Quotes from Donna Tartt

And—maybe it's ridiculous to go on in this vein, although it doesn't matter since no one's ever going to see this—but does it make any sense at all to know that it ends badly for all of us, even the happiest of us, and that we all lose everything that matters in the end—and yet to know as well, despite all this, as cruelly as the game is stacked, that it's possible to play it with a kind of joy?

Well, she doesn't have anything to do with it, Richard, you're just like that guy in 'Dragnet' that always wants the facts.

Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us. Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that's why we're so anxious to lose them, don't you think?

It does all swing around strangely sometimes, doesn't it.

It was Boris I missed, the whole impulsive mess of him: gloomy, reckless, hot-tempered, appallingly thoughtless. Boris pale and pasty, with his shoplifted apples and his Russian-language novels, gnawed-down fingernails and shoelaces dragging in the dust. Boris—budding alcoholic, fluent curser in four languages—who snatched food from my plate when he felt like it and nodded off drunk on the floor, face red like he'd been slapped.

I am sorry, as well, to present such a sketchy and disappointing exegesis of what is in fact the central part of my story.

great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don't get to choose our own hearts. We can't make ourselves want what's good for us or what's good for other people. We don't get to choose the people we are.

Her death the dividing mark: Before and After. And though it's a bleak thing to admit all these years later, still I've never met anyone who made me feel loved the way she did. 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—I

in whatever wink of consciousness that remained to me I felt I understood the secret grandeur of dying, all the knowledge held back from all humankind until the very end: no pain, no fear, magnificent detachment, lying in state upon the death barge and receding into the grand immensities like an emperor, gone, gone, observing all the distant scurryers on shore, freed from all the old human pettiness of love and fear and grief and death.

And what is beauty? Terror. And if beauty is terror, then what is desire? To live. To live forever.

The light of long ago is different from the light of today and yet here, in this house, I'm reminded of the past at every turn.

While I was still in Amsterdam, I dreamed about my mother for the first time in years.

I think he did save me, though. And someplace, if there is a place where lists are kept, and credit given, I am sure there is a gold star by his name. But I am getting sentimental. Sometimes, when I think about these things, I do.

Maybe good luck was like bad luck in that it took awhile for it to sink in. You don't feel anything at first. The feeling came later on.

I began to realize, with some little horror, that she was nothing more than a lowbrow, pop-psychology version of Sylvia Plath. It lasted forever, like some weepy and endless made-for-TV movie—all the clinging, all the complaints, all the parking-lot confessions of "inadequacy" and "poor self-image," all those banal sorrows.

A sunstruck instant that existed now and forever.

and felt the strangeness of the city pressing in all around me, smells of tobacco and malt and nutmeg, café walls the melancholy brown of an old leather-bound book and then beyond, dark passages and brackish water lapping, low skies and old buildings all leaning against each other with a moody, poetic, edge-of-destruction feel, the cobblestoned loneliness of a city that felt—to me, anyway—like a place where you might come to let the water close over your head.

In very great poetry the music often comes through even when one doesn't know the language. I loved Dante passionately before I knew a word of Italian.

strenuous occasions where (jumpy, un-opiated, wracked to the last synapse)

Then again: there was not exactly a word for Boris and me... It was just about drowsy air-conditioned afternoons, lonely and drunk, blinds closed against the glare, empty sugar packets and dried-up orange peels strewn on the carpet, Dear Prudence from the White Album (which Boris adored) or else the same mournful old Radiohead over and over...

Maybe it's stupid to even articulate such hopes. But, then again, maybe it's more stupid not to.

One's thought patterns become different, he said, when forced into the confines of a rigid and unfamiliar tongue. Certain common ideas become inexpressible; other, previously undreamt-of ones spring to life, finding miraculous new articulation.

I forgave him, a hundred times over, and never on the basis of anything more than this: a look, a gesture, a certain tilt of his head.

And I'm hoping there's some larger truth about suffering here, or at least my understanding of it – although I've come to realize that the only truths that matter to me are the ones I don't, and can't, understand. What's