Quotes from Donna Tartt

the classical mind is narrow, unhesitating, relentless... I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.

If he really wanted to be happy in the world, Horst? To have any kind of joyful or happy life? He should pay twenty grand to go back to his rapid detox place and then come here and smoke Buddha Haze and stand in a museum all day long.

It never occurred to me that half of the population of Vermont wasn't experiencing pretty much what I put myself through every night- bone-crackling cold that made my joints ache, cold so relentless I felt it in my dreams: ice floes, lost expeditions, the lights of search planes swinging over whitecaps as I floundered alone Arctic Seas.

It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely?

At home, my mother had known how to suffocate my dad's anger by growing silent, a low, unwavering flame of contempt that sucked all the oxygen out of the room and made everything he said and did seem ridiculous.

Well, is true. I did know. Because if possible to paint fakes that look like that? Las Vegas would be the most beautiful city in the history of earth!

liked the idea of living in a city — any city, especially a strange one — liked the thought of traffic and crowds, of working in a bookstore, waiting tables in a coffee shop, who knew what kind of solitary life I might slip into? Meals alone, walking the dogs in the evenings; and nobody knowing who I was.

Everything came alive in her company; she cast a charmed theatrical light about her so that to see anything through her eyes was to see it in brighter colors than ordinary

Um, we don't hit women in America." He scowled, and spit out an apple seed. "No. Americans just persecute smaller countries that believe different from them.

Bad artists copy, good artists steal.

Did she ever have the sense of observing herself from afar, as I often did, as if the explosion had knocked my body and my soul into two separate entities that remained about six feet apart from one another?

All my life, people have taken my shyness for sullenness, snobbery, bad temper of one sort or another. Stop looking so superior! my father sometimes used to shout at me when I was eating, watching television, or otherwise minding my own business. But this facial cast of mine (that's what I think it is, really, a way my mouth has of turning down at the corners, it has little to do with my actual moods) has worked as often to my favor as to my disadvantage.

it was a clear night, with crickets and a million stars

We have art in order not to die from the truth. — NIETZSCHE

lights and moods and seasons was to see it a thousand different ways and to keep it shut in the dark—a thing made of light, that only lived in light—was wrong in more ways than I knew how to explain. More than wrong: it was crazy.

From the sound of it, had I stayed in California I might have ended up in a cult or at the very least practicing some weird dietary restriction.

I think of what Hobie said: beauty alters the grain of reality. And I keep thinking too of the more conventional wisdom: namely, that the pursuit of pure beauty is a trap, a fast track to bitterness and sorrow, that beauty has to be wedded to something more meaningful.

The description of shock and grief hot so close to home: but sometimes, unexpectedly, grief pounded over me in waves that left me gasping; and when the waves washed back, I found myself looking out over a brackish wreck which was illuminated in a light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead

honestly can't remember much else about those years

We drank our tea. The lamplight was warm and the apartment still and snug. At home in bed, in my private abyss of longing, the scenes i dreamed of always began like this: drowsy drunken hour, the two of us alone, scenarios in which invariably she would brush against me as if by chance, or lean coveniently close, cheek touching mine, to point out a passage in a book, opportunities that i would seize, gently but manfully, as exordium to more violent pleasures.

And how can we lose this maddening self, lose it entirely? Love? Yes, but as old Cephalus once heard Sophocles say, the least of us know that love is a cruel and terrible master. One loses oneself for the sake of the other, but in doing so becomes enslaved and miserable to the most capricious of all the gods.

the atmosphere it breathed was like the light-rinsed airiness of a wall opposite an open window.

Everything was lost, I had fallen off the map: the disorientation of being in the wrong apartment, with the wrong family, was wearing me down, so I felt groggy and punch-drunk, weepy almost, like an interrogated prisoner prevented from sleeping for days. Over and over, I kept thinking I've got to go home and then, for the millionth time, I can't.

The other day, I tried to remember what was the word for 'dragonfly' and couldn't.