Quotes from Donna Tartt

Death is the mother of beauty," said Henry. "And what is beauty?" "Terror.

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.

Who was it said that coincidence was just God's way of remaining anonymous?

If I'm not working, I'm not happy. That's it. That's the prerequisite for me for happiness.

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.

Wade straight through life, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and heart open.

Who cares? If he is good to you? None of us ever find enough kindness in the world, do we?

Well, I do have some maiden aunts that are not quite like the aunts in the book, but I definitely do have a couple of them, and a couple of old aunties.

You are - all your experience just kind of accumulates, and the novel takes a richness of its own simply because it has the weight of all those years that one's put into it.

I'm not sure whay I've been drawn to this subject, except that murder is a subject that has always drawn people for as long as people have been telling stories.

Everything takes me longer than I expect. It's the sad truth about life.

To really be centered and to really work well and to think about the kinds of things that I need to think about, I need to spend large amounts of time alone.

But romantic vision can also lead one away from certain very hard, ugly truths about life that are important to know.

The novel is about five students of classics who are studying with a classics professor, and they take the ideas of the things that they're learning from him a bit too seriously, with terrible consequences.

Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a 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.

I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.

Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones that I did not.

Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.

Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only—if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn't it? And isn't the whole point of things—beautiful things—that they connect you to some larger beauty?

It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.

A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don't get to choose our own hearts. We can't make ourselves want what's good for us or what's good for other people. We don't get to choose the people we are.

I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.

Are you happy here?" I said at last. He considered this for a moment. "Not particularly," he said. "But you're not very happy where you are, either.

There are such things as ghosts. People everywhere have always known that. And we believe in them every bit as much as Homer did. Only now, we call them by different names. Memory. The unconscious.