Quotes from Donna Tartt

I still have an overwhelming wish to see him the way that I first saw him: as the wise old man who appeared to me out of nowhere on a desolate strip of road, with a bewitching offer to make all my dreams come true.

It was like walking into the cockpit of an airplane and finding the pilot and co-pilot passed out drunk in their seats. And standing outside the Lyceum, I was struck with a black, incredulous horror, which in fact was not at all unlike the horror I had felt at twelve, sitting on a bar stool in our sunny little kitchen in Plano. Who is in control here? I thought, dismayed. Who is flying this plane?

and though she was not beautiful her calmness had the magnetic pull of beauty—a stillness so powerful that the molecules realigned themselves around her when she came into a room.

Shock and aura. Things are stronger and brighter and I feel on the edge of something inexpressible. Coded messages in the in-flight magazines. Energy Shield. Uncompromising Care. Electricity, colors, radiance. Everything is a signpost pointing to something else.

It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from all the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one's burned tongues and skinned knees, that one's aches and pains are all one's own. Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us. Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that's why we're so anxious to lose them, don't you t

Twelve years after Robin's death, no one knew any more about how he had ended up hanged from a tree in his own yard that they had known on the day it happened.

Was ist, wenn einer zufällig von einem Herzen besessen ist, dem nicht zu trauen ist? Wenn dein tiefstes Inneres dich singend zum Scheiterhaufen lockt, sollst du dich dann lieber abwenden, dir die Ohren mit Wachs verstopfen, den perversen Glanz ignorieren, von dem dein Herz dir zubrüllt? [...] Oder ist es besser, dich - wie Boris - kopfüber und lachend in das heilige Wüten zu stürzen, das deinen Namen ruft?

and I think of what Hobie said: beauty alters the grain of reality.

aristo poetika'da der ki,'' dedi henry, ''ceset gibi gerçekte görmesi rahats?z edici ÅŸeyler sanat eserlerinde bakmaya doyulmayacak manzaralara dönüÅŸebilir.

My name is Adnan Nassar and I am Palestinian-American," he said in a rush. "I came to this country from Syria nine years ago and have since then earned American citizenship and am assistant manager of the Pizza Pad on Highway 6.

We being round thee, forget to die.

In retelling these events, I have fought against a tendency to sentimentalize Julian, to make him seem very saintly—basically to falsify him—in order to make our veneration of him seem more explicable; to make it seem something more, in short, than my own fatal tendency to try to make interesting people good.

beauty has to be wedded to something more meaningful. Only what is that thing? Why am I made the way I am? Why do I care about all the wrong things, and nothing at all for the right ones? Or, to tip it another way: how can I see so clearly that everything I love or care about is illusion, and yet—for me, anyway—all that's worth living for lies in that charm?

to make it seem something more, in short, than my own fatal tendency to try to make interesting people good

As is true of most incipient bad things in life, i had not really prepared myself for this possibility.

We had so many happy days in the country that fall that from this vantage they merge into a sweet and indistinct blur. Around Halloween the last, stubborn wildflowers died away and the wind became sharp and gusty, blowing sbowers of yellow leaves on the gray, wrinkled surface of the lake. On those chill afternoons when the sky was like lead and the clouds were racing, we stayed in the library, banking huge fires to keep warm. Bare willows clicked on the windowpanes like skeleton fingers.

Everything was raw and painful and confusing and wrong and yet it was as if I'd been dragged from freezing water through a break in the ice, into sun and blazing cold.

rapid-fire monotone.

And I know I said earlier that he was perfect, but he wasn't perfect, far from it; he could be silly and vain and remote and often cruel and still we loved him, in spite of, because.

a scrap of seventeenth-century sunlight compressed into dots and pixels

Las cosas nunca son lo que parecen..., todo bueno o todo malo. Sería mucho más fácil si lo fueran.

still when I lost her I lost sight of any landmark that might have led me someplace happier

Maybe I only see a pattern because I've been staring too long. But then again, maybe I see a pattern because it's there.

You didn't meet many people who moved freely through the world with such a vigorous contempt for it and at the same time such oddball and unthwartable faith in what, in childhood, he had liked to call "the Planet of Earth.