Quotes from Donna Tartt

Why am I made the way I am? Why do I care all about the wrong things, and nothing at all for the right reasons? Or, to tip it another way: how can I see so clearly that everything I love or care about is illusion, and yet- for me anyway- all that's worth living for lies in that charm?

What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can't be trusted

If one is to read Dante, and understand him, one must become a Christian if only for a few hours.

The significance doesn't matter. The historical significance deadens it.

She'd heard the stories so often that she knew them by heart, could repeat them if she wanted, sometimes even dash in a detail or two neglected in the retelling [...]. The stories were familiar much as stories from her mother's girlhood were familiar, or stories from books. But none of them seemed connected with her in any fundamental way

Se uma pintura realmente se nos entranha no coração e muda a maneira como vemos e pensamos e sentimos, não dizemos para connosco: Oh, adoro esta pintura porque é universal. Adoro esta pintura porque diz algo a toda a humanidade. Não é essa a razão por que quem quer que seja adora uma peça de arte.

no one will ever, ever be able to persuade me that life is some awesome, rewarding treat. because, here's the truth: life is catastrophe

A life spent at one's desk is a life alone.

Those first days before classes started I spent alone in my whitewashed room, in the bright meadows of Hampden. And I was happy in those first days as really I'd never been before, roaming like a sleepwalker, stunned and drunk with beauty.

Fate is cruel but maybe not random. Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn't mean we have to bow and gravel to it.

Flapping crows. Shiny beetles crawling in the undergrowth. A patch of sky, frozen in a cloudy retina, reflected in a puddle on the ground. Yoo-hoo. Being and nothingness

life - whatever else it is - is short... 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.

Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature

And as much as I wanted to, I knew I couldn't turn around, that to look at her directly was to violate the laws of her world and mine; she had come to me the only way she could, and our eyes met in the glass for a long still moment; but just as she seemed about to speak - with what seemed a combination of amusement, affection, exasperation - a vapor rolled between us and I woke up.

Nothing", he said. "Except that my life, for the most part, has been very stale and colorless. Dead, I mean. The world has always been an empty place to me. I was incapable of enjoying even the simplest things. I felt dead in everything I did.

And just as 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- so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.

Era melhor nunca ter nascido — nunca ter desejado nada, nunca ter esperado nada.

Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction.

Booze made people sloppy and unfocused:

We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it?' 'To live,' said Camilla. 'To live forever,' said Bunny

Who knew it was in my power to make anyone so happy? Or that I could ever be so happy myself?

They want it all as detailed as possible because even the tiniest things mean something. Whenever you see flies or insects in a still life -- a wilted petal, a black spot on the apple -- the painter is giving you a secret message. He's telling you that living things don't last -- it's all temporary. Death in life. That's why they're called natures mortes. Maybe you don't see it at first with all the beauty and bloom, the little speck of rot. But if you look closer -- there it is.

I suppose there is a certain crucial interval in everyone's life when character is fixed forever; for me it was that first fall term in Hampden. So many things remain with me from that time, even now: those preferences in clothes and books and even food - aquired then and largely I must admit in adolescent emulation of the rest of the Greek class...

I believe, in a funny way, the job of the novelist is to be out there on the fringes and speaking for an experience that has not really been spoken for.