Quotes from Donna Tartt

It's a perfectly handy skill for any boy to know." "Certainly it is, if he needs to hail a passing tugboat.

yet to know as well, despite all this, as cruelly as the game is stacked, that it's possible to play it with a kind of joy?

I knew then, and know now, virtually nothing

I like the idea of living in a city - any city, especially a strange one - like the thought of traffic and crowds, of working in a bookstore, waiting tables in a coffee shop, who knew what kind of odd, solitary life I might slip into? Meals alone, waling the dogs in the evenings; and nobody knowing who I was.

It was because I thought too much, lived too much in the mind.

She was wearing a man's nightshirt, much too big for her, and I found myself staring at her bare legs—tawny calves, slender ankles, lovely, dusty-soled boyfeet.

I was relieved that in my unfamiliar babbling-and-wanting-to-talk state I'd stopped myself from blurting the thing on the edge of my tounge, the thing I'd never said, even thouhg it was something we both knew well enough without me saying it out loud to him in the street-which was, of course, I love you.

She was sitting quietly on the bank of a stream with her feet in the water, her robe perfectly white, and no blood anywhere except for her hair. It was dark, and clotted, completely soaked. As if she's tried to dye it red.

I felt my heart limping in my chest, and was revolted by it, a pitiful muscle, sick and bloody, pulsing against my ribs.

Welty himself used to talk about fateful objects. Every dealer and antiquaire recognizes them. The pieces that occur and recur. Maybe for someone else, not a dealer, it wouldn't be an object. It'd be a city, a color, a time of day. The nail where your fate is liable to catch and snag.

That Mossberg, Boris said to me, accepting the bottle passed over the front seat. Evil dirty thing. Sawed off--? sprays pellets here to Hamburg. Aim it way the fuck away from everyone and still you will hit half the people in the room.

What if - is more complicated than that? What if maybe opposite is true as well? Because, if bad can sometimes come from good actions-? Where does it say, anywhere, that only bad can come from bad actions? Maybe soemtimes-the wrong way is the right way? You can take the wrong path and it still comes out where you want to be? Or spin it another way, soemtiems you can do everything wrong and it still turns out to be right?

Hordes of people on the street, lighted Christmas trees sparkling high on penthouse balconies and complacent Christmas music floating out of shops, and weaving in and out of crowds I had a strange feeling of being already dead

You could grasp it in an instant, you could live in it forever.

El mundo no acudirá a mí, solía decir, yo tengo que salir a su encuentro.

The ceilings had set off a ghostly echo, giving all that desperate hilarity the quality of a memory even as I sat listening to it, memories of things I'd never known.

Es peligroso ignorar la existencia de lo irracional. Cuanto más cultivada es una persona, cuanto más inteligente y más reprimida, más necesita algún medio de canalizar los impulsos primitivos que tanto se ha esforzado en suprimir.

I want to sleep," he said, with a melodramatic roll of his eye, " Ã¢â'¬Ëœdormir plutôt que vivre'!" " Ã¢â'¬ËœDans un sommeil aussi doux que la mort …' Ã¢â'¬Â said Henry with a smile.

I sailed home on the bus, melting with sorrow and loveliness, a starry ache that lifted me up above the windswept city like a kite: my head in the rainclouds, my heart in the sky.

Beauty is harch.

And as much as I'd like to believe there's a truth beyond illusion, I've come to believe that there's no truth beyond illusion.

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

sure how that was going to work, but once I got Boris out of the house I could figure something out. "Please, come on." "Is State Care that bad in America?" said Boris doubtfully.

the suddenness of the explosion had never left me, I was always looking for something to happen, always expecting it just out of the corner of my eye, certain configurations of people in public places could trigger it, a wartime urgency, someone cutting in front of me the wrong way or walking too fast at a particular angle was enough to throw me into tachycardia and trip-hammer panic, the kind that made me stumble for the nearest park bench;