Quotes from Donna Tartt

The dead appear to us in dreams, said Julian, because that's the only way they can make us see them; what we see is only a projection, beamed from a great distance, light shining at us from a dead star Ã¢â'¬Â¦

La gente muore, questo è un dato di fatto» diceva la mamma. «Ma il modo in cui perdiamo le cose è insensato e terribile. Per incuria. Incendi, guerre. Il Partenone utilizzato come un magazzino per le munizioni, ma ci pensi? Tutto ciò che sopravvive alla Storia dovrebbe essere considerato un miracolo.»

Do you really think what we do is work? - What else should I call it? I should call it the most glorious kind of play.

Isn't everything worthwhile a gamble? Can't good come around sometimes through some strange back doors?

And as terrible as this is, I get it. We can't choose what we want and don't want and that's the hard lonely truth. Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it's going to kill us. We can't escape who we are.

Though I would have died rather than told anyone, I was worried my exuberant drug use had damaged my brain and my nervous system and maybe even my soul in some irreparable and perhaps not readily apparent way.

Give my life, gladly! I will never love any person on the earth like Katya again—not even close. She was the one. I would die and be happy for only one day with her. But—" pushing his sleeve back down—"you should never get a person's name tattooed on you, because then you lose the person. I was too young to know that when I got the tattoo.

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

Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before

And as the light flickered over it in bands, I had the queasy sense of my own life, in comparison, as a patternless and transient burst of energy, a fizz of biological static just as random as the street lamps flashing past.

his subconscious mind knocked loose from its perch and flapping in the hollow corridors of his skull as erratically as a bat

There wasn't a single meaning. There were many meanings. It was a riddle expanding out and out and out.

I prefer to think of it as redistribution of matter.

to me, the hallmark of the modern mind is that it loves to wander from its subject) I

In Paradise Lost he pushes English to its very limits but I think no language without noun cases could possibly support the structural order he attempts to impose.

Things would have been terribly strange and unbalanced without her. She was the Queen who finished out the suit of dark Jacks, dark King, and Joker.

Sometimes, when there's been an accident and reality is too sudden and strange to comprehend, the surreal will take over. Action slows to a dreamlike glide, frame by frame; the motion of a hand, a sentence spoken, fills an eternity. Little things—a cricket on a stem, the veined branches on a leaf—are magnified, brought from the background in achingly clear focus. And

coincidence was just God's way of remaining anonymous?

Clearly 'worry' was the mark of a primitive and spiritually unevolved person.

Mr. MacNatt was an auto-parts salesman; Mrs. MacNatt was shaped like a pigeon and sold Avon.

Yet if you scratched very deep at that idea of pattern (which apparently he had never taken the trouble to do), you hit an emptiness so dark that it destroyed, categorically, anything you'd ever looked at or thought of as light.

Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game. Squirming

Years ago, in an old notebook, I wrote: One of Julian's most attractive qualities is his inability to see anyone, or anything, in its true light. And under it, in a different ink, maybe one of my most attractive qualities, as well(?) -Richard

ominously—a love more binding than physical affection, some tar-pit of the soul where I might flop around and malinger for years.