Quotes from Donna Tartt

we don't get to choose our own hearts. We can't make ourselves want what's good for us or what's good for other people. We don't get to choose the people we are.

It's funny, but thinking back on it now, I realize that this particular point in time, as I stood there blinking in the deserted hall, was the one point at which I might have chosen to do something very different from what I actually did. But of course I didn't see this crucial moment then for what is was; I suppose we never do.

Estamos tan acostumbrados a disfrazarnos para los demás que al final nos disfrazamos para nosotros mismos.   FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD

Look, here comes Twinkletoes, said Bunny, busying himself with the menu.

What you want to live and be happy in the world is a woman who has her own life and lets you have yours.

Il mondo non mi verrà incontro, perciò devo andargli incontro io.

jeans jacket, catching him in a chokehold, pistol at

He had a habit, as I was later to discover, of trailing off into absorbed, didactic, entirely self-contained monologues, about whatever he happened to be interested in at the time

credulous father, a distinguished judge who had spent his final

Death is the mother of Beauty. And what is Beauty? Terror.

Cuanto más agitas los árboles más hojas caen de ellos.

Um—" I turned to the shop window to compose myself, and my transparent ghost turned to meet me, crowds passing behind me in the glass.

I was very taken with the idea that a person might notice in passing some bewitching stranger and remember her for the rest of his life.

between 'reality' on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there's a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic.

Another trick—calculated to lure a different, more sophisticated customer—was to bury a piece in the back of the store, reverse the vacuum cleaner over it (instant antiquity!) and allow the nosy customer to ferret it out on his or her own—look

And I've written these pages, on some level, to try to understand. But—on another level I don't want to understand, or try to understand, for by doing so I'll be false to the fact. All I can really say for sure is that I've never felt the mystery of the future so much: sense of the hourglass running out, fast-running fever of time. Forces unknown, unchosen, unwilled.

when you feel homesick, he said, just look up. because the moon is the same wherever you go

Nowhere, ever, have the hideous mechanics of birth and copulation and death—those monstrous upheavals of life that the Greeks call miasma, defilement—been so brutal or been painted up to look so pretty; have so many people put so much faith in lies and mutability and death death death.

Well—very Russian, you know, to complain how bad things are all the time! Even if life is great—keep it to yourself. You don't want to tempt the devil.

If they do, I certainly want to have an excuse for having been here. And pick up that match," he said sourly to Francis

It was Boris I missed, the whole impulsive mess of him: gloomy, reckless, hot-tempered, apallingly thoughtless. Boris pale and pasty, with his shoplifted apples and his Russian-language novels, gnawed-down fingernails and shoelaces dragging in the dust. Boris-- budding alcoholic, fluent curser in four languages-- who snatched food from my plate when he felt like it and nodded off drunk on the floor, face red like he'd been slapped.

After class, I wandered downstairs in a dream, my head spinning, but acutely, achingly conscious that I was alive and young on a beautiful day; the sky a deep deep painful blue, wind scattering the red and yellow leaves in a whirlwind of confetti.

No, he's asleep. Where's my mother? Is

Understand, by saying 'God,' I am merely using 'God' as a reference to long-term pattern we can't decipher. Huge, slow-moving weather system rolling in on us from afar, blowing us randomly like— But—maybe not so random and impersonal as all that, if you get me. […] The point is maybe that the point is too big to see or work round to on our own.