Quotes from Donna Tartt

Neither place was readily apparent to a drunk stumbling out into the night. But Monmouth was scarcely thirty feet away, and my own room, with its conspicuously lighted window, must have loomed in his path like a beacon.

Even now I remember those pictures, like pictures in a storybook one loved as a child. Radiant meadows, mountains vaporous in the trembling distance; leaves ankle-deep on a gusty autumn road; bonfires and fogs in the valleys; cellos, dark windowpanes, snow.

consumed by a more general sense of dread, of imprisonment within the dreary round of school and home: circumstances

Every new event - everything I did for the rest of my life - would only separate us more and more: days she was no longer a part of, an ever-growing distance between us. Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away.

She, I thought, was very beautiful, in an unsettling, almost medieval way which would not be apparent to the casual observer.

Eso era el cuerpo: falible, sujeto a achaques. Enfermedad, dolor. ¿Por qué la gente se acaloraba tanto sobre ello?

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 think? Remember the Erinyes?

He would deny this is confronted, citing evasively his affection for Dante and Giotto, but anything overtly religious filled him with a pagan alarm; and I believe that like Pliny, whom he resembled in so many respects, he secretly thought it to be a degenerate cult carried to extravagant lengths.

my shoes squelching on the dewy grass

Then Henry spoke. His words were low but deliberate and distinct. Should I do what is necessary? To my surprise, Julian took both Henry's hands in his own. You should only, ever, do what is necessary, he said. What, I thought, the hell is going on? I stood at the top of the stairs, trying not to make a sound, wanting to leave before they saw me but afraid to make a move. To my utter, utter surprise Henry leaned over and gave Julian a quick little businesslike kiss on the cheek.

I suppose I was only a little depressed, now the novelty of it had worn off, at the wildly alien character of the place in which I found myself: a strange land with strange customs and peoples and unpredictable weathers.

Qualunque cosa ci insegni a parlare con noi stessi è importante qualunque cosa ci insegni a cullarci fino a uscire dalla disperazione.

Whatever teaches us to talk to ourselves is important: whatever teaches us to sing ourselves out of despair. But the painting has also taught me that we can speak to each other across time.

I hadn't slept with anybody in Vermont except a little red-haired girl I met at a party on the first weekend.

Intentionally or no: I had extinguished a light at the heart of the world.

But walking through it all was one thing; walking away, unfortunately, has proved to be quite another, and though once I thought I had left that ravine forever on an April afternoon long ago, now I am not so sure.

Minie balls and repeating rifles. That was why the body count was so high. We had trench warfare in America way before WW1. p128

it felt like the waking-up moment between dream and daylight where everything merged and mingled just as it was about to change, all in the same, fluid, euphoric slide:

I feel I should say it as urgently as if I were standing in the room with you. That life – whatever else it is – is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn't mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we're not always so glad to be here, it's our task to immerse ourselves anyway:

That's odd,' said Henry. 'The first thing I thought of when I tasted that coffee was you.

It was six o'clock in the morning, and the sun was rising over the mountains, and the birches, and the impossibly green meadows; and to me, dazed with night and no sleep and three days on the highway, it was like a country from a dream.

I supposed that when anyone accustomed to working with the mind is faced with a straightforward action, there's a tendency to embellish, to make it overly clever. On paper there's a certain symmetry. Now that I'm faced with the prospect of executing it I realize how hideously complicated it is.

Consequently their relationship with their dead brother was of the most intimate sort, his strong, bright, immutable character shining changelessly against the vagueness and vacillation of their own characters, and the characters of people that they knew; and they grew up believing that this was due to some rare, angelic incandescence of nature on Robin's part, and not at all to the fact that he was dead.

In recent years they had fallen in with a gabby, childless couple, older than they were, called the MacNatts. Mr. MacNatt was an auto-parts salesman; Mrs. MacNatt was shaped like a pigeon and sold Avon. They had got my parents doing things like taking bus trips to factory outlets and playing a dice game called "bunko" and hanging around the piano bar at the Ramada Inn.