcontent. The White Devil. The Broken Heart.

That life—whatever else it is—is short. That fate is

And though it's a bleak thing to admit all these years later, still I've never met anyone who made me feel loved the way she did. Everything came alive in her company; she cast a charmed theatrical light about her so that to see anything through her eyes was to see it in brighter colors than ordinary.

he'd probably just crawl in the corner and starve. Like a hamster you forgot to feed.

Cloke Rayburn, a school friend of Corcoran's and one of those who first notified police, said that Corcoran 'is a real straight guy - definitely not mixed up in drugs or anything like that.

Idolatría! Amar tanto a los objetos puede acabar destruyéndote. Lo que ocurre es que si cuidas algo lo suficiente cobra vida propia. ¿Y no es ese el propósito de los objetos, de las cosas hermosas, ponerte en contacto con una belleza más grande?

That's what he would have wanted. The parting glimpse, the death haiku—he wouldn't have liked to leave without stopping to speak to someone along the way. 'A teahouse amid the cherry blossoms, on the way to death.

installed herself as Wedding Obergruppenführer.

Somewhere, Bunny had heard that John Donne had been acquainted with Izaak Walton, and in some dim corridor of his mind this friendship grew larger and larger, until in his mind the two men were practically interchangeable.

the only light came from a lamp which threw a sharp white circle on melted candles, computer cables, empty beer bottles and butane cans, oil pastels boxed and loose, many catalogues raisonnés, books in German and English including Nabokov's Despair

With mahogany in particular, it's so tightly grained

they were magnificent creatures, such eyes, such hands, such looks-sic oculos, sic ille manus, sic ora ferebat.

Have some champagne, quick,' Bunny said. 'It's going flat.' 'Where is it?' 'In the teapot.

is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons. —SCHILLER

And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought for them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.

The woods were silent, not a sound. Henry smiled. Why, looking for new ferns, he said, and took a step towards him.

Henry tells me that this particular sort of mushroom was a great favorite of the emperor Claudius. Interesting, because you remember how Claudius died." I did remember. Agrippina had slipped a poisoned one into his dish one night.

When you're worried about something," said Henry abruptly, "have you ever tried thinking in a different language?

the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.

For if the modern mind is whimsical and discursive, the classical mind is narrow, unhesitating, relentless. It is not a quality of intelligence that one encounters frequently these days.