Quotes from Donna Tartt

It's 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.

And what is beauty?" "Terror.

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

music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky

A goodbye at the gate," said Hobie. He seemed to be talking partly to himself. "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.' " He

Cada acontecimiento nuevo —todo lo que hiciera en adelante— no haría más que separarnos; serían días de los que ella ya no formaría parte, por lo que la distancia entre nosotros sería cada vez mayor. Cada día de mi vida ella no haría sino alejarse aún más.

throw up his hands and say, 'Who, me? I had nothing to do with it.'

These people understood- as I did- the back alleys of the soul, whispers and shadows, money slipping from hand to hand, the password, the code, the second self, all the hidden consolations that lifted life above the ordinary and made it worth living.

I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive

Judy told me all about you. You're the new guy who's studying Greek with those creepos. Judy? What do you mean, Judy told you about me? She ignored this. You had better watch out, she said. I have heard some weird shit about those people. Like what? Like they worship the fucking Devil. The Greeks have no Devil, I said pedantically.

There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty — unless she is wed to something more meaningful — is always superficial.

It's often pain tha makes us more aware of self

unfortunately it's necessary," he said, sniffling and wiping his nose on his sleeve. His course load was

there were a lot of small, easy, everyday kindnesses I'd missed out on; and even the word kindness was like rising from unconsciousness into some hospital awareness of voices, and people, from a stream of digitized machines.

changing the plan at the last moment. "Oh, come on. The chicken can wait. Can't it? Sure it can." He was talking a mile a minute. "You can put the other thing back

That maybe even if we're not always so glad to be here, it's our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open.

This piece, not of the first quality, doesn't fit with anything else I own, and yet isn't it always the inappropriate thing, the thing that doesn't quite work, that's oddly the dearest?

beauty alters the grain of reality. And I keep thinking too of the more conventional wisdom: namely, that the pursuit of pure beauty is a trap, a fast track to bitterness and sorrow, that beauty has to be wedded to something more meaningful.

Death is the mother of beauty And what is beauty? Terror Well said. Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary, genuine beauty is always quite alarming

No person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us.

He did touch people's lives, the lives of strangers, in an entirely unanticipated way. It was they who really mourned him - or what they thought was him - with a grief that was no less sharp for not being intimate with its object.

A teahouse amid the cherry blossoms, on the way to death. p136

They were all laughing at me, even Shirley Temple, the whole world was laughter bouncing fractal and metallic off the tiled walls, delirium and phantasmagorica, a sense of the world growing and swelling like some fabulous blown balloon floating and billowing away to the stars, and I was laughing too and I wasn't even sure what I was laughing at since I was still so shaken I was trembling all over.

the walls were spidery with the shadows of potted palms and on the ceilings