Quotes from Donna Tartt

We'd done our errands, not to mention an awful lot of cocaine in the parking lot of Burger King . . .

Though he didn't treat them as equals - he didn't treat anyone as an equal, actually - neither did he resort to the condescending friendliness of the wealthy.

But those sparkling blue shallows- so enticing at first glance- had not yet graded off into depths, so that sometimes I got the disconcerting sensation of wading around in knee-high waters hoping to step into a drop-off, a place deep enough to swim.

And that was it: infinite loop; no alt-tab out. You could force close, shut down the computer, start all over and run it again, and the game would still lock up and freeze at the same place. Where's Popper? No cheat code. Game over. There was no way past that moment.

It is here that the stilted mannequins of my initial acquaintance begin to yawn and stretch and come to life. It was months before the gloss and mystery of newness, which kept me from seeing them with much objectivity, would wear entirely off... it is here, in my memory, that they cease being totally foreign and begin to appear, for the first time, in shapes very like their bright old selves.

But poor Andy—even before he was skipped ahead a grade—had always been a chronically picked-upon kid: scrawny, twitchy, lactose-intolerant, with skin so pale it was almost transparent, and a penchant for throwing out words like 'noxious' and 'chthonic' in casual conversation.

Running might take her forward, it could even take her home; but it couldn't take her back—not ten minutes, ten hours, not ten years or days.

Lying awake, I tried to recall all my best memories of her – to freeze her in my mind so I wouldn't forget her – but instead of birthdays and happy times I kept remembering things like how a few days before she was killed she'd stopped me halfway out the door to pick a thread off my school jacket.

For weeks, I'd been frozen, sealed-off; now, in the shower, I would turn up the water as hard as it would go and howl, silently. Everything was raw and painful and confusing and wrong and yet it was as if I'd been dragged from freezing water through a break in the ice, into sun and blazing cold.

The world and everything in it was intolerably and permanently fucked and nothing had ever been good or okay, unbearable claustrophobia of the soul, the windowless room, no way out, waves of shame and horror, leave me alone.

Outside, it was cool and still, the sky a hazy shade of white peculiar to autumn mornings...

or rather, how strange to find that the present contained such a bright shard of the living past, damaged and eroded but not destroyed.

Worse: the thought of returning to any kind of normal routine seemed disloyal, wrong. It kept being a shock every time I remembered it, a fresh slap: she was gone. Every new event—everything I did for the rest of my life—would only separate us more and more: days she was no longer a part of, an ever-growing distance between us. Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away.

Sometimes I wondered exactly what it might take to break Andy out of his math-nerd turret: a tidal wave? Decepticon invasion? Godzilla tromping down Fifth Avenue? He was a planet without an atmosphere.

when what she needed was something concrete, some small final memory to slip its hand in hers and accompany her—sightless now, stumbling—through this sudden desert of existence which stretched before her from the present moment until the end of life.

There were plenty of girls at school prettier than Harriet, and nicer. But none of them were as smart, or as brave. How could he make her love him, make her notice when he wasn't there?

How was it possible to miss someone as much as I missed my mother? I missed her so much I wanted to die: a hard, physical longing, like a craving for air underwater.

Because, here's the truth: life is catastrophe. The basic fact of existence—of walking around trying to feed ourselves and find friends and whatever else we do—is catastrophe.

Because—isn't it drilled into us constantly, from childhood on, an unquestioned platitude in the culture—? From William Blake to Lady Gaga, from Rousseau to Rumi to Tosca to Mister Rogers, it's a curiously uniform message, accepted from high to low: when in doubt, what to do? How do we know what's right for us? Every shrink, every career counselor, every Disney princess knows the answer: "Be yourself." "Follow your heart.

Wade straight through life, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and heart open.

it didn't matter what the books said, what the experts said, what similar items at Christie's had recently gone for. An object—any object—was worth whatever you could get somebody to pay for it.

Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you. What you want to live and be happy in the world is a woman who has her own life and lets you live yours.

Then there's the business of standardized tests. Henry refused to take the SATs - he'd probably score off the charts if he did, but he's got some kind of aesthetic objection to them.

their reality was far more interesting than any idealized version could possibly be