Quotes from Donna Tartt

But depression wasn't the word. This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time.

Ma dopotutto non è sempre l'elemento fuori posto, quello che non funziona alla perfezione, che stranamente finiamo per amare di più?

what we find ourselves gazing at in astonishment when God finally takes His hands off our eyes and says: Look!

I tend to equate physical beauty with qualities with which it has absolutely nothing to do. I see a pretty mouth or a moody pair of eyes and imagine all sorts of deep affinities, private kinships.

Angrily, I concentrated on her flaws, willfully studying the photographs that caught her at awkward ages and less flattering angles - long nose, thin cheeks, her eyes (despite their heartbreaking color) naked-looking with their pale lashes - Huck-Finn plain. Yet all these aspects were - to me - so tender and particular they moved to despair.

What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can't be trusted—? What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance

winter grayness weighing like stone.

I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead.

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.

it wasn't until I had helped to kill a man that I realized how elusive and complex an act a murder can actually be

They were a pair of white mice, I thought—only Kitsey was a spun-sugar, fairy-princess mouse whereas Andy was more the kind of luckless, anemic, pet-shop mouse you might feed to your boa constrictor.

At the silence, my heart went cold. Dead flowers stood rotting in the massive Chinese vases and a shut-up heaviness overweighed the room: the air almost too stale to breathe...It was a stillness I knew; this was a house closed in on itself when someone had died.

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.

You want to know what Classics are?" said a drunk Dean of Admissions to me at a faculty party a couple of years ago. "I'll tell you what Classics are. Wars and homos." A sententious and vulgar statement, certainly, but like many such gnomic vulgarities, it also contains a tiny splinter of truth.)

every great painting is really a self-portrait

and what could be more terrifying and beautiful to souls like the Greeks or our own than to lose control completely; to throw off the chains of being for an instant; to shatter the accident of our mortal selves.

Raviv and Avi, and—my favorite—a Russian Jew named Grisha. (" 'Russian Jew' contradiction in terms," he explained, in a lavish plume of menthol smoke. "To Russian mind anyway. Since 'Jew' to antisemite mind is not the same as true Russian—Russia is notorious of this fact.") Grisha had been born in Sevastopol, which he claimed to remember ("black water

For that you should read the original. In very great poetry the music often comes through even when one doesn't know language. I loved Dante passionately before I knew a word of Italian.

sometimes, unexpectedly, grief pounded over me in waves that left me gasping; and when the waves washed back, I found myself looking out over a brackish wreck which was illumined in a light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead.

When I got to my room it was silver and alien with moonlight

Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that's why we're so anxious to lose them, don't you think? Remember

As I lay on my side, staring at a pool of white moonlight on the wooden floor, a gust of wind blew the curtains out, long and pale as ghosts. As though an invisible hand were leafing through them, the

She really was older, not the glancing-eyed girl I had fallen in love with but no less beautiful for that; beautiful now in a way less excited my senses than tore at my very heart.

What if our badness and mistakes are the very thing that set our fate and bring us round to good? What if, for some of us, we can't get there any other