Quotes from Donna Tartt

After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great.

More than anything I was relieved that in my unfamiliar babbling-and-wanting-to-talk state I'd stopped myself from blurting the thing I'd never said, even though it was something we both knew well enough without me saying out loud to him in the street - which was, of course, I love you.

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 much different from what I actually did. But of course I didn't see this crucial moment for what it actually was; I suppose we never do. Instead, I only yawned, and shook myself from the momentary daze that had come upon me, and went on my way down the stairs.

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

There was a horrible, erratic thumping in my chest, as if a large bird was trapped inside my ribcage and beating itself to death.

How quickly he fell; how soon it was over.

It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.

As long as I am acting out of love, I feel I am doing best I know how.

Henry's a perfectionist, I mean, really-really kind of inhuman — very brilliant, very erratic and enigmatic. He's a stiff, cold person, Machiavellian, ascetic and he's made himself what he is by sheer strength of will. His aspiration is to be this Platonic creature of pure rationality and that's why he's attracted to the Classics, and particularly to the Greeks — all those high, cold ideas of beauty and perfection.

And the nights, bigger than imagining: black and gusty and enormous, disordered and wild with stars.

And if beauty is terror," said Julian, "then what is desire? 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, chin cupped in palm.

I liked the idea of living in a city — any city, especially a strange one — liked the thought of traffic and crowds, of working in a bookstore, waiting tables in a coffee shop, who knew what kind of solitary life I might slip into? Meals alone, walking the dogs in the evenings; and nobody knowing who I was.

They understand not only evil, it seemed, but the extravagance of tricks with which evil presents itself as good.

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

Even if it meant that she had failed, she was glad. And if what she'd wanted had been impossible from the start, still there was a certain lonely comfort in the fact that she'd known it was impossible and had gone ahead and done it anyway.

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.

The world won't come to me...so I must go to it.

The dead appear to us in dreams because that's the only way they can make us see them; what we see is only a projection, beamed from a great distance, light shining at us from a dead star...

We don't like to admit it, but the idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than almost anything. All truly civilized people – the ancients no less than us – have civilized themselves through the wilful repression of the old, animal self.

Because it is dangerous to ignore the existence of the irrational. The more cultivated a person is, the more intelligent, the more repressed, then the more he needs some method of channeling the primitive impulses he's worked so hard to subdue. Otherwise those powerful old forces will mass and strengthen until they are violent enough to break free, more violent for the delay, often strong enough to sweep the will away entirely.

Yet my longing for her was like a bad cold that had hung on for years despite my conviction that I was sure to get over it at any moment.

Are you always up this early?' I asked him. 'Almost always,' he said without looking up. 'It's beautiful here, but morning light can make the most vulgar things tolerable.

They all shared a certain coolness, a cruel, mannered charm which was not modern in the least but had the strange cold breath of the ancient world : they were magnificent creatures, such eyes, such hands, such looks - sic oculos, sic ille manus, sic ora ferebat.

Can't good come around sometimes through some strange back doors?