Quotes from Donna Tartt

I'd stopped myself from blurting the thing on the edge of my tongue, the thing I'd never said, even though 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.

He had never seen a gunshot wound. He kept asking what if felt like? dull or sharp? an ache or a burn? My head was spinning and naturally I could give him no kind of coherent answer but I remember thinking dimly that it was sort of like the first time I got drunk, or slept with a girl; not quite what one expected, really, but once it happened it couldn't be any other way. Neon lights: Motel 6, Dairy Queen. Colors so bright, they nearly broke my heart.

rain—was grappling for her wallet. "Maybe

You saw Dionysus, I suppose? I had not meant this at all seriously, and I was startled when nodded as casually as if I'd asked him if he'd done his homework.

valiant efforts to make conversation all stumbled and sank into quicksand. The main thing I remembered were the forced smiles, the heavy smell of cherry pipe tobacco and Grandpa Decker's not-very-friendly warning to keep my sticky little mitts off his model train set (an Alpine village which took up an entire room of their house and according to him was worth tens of thousands of dollars).

for Hobie, who sorrowed over these elegant old remnants as if they were underfed children or mistreated cats, it was a point of duty to rescue what he could and then with his gifts as carpenter and joiner to recombine them into beautiful young Frankensteins that were in some cases plainly fanciful but in others such faithful models of the period that they were all but indistinguishable from the real thing. p452

El amor es un maestro cruel y terrible. Uno pierde su yo en favor del otro, pero al hacerlo se esclaviza y se convierte en un desdichado.

it was years since I'd roused myself from my stupor of misery and self-absorption; between anomie and trance, inertia and parenthesis and gnawing my own heart out, there were a lot of small, easy, everyday kindnesses I'd missed out on; and even the word kindness was like rising from unconsciousness into some hospital awareness of voices, and people, from a stream of digitized machines.

It kept being a shock every time I remembered it, a fresh slap: she was gone. Every new event—everything I did for the rest of my life—would only separate us more and more: days she was no longer a part of, an ever-growing distance between us. Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away.

Sometimes, when there's been an accident and reality is too sudden and strange to comprehend, the surreal will take over.

We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others, that in the end, we become disguised to ourselves.

La muerte es la madre de la belleza. —¿Y qué es la belleza? —El terror.

the secret visible only to me: blooming in the darkness and never once mentioned by name.

it was sort of like the first time I got drunk, or slept with a girl; not quite what one expected, really, but once it happened one realized it couldn't be any other way

Si tenemos un alma lo bastante fuerte, podemos arrancarnos el velo y contemplar cara a cara la desnuda y terrible belleza; dejar que el dios nos consuma, nos devore, nos quiebre los huesos. Y luego nos escupa renacidos.

Charles Portis shows his mastery of place and the more complicated subtleties of time.

Exactly. And how did they drive people mad? They turned up the volume of the inner monologue, magnified qualities already present to great excess, made people so much themselves that they couldn't stand it.

even when I leaned in as far as I dared without being obvious

Me gustaría pensar que hay algo de cierto en el tópico amor vincit omnia. Pero si algo he aprendido en esta corta y triste vida, es que ese tópico es mentira. El amor no lo conquista todo. Y el que lo crea es un insensato.

The Jacobeans had a sure grasp of catastrophe. They understood not only evil, it seemed, but the extravagance of tricks with which evil presents itself as good. I felt they cut right to the heart of the matter, to the essential rottenness of the world.

But 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?

El temor por nuestras propias vidas pudo habernos inducido a llevarlo al patíbulo y ponerle la soga al cuello, pero fue necesario un ímpetu más urgente que nos hiciera continuar y darle una patada a la silla.

It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons. —SCHILLER

You know, sometimes there's a light at the table, like a visible halo, and you're it, you know? You're the light?