Quotes from Donna Tartt

For a moment, as his arm touched mine, he was a creature of flesh and blood, but the next he was a hallucination again, a figment of the imagination stalking down the hallway as heedless of me ass ghosts, in their shadowy rounds, are said to be heedless of the living.

One's thought patterns become different...when forced into the confines of a rigid and unfamiliar tongue. Certain common ideas become inexpressible; other, previously undreamt-of ones spring to life, finding miraculous new articulation.

Every shrink, every career counselor, every Disney princess knows the answer: "Be yourself." "Follow your heart.

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

The dead appear to us in dreams

It's funny, but thinking back on it now, I realize that this particular point in time, as I stood there blinking in the deserted hall, was the one point at which I might have chosen to do something very different from what I actually did.

Another thing I figured out, after a few days in the house on Desert End Road: what Xandra and my dad really meant when they said my dad had "stopped drinking" was that he'd switched from Scotch (his beverage of choice) to Corona Lights and Vicodin.

Sometimes, when there's been an accident and reality is too sudden and strange to comprehend, the surreal will take over. Action slows to a dreamlike glide, frame by frame; the motion of a hand, a sentence spoken, fills an eternity. Little things—a cricket on a stem, the veined branches on a leaf—are magnified, brought from the background in achingly clear focus.

A guesstimate?" prompted the man Enrique. "About your dad?" "Ballpark will do," the Korean lady said.

I sometimes get the feeling that he was less pleased by kindness itself than by the elegance of the gesture.

And yet I thought of him almost every day. The Russian novels I had to read for school reminded me of him; Russian novels, and seven pillars of wisdom, and so too the Lower East Side—tattoo parlors and pierogi shops, pot in the air, old polish ladies swaying side to side with grocery bags and kids smoking in the doorways of bars along Second Avenue.

In a certain sense, this was why I felt so close to the others in the Greek class. They, too, knew this beautiful and harrowing landscape, centuries dead; they'd had the same experience of looking up from their books with fifth-century eyes and finding the world disconcertingly sluggish and alien, as if it were not their home.

You don't need a point. The point is maybe that the point is too big to see or work round to on our own

Are you going somewhere?" I said, regarding him timidly. The suit made him seem a different person, less melancholy and distracted, more capable—unlike the Hobie of my first visit, with his bedraggled aspect of an elegant but mistreated polar bear.

In the first week of April the weather turned suddenly, unseasonably, insistently lovely. The sky was blue, the air warm and windless, and the sun beamed on the muddy ground with all the sweet impatience of June. Toward the fringe of the wood, the young trees were yellow with the first tinge of new leaves; woodpeckers laughed and drummed in the copses and, lying in bed with my window open, I could hear the rush and gurgle of the melted snow running in the gutters all night long.

Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the

an excuse to bring out the bottle of sherry and visit

Si un cuadro te llega de verdad al corazón y cambia tu forma de mirar, de pensar, de sentir, no piensas: «Oh, me encanta este cuadro porque es universal» o «Me encanta este cuadro porque habla a toda la humanidad». Esa no es la razón por la que alguien ama una obra de arte. Es un susurro secreto desde un callejón: «Psss. Eh, chico. Sí, tú».

a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being

Wrap it in newspapers and pack it at the very bottom of the trunk, my dear. With the other curiosities.

It does not to do be frightened of things about which you know nothing,' he said. 'You are like children. Afraid of the dark.

MIGHT HAVE LIKED Xandra in other circumstances—which, I guess, is sort of like saying I might have liked the kid who beat me up if he hadn't beat me up.

I can't believe you two," Henry said crossly. "I reminded you of this last night." "But we forgot," said the twins, in simultaneous despair. "How could you?" "Well, if you wake up intending to murder someone at two o'clock, you hardly think what you're going to feed the corpse for dinner." "Asparagus is in season," said Francis helpfully.

You know that thing Julian used to say,' said Francis. 'Which thing?' 'About a Hindu saint being able to slay a thousand on the battlefield and it not being a sin unless he felt remorse.