Quotes from Donna Tartt

overly sensitive to the souls of rooms and objects, the emanations

art] those images that strike the heart and set it blooming like a flower, images that open up some much, much larger beauty that you can spend your whole life looking for and never find.

La morte è la madre della bellezza» disse Henry. «E cos'è la bellezza?» «Terrore.»

The walls billowed with printed fabric—yellow, green, indigo, purple—and a red hammer-and-sickle flag hung over the batik-draped mattress. It was as if a Russian cosmonaut had crashed in the jungle and fashioned himself a shelter of his nation's flag and whatever native sarongs and textiles he could find.

What mattered more was the feeling, a rich sweet undertow so commanding that in class, on the school bus, lying in bed trying to think of something safe or pleasant, some environment or configuration where my chest wasn't tight with anxiety, all I had to do was sink into the blood-warm current and let myself spin away to the secret place where everything was all right.

It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to lose control completely? To throw off all the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves?

We belonged together; there was a dream rightness and magic to it, inarguable; the thought of her flooded every corner of my mind with light and poured brightness into miraculous lofts I hadn't even known were there, vistas that seemed to exist not at all except in relationship to her.

People don't pay attention to ninety percent of what they see.

distracted themselves with all kinds of gadgets and devices, flooding themselves incessantly with information and texts and communication and entertainment from every direction to try to make themselves forget it: where we were, what we were.

All those years I'd drifted along too glassy and insulated for any kind of reality to push through: a delirium which had spun me along on its slow, relaxed wave since childhood, high and lying on the shag carpet in Vegas laughing at the ceiling fan, only I wasn't laughing any more, Rip van Winkle wincing and holding his head on the ground about a hundred years too late.

Because--the line of beauty is the line of beauty. It doesn't matter if it's been through the Xerox machine a hundred times ... Still with greatness, there's a jolt at the end of the wire. It doesn't matter how often you grab hold of the line, or how many people have grabbed hold of it before you. It's the same line. Fallen from a higher life. It still carries some of the same shock.

Birds can sing and fish can swim and I can do this.

Who knew, or cared, the names of the Turks who blew the roof off the Parthenon? the mullahs who had ordered the destruction of the Buddhas at Bamiyan? Yet living or dead: their acts stood. It was the worst kind of immortality. Intentionally or no: I had extinguished a light at the heart of the world.

He's telling you that living things don't last—it's all temporary. Death in life.

Anyways, the secret is, always fix their attention *away* from where the slippery stuff's going on. That's the first law of magic, Specs. Misdirection. Never forget it.

well that's the wonderful thing about books, that's the thing that books can do that no other art form can do: when we read a great book we do internalize it, it becomes part of us; when we read a great book we put it down and we're different people.

you can live many lives by reading books.

Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells awaited them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital.

Henry. Please. I was on the verge of tears. What's the matter with you? Have you lost your mind? Don't you understand what's going on? He stood up, dusted his hands on his trousers.

You're a Homeric scholar?' I might have said yes, but I had the feeling he'd be glad to catch me in a mistake and he would be able to do it easily. 'I like Homer' I said weakly. He regarded me chill distaste. 'I love Homer' He said.

He's telling you that living things don't last—it's all temporary. Death in life. That's why they're called natures mortes. Maybe you don't see it at first with all the beauty and bloom, the little speck of rot. But if you look closer—there it is.

War? One can lose oneself in the joy of battle, in fighting for a glorious cause, but there are not many glorious causes for which to fight these days.

And that's why I've chosen to write these pages as I've written them. For only by stepping into the middle zone, the polychrome edge between truth and untruth, is it tolerable to be here and writing this at all.

Books are written by the alone for the alone.