Quotes from Donna Tartt

But my loyalties were elsewhere. And the flavor of Pippa's kiss—bittersweet and strange—stayed with me all the way back uptown, 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.

Thin and pale as a starved poet

And 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.

That is not the point," he said. "I am an Arab and I resent the racial slurs you make against my people.

E talvez seja ridículo continuar nesse raciocínio, embora não importe já que ninguém nunca vai ver isso, mas será que faz algum sentido saber que acaba mal pra todo mundo, até para os mais felizes de nós, e que todos perdemos tudo o que importa no final, e ao mesmo tempo saber que, apesar de tudo isso, segundo a cruel elaboração do jogo, é possível jogá-lo com uma espécie de alegria?

He played with relish, sleeves rolled up, smiling at his work, tinkling from the low ranges to the high with the tricky syncopation of a tap dancer going up a Ziegfeld staircase.

It seemed the best thing was just to come right out and say it. You know, I said, I'm really not attracted to you. I mean, not that- Isn't that interesting, he said coolly. I'm really not attracted to you, either. But- You were there.

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

Boris laughed, and threw out some fake-looking gang sign. "Suit yourself, yo," he said, in his "gangsta" voice (discernible from his regular voice only by the hand gesture and the "yo") as he got up and roll-walked out. "Nigga gotz to eat.

you should never get a person's name tattooed on you, because then you lose the person. I was too young to know that when I got the tattoo.

out of a clear blue sky the heroes and heroines abandoned their adventures for some dull sweetheart, got married and had families, and generally started acting like a bunch of cows.

It was a stillness I knew; this was how a house closed in on itself when someone had died.

But even that day, there on the porch, with Charles beside me and the smell of wood smoke in the air, it had a quality of a memory; there it was, before my eyes, and yet too beautiful to believe

Una mente perspicaz siempre acaba descubriendo la razón. ¿Pero la suerte? Es invisible, caótica, angelical.

controlling.

A veces tienes que perder para ganar.

Everything was going beautifully, on the brink of taking wing, and I had a feeling that I'd never had, that reality itself was transforming around us in some beautiful and dangerous fashion, that we were being driven by a force we didn't understand, towards an end I did not know.

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.

I read The Great Gatsby. It is one of my favorite books and I had taken it out of the library in hopes that it would cheer me up; of course, it only made me feel worse, since in my own humorless state I failed to see anything except what I construed as certain tragic similarities between Gatsby and myself.

And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn't touch.

with all your chick peas and your filthy little pocket breads?

Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. - The Secret History

I called, my voice false-sounding and hoarse, slipping the painting into an extra pillowcase and hiding it under the bed before hurrying out of the room.

No law against throwing a coat in the canal, is there?" "I would have thought so, yes." "Well—who knows. Not very widely enforced law, if you ask me