Quotes from Donna Tartt

One's thought patterns become different, he said, 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.

De algún modo el presente se había contraído convirtiéndose en un lugar más pequeño y mucho menos interesante. Tal vez era eso lo que ocurría cuando la gente se hacía mayor.

Is it better to throw yourself head first and laughing into the holy rage calling your name? It's not about the outward appearances but inward significance. A grandeur in the world, but not of the world, a grandeur that the world doesn't understand. That first glimpse of pure otherness, in whose presence you bloom out and out and out. A self one does not want. A heart one cannot help.

it seemed that the whole past was redefined and brought into focus by this moment

What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight towards a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster?

Although, I do have to say, it was difficult to imagine him

And yet it was remarkable too how his world limped on without him. Strange, I thought, as I jumped a sheet of water at the curb, how a few hours could change everything—or rather, how strange to find that the present contained such a bright shard of the living past, damaged and eroded but not destroyed.

I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.

Does such a thing as the fatal flaw, that showy dark crack running down the middle of life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.

And the painting, above his head, was the still point where it all hinged: dreams and signs, past and future, luck and fate.

Chlorotic, with a sunken chest, he smoked incessantly, wore cheap shirts that had grayed in the wash, drank endless cups of sugary tea.

glared at Danny with her wolfish eyes, and

It's a terrible thing, what we did," said Francis abruptly. "I mean, this man was not Voltaire we killed. But still. It's a shame. I feel bad about it.

Se penso, se mi figuro d'aver perso quest'occasione per paura o per comodo o per qualunque altro motivo, mi vengono i brividi.

I hate Gucci, said Francis. Do you? said Henry, glancing up from his reverie. Really? I think it's rather grand. Come on, Henry. Well, it's so expensive, but it's so ugly too, isn't it? I think they make it ugly on purpose. And yet people buy it out of sheer perversity. I don't see what you think is grand about that. Anything is grand if it's done on a large enough scale, said Henry. this is by god not donna tartt

Everyone basically has one aria to sing over their entire life.

I did not think I could stand a Christmas at my parents' house, with a plastic tree and no snow and the TV going constantly. It was not as if my parent were so anxious to have me, either. 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 MacNat was shaped like a pigeon and sold Avon.

Does it make any sense at all to know that it ends badly for all of us, even the happiest of us, and that we all lose everything that matters in the end—and 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?

We can't choose what we want and don't want and that's the hard lonely truth. Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it's going to kill us. We can't escape who we are.

Yet (moment by painful moment, breath by painful breath) one got through things.

Beauty is terror

But who am I to give lessons? There are no real messages in my fiction. The first duty of the novelist is to entertain. It is a moral duty. People who read your books are sick, sad, traveling, in the hospital waiting room while someone is dying. Books are written by the alone for the alone.

A morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs

I'd given up trying to explain Hobie to Boris: the house, the workshop, his thoughtful way of listening (...) but more than anything a sort of pleasing atmosphere of mind: foggy, autumnal, a mild and welcoming micro-climate that made me feel safe and comfortable in his company.