Quotes from Donna Tartt

I waited for him to pick up the thread again—and when he didn't, we sat there peacefully, while I sipped my cooling tea (Lapsang Souchong, smoky and peculiar) and felt the strangeness of my life, and where I was.

Let's both be good, and truthful, and kind to each other, and let's be happy together and have fun always.

Joan of Arc had led armies when she was hardly older than Harriet. Yet, for Christmas last year, Harriet's father had given Harriet an insulting board game for girls called What Shall I Be? It was a particularly flimsy game, meant to offer career guidance but no matter how well you played, it offered only four possible futures: teacher, ballerina, mother, or nurse.

I never took it out...though 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.

Pragmatists are often strangely superstitious.

But though I can digress with the best of them, I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.

I loved her every minute of every day, heart and mind and soul and all of it, and it was getting late and I wanted the place never to close, never.

She was as cool as dammit.

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. There are other advantages, more difficult to speak of, things which ancient sources only hint at and which I myself only understood after the fact.

no matter how hard I tried to wish him out of the picture—for there he always was, in my hands and my voice and my walk...

But while I have never considered myself a very good person, neither can I bring myself to believe that I am spectacularly bad one. Perhaps it's simply impossible to think of oneself in such a way.

But I am getting sentimental. Sometimes, when I think about these things, I do.

I felt like a lifetime had come and gone since my night with Pippa and I thought how happy I'd been, rushing to meet her in the sharp-edged winter darkness, my elation at spotting her under a streetlamp out in front of Film Forum and how I'd stood on the corner to savor it - the joy of watching her watch for me. Her expectant watching-the-crowd face. Me she was watching for: me. And the heart-shock of believing, for only a moment, that you might just have what could never be yours.

I think about it quite a bit, actually, that look on his face. I think about a lot of things. I think about the first time I ever saw a birch tree; about the last time I saw Julian; about the first sentence that I ever learned in Greak. ?????? ?? ????. Beauty is harsh. ? Donna Tartt, The Secret History

Time, and repeated screenings, have endowed the memory with a menace the original did not possess. -The Secret History, pg. 260

Safe trip. I love you. No kidding.

like a stray dog hungry for affection, I felt some profound shift in allegiance, blood-deep, a sudden, humiliating, eyewatering conviction of this place is good, this person is safe, I can trust him, nobody will hurt me here.

It seems to me that psychology is only another word for what the ancients called fate.

What do you think about America? Everyone always smiles so big! Well—most people. Maybe not so much you. I think it looks stupid.

Mine, mine. Fear, idolatry, hoarding. The delight and terror of the fetishist.

But how," said Charles, who was close to tears, "how can you possibly justify cold-blooded murder?" Henry lit a cigarette. "I prefer to think of it," he had said, "as redistribution of matter.

As for Charles – well, basically, he likes girls. If he's drunk, I'll do. But – just when I've managed to harden my heart, he'll turn around and be so sweet. I always fall for it. I don't know why.

a light that made me think of long hours in dusty libraries, and old books, and silence.

he was about as erotic as an old football coach.