Quotes from Donna Tartt

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

For a moment, as his arm touched mine, he was a creature of flesh and blood, but the next he was a hallucination again, a figment of the imagination stalking down the hallway as heedless of me as ghosts, in their shadowy

My heart - which, thrilled at my daring, had held its breath for a moment or two - began suddenly to beat quite wildly

Maybe even if we're not always so glad to be here it's our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open.

a starry ache that lifted me up above the windswept city like a kite: my head in the rainclouds, my heart in the sky.

The thing to remember," said Dave, the psychiatrist who had been assigned to me by the city, "is that you'll be taken care of no matter what." He was a thirtyish guy with dark clothes and trendy eyeglasses who always looked as if he'd just come from a poetry reading in the basement of some church.

maybe good luck was like bad luck in that it took a while to sink in. You didn't feel anything at first. The feeling came later on.

Sleeping or waking, the world was a slippery game: fluid stage sets, drift and echo, reflected light. And all of it sifting like salt between her numbed fingers.

I was jarred - a little spooked as well - at so blatant a reference to something referred to, by mutual agreement, almost exclusively with codes, catchwords, a hundred different euphemisms. It was the most important night of my life, he said calmly. It enabled me to do what I've always wanted most. Which is? To live without thinking.

and comparison, he'd taught me how to identify a reproduction: by wear that was too even (antiques were always worn asymmetrically); by edges that were machine-cut instead of hand-planed (a sensitive fingertip could feel a machine edge, even in poor light);

Rather in the way that the Roman Empire continued in a certain fashion to run itself even when there was no one left to run it and the reason behind it was entirely gone, much of this routine remained intact even during the terrible days after Bunny's death. Up until the very end there was always, always, Sunday-night dinner at Charles and Camilla's, except on the evening of the murder itself, when no one felt much like eating and it was postponed until Monday.) I

I turned, painting in hand, to show it to her, and then realized she wasn't there. Or - she was there and she wasn't. Part of her was there, but it was invisible. The invisible part was the important part. This was something I hadn't understood before.

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 have yours.

On she prattled, friendly as a parrot. But my loyalties were elsewhere. And the flavour of Pippa's kiss - bittersweet and strange - stayed with me all the way back uptown, swaying and sleepy as I sailed home on the bus, melting with sorrow and loveliness, a starry ache that lifted me up above the windswept city like a kite: my head in the rainclouds, my heart in the sky.

picking up the phone to say hello, somehow I never had. "Are you okay?

The nail where your fate is liable to catch and snag." "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?

the mind is its own place and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell and so forth

Forgive me for for all the things that i did, but mostly for all the things i didn't do

At her tone, at once intimate and formal, a terrible sadness came over me, and when we looked at each other it seemed that the whole past was redefined and brought into focus by this moment, clear as glass, a complexity of stillness that was rainy afternoons in spring, a dark chair in the hallway, the light-as-air touch of her hand on the back of my head.

Because it is dangerous to ignore the existence of the irrational. The more cultivated a person is, the more intelligent, the more repressed, then the more he needs some method of channeling the primitive impulses he's worked so hard to subdue. Otherwise those powerful old forces will mass and strengthen until they are violent enough to break free, more violent for the delay, often strong enough to sweep the will away entirely.

Love doesn't conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.

it may be a superhuman effort to lose oneself so completely, but that's nothing compared to the effort of getting oneself back again

I don't care what anyone says or how often or winningly they say it: no one will ever, ever be able to persuade me that life is some awesome, rewarding treat. Because, here's the truth: life is catastrophe.

This was extraordinary, as Mrs. Fountain was so cheap she washed out her old tinfoil to roll in a ball and use again