Quotes from Donna Tartt

I often thought how peculiar my life must look to someone reading those letters, far away.

a vida - para além do mais que possa ser - é curta. (...) o destino é cruel e talvez não aleatório. (...) a morte ganha sempre, mas isso não quer dizer que tenhamos de lhe baixar a cabeça e a bajular.

We don't like to admit it," said Julian, "but the idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than almost anything. All truly civilized people—the ancients no less than us—have civilized themselves through the willful repression of the old, animal self.

For humans—trapped in biology—there was no mercy: we lived a while, we fussed around for a bit and died, we rotted in the ground like garbage.

All right," said Julian, looking around the table. "I hope we're all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?

Son nuestros secretos los que nos definen, y no la cara que mostramos al mundo.

But if you close the door… the night could last forever…

and the stainless-steel fridge was always well-stocked with Girl Food: hummus and olives, cake and champagne, lots of silly take-out vegetarian salads and half a dozen kinds of ice cream.

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.

You know what Picasso says. 'Bad artists copy, good artists steal.

real age, as I came to see from the genuine pieces that passed through my hands, was variable, crooked, capricious, singing here and sullen there, warm asymmetrical streaks on a rosewood cabinet from where a slant of sun had struck it while the other side was as dark as the day it was cut.

Era una quietud que yo conocía bien: así se encerraba en sí misma una casa cuando alguien moría.

God has tortured Theo plenty. If suffering makes noble, then he is a prince.

is death really so terrible a thing?

light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead.

You'd be surprised, Theo. she said, leaning back in her shawl-shaped chair, what small, everyday things can lift us out of despair. But nobody can do it for you. You're the one who has to watch for the open door.

Bunny put away his copy of The Bride of Fu Manchu and started carrying around a volume of Homer instead.

It was better never to have been born - never to have wanted anything, never to have hoped for anything.

Every new event - everything I did for the rest of my life - would only separate us more and more: days she was n 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.

But despite the gloss and sparkle of the job (champagne breakfasts, gift bags from Bergdorf's) the hours were long and there was a hollowness at the heart of it that-I knew-made her sad.

Picasso says. 'Bad artists copy, good artists steal.

Boris shrugged. "Who cares? If he is good to you? None of us ever find enough kindness in the world, do we?

Buffalo is a long way from New York City; but apart from a dreamlike, feverish stop in Syracuse, where I walked and watered Popper and bought us a couple of cheese danishes because there wasn't anything else—I managed to sleep almost the whole way, through Batavia and Rochester and Syracuse and Binghamton, with my cheek against the window and cold air coming through at the crack, the vibration taking me back to Wind, Sand and Stars and a lonely cockpit high above the desert.

Because, between 'reality' on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there's a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic.