Quotes from Donna Tartt

By happy contrast, Hobie's whole day revolved around dinner.

It's awful being a child," she said, simply, "at the mercy of other people.

is it better to throw yourself head first and laughing into the holy rage calling your name?

I mean, this man was not /Voltaire/ we killed.

my own fatal tendency to try to make interesting people good. And

I was confused by this sudden glare of attention; it was as if the characters in a favorite painting, absorbed in their own concerns, had looked up out of the canvas and spoken to me.

even when I couldn't see it I liked knowing it was there for the depth and solidity it gave things, the reinforcement to infrastructure, an invisible, bedrock rightness that reassured me just as it was reassuring to know that far away, whales swam untroubled in Baltic waters and monks in arcane time zones chanted ceaselessly for the salvation of the world.

In films, we are voyeurs, but in novels, we have the experience of being someone else: knowing another person's soul from the inside. No other art form does that. And this is why sometimes, when we put down a book, we find ourselves slightly altered as human beings. Novels change us from within.

Death is the mother of beauty," said Henry. "And what is beauty?" "Terror." "Well said," said Julian. "Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.

She closed her eyes, dark-lidded, dark shadows beneath them; she really was older, not the glancing-eyed girl I had fallen in love with but no less beautiful for that; beautiful now in a way that less excited my senses than tore at my very heart.

I met her my first year of college, and was initially attracted to her because she seemed an intelligent, brooding malcontent like myself; but after about a month, during which time she'd firmly glued herself to me, I began to realize, with some little horror, that she was nothing more than a lowbrow, pop-psychology version of Sylvia Plath.

Because I don't care what anyone says or how often or winningly they say it: no one will ever, ever be able to persuade me that life is some awesome, rewarding treat. Because, here's the truth: life is a catastrophe. The basic fact of existence – of walking around trying to feed ourselves and find friends and whatever else we do – is a catastrophe.

A moi, L'historie d'une de mes folies.

It was like waking from a nightmare to a worse nightmare.

After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great. To escape the cognitive mode of experience, to transcend the accident of one's moment of being.

But, if I dare say it, it wasn't until I had helped kill a man that I realized how elusive and complex an act a murder can actually be, and not necessarily attributable to one dramatic motive.

A picture that will never leave me. 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.

And besides, is death really so terrible a thing? It seems terrible to you, because you are young, but who is to say he is not better off now than you are? Or—if death is a journey to another place—that you will not see him again?" He opened his lexicon and began to search for his place. "It does not do to be frightened of things about which you know nothing," he said. "You are like children. Afraid of the dark.

Maybe good luck was like bad luck in that it took a while to sink in.

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.

With a beautiful girl I could have consoled myself that she was out of my league; that I was so haunted and stirred even by her plainness suggested—ominously—a love more binding than physical affection, some tar-pit of the soul where I might flop around and malinger for years.

Nihil sub sole novum [...] Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.

swaying and sleepy as I sailed home on the bus, melting with sorrow and loveliness, a starry ache that lifted me up above the windswept city like a kite: my head in the rainclouds, my heart in the sky.

It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from all the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one's burned tongues and skinned knees, that one's aches and pains are all one's own. Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can never truly understand us. Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that's why we're so anxious to lose them, don't you think?