Quotes from Donna Tartt

Beauty—unless she is wed to something more meaningful—is always superficial.

For humans—trapped in biology—there was no mercy: we lived a while, we fussed around for a bit and died, we rotted in the ground like garbage. Time destroyed us all soon enough. But to destroy, or lose, a deathless thing—to break bonds stronger than the temporal—was a metaphysical uncoupling all its own, a startling new flavor of despair.

There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty—unless she is wed to something more meaningful—is always superficial. It is not that your Julian chooses solely to concentrate on certain, exalted things; it is that he chooses to ignore others equally as important.

I looked at him. There was so much I wanted to ask him, so much I wanted to say; but somehow I knew there wasn't time and even if there was, that it was all, somehow, beside the point. Are you happy here? I said at last. He considered this for a moment. Not particularly, he said. But you're not very happy where you are, either.

Because, here's the truth: life is catastrophe.

Adrift in an air of charged significance, doubt struck me: was it a real memory, had he really spoken those words to me, or was I dreaming?

I was behind in school, there were papers to write and exams were coming up but still I was young; the grass was green and the air was heavy with the sound of bees and I had just come back from the brink of Death itself, back to the sun and air. Now I was free; and my life, which I had thought was lost, stretched out indescribably precious and sweet before me.

There was a strong sense of being alone, in wintry deadness. Nothing made sense in any direction.

Something strangled them as they grew older, made them doubt their own powers—laziness? Habit? Their grip slackened; they stopped fighting and resigned themselves to what happened. "That's Life." That's what they all said. "That's Life, Harriet, that's just how it is, you'll see.

I think this goes more to the idea of 'relentless irony' than 'divine providence.

And isn't the whole point of things—beautiful things—that they connect you to some larger beauty?

In my own humorless state I failed to see anything except what I construed as certain tragic similarities between Gatsby and myself.

Reason is always apparent to a discerning eye. But luck? It's invisible, erratic, angelic.

You sound like my dad." "Well—let's put it another way. Who was it said that coincidence was just God's way of remaining anonymous?" "Now you really sound like my dad." "Who's to say that gamblers don't really understand it better than anyone else? Isn't everything worthwhile a gamble? Can't good come around sometimes through some strange back doors?

When she went back to the telephone Hely's breath, on the other end, was ragged and secretive.

Only occasionally did I notice the chain on the finch's ankle, or think what a cruel life for a little living creature—fluttering briefly, forced always to land in the same hopeless place.

The lamplight was eerie, and, standing there motionless in our bathrobes, sleepy, with shadows flickering all around, I felt as though I had woken from one dream into an even more remote one, some bizarre wartime bomb shelter of the unconscious.

worrying, Potter! Don't stand there and look so unhappy! If we lose, we win, and if we win, we win! Everything is good!

Even the adorable drag in her step (like the little mermaid, too fragile to walk on land) drove me crazy. She was the golden thread running through everything, a lens that magnified beauty so that the whole world stood transfigured in relation to her, and her alone.

Whatever teaches us to talk to ourselves is important: whatever teaches us to sing ourselves our of despair.

What if there was a disease in Alexandria, she thought, and everybody died but me? I'd go live at the library, she told herself. The notion was cheering. She saw herself reading by candlelight, shadows flickering on the ceiling above the labyrinth of shelves. She could take a suitcase from home–peanut butter and crackers, a blanket, a change of clothes–and pull together two of the big armchairs in the Reading Room to sleep on…

But do you really think," he said, concerned, "that one can call psychology a science?" "Certainly. What else is it?" "But even Plato knew that class and conditioning and so forth have an inalterable effect on the individual. It seems to me that psychology is only another word for what the ancients called fate.

We stood looking at each other. It was raining. She looked at me with her rain-colored eyes.

Horrific as it was, the present dark, I was afraid to leave it for the other, permanent dark – jelly and bloat, the muddy pit. I had seen the shadow of it on Bunny's face – stupid terror; the whole world opening upside down; his life exploding in a thunder of crows and the sky expanding empty over his stomach like a white ocean. Then nothing. Rotten stumps, sowbugs crawling in the fallen leaves. Dirt and dark.