Quotes from Donna Tartt

I guess that anything we manage to save from history is a miracle.

What if all your actions and choices, good or bad, make no difference to God? What if the pattern is pre-set? No no—hang on—this is a question worth struggling with. What if our badness and mistakes are the very thing that set our fate and bring us round to good? What if, for some of us, we can't get there any other way?

At home in bed, in my private abyss of longing, the scenes I dreamed of always began like this.

I look at the blanked-out faces of the other passengers--hoisting their briefcases, their backpacks, shuffling to disembark--and I think of what Hobie said: beauty alters the grain of reality. And I keep thinking too of the more conventional wisdom: namely, that the pursuit of pure beauty is a trap, a fast track to bitterness and sorrow, that beauty has to be wedded to something more meaningful.

our badness and mistakes are the very thing that set our fate and bring us round to good? What if, for some of us, we can't get there any other way?

Nihil sub sole novum

It's funny, but thinking back on it now, I realize that this particular point in time, as I stood there blinking in the deserted hall, was the one point at which I might have chosen to do something very different from what I actually did. But of course I didn't see this crucial moment then for what it was; I suppose we never do.

It didn't occur to me then, though it certainly does now, that it was years since I'd roused myself from my stupor of misery and self-absorption; between anomie and trance, inertia and parenthesis and gnawing my own heart out, there were a lot of small, easy, everyday kindnesses I'd missed out on; and even the word kindness was like rising from unconsciousness into some hospital awareness of voices, and people, from a stream of digitized machines.

I have come to realize that while for years I might have imagined myself to be somewhere else, in reality I have been there all the time:

Still with real greatness, there's a jolt at the end of the wire. It doesn't matter how often you grab hold of the line, or how many people have grabbed hold of it before you. It's the same line. Fallen from a higher life. It still carries some of the same shock.

But – just when I've managed to harden my heart, he'll turn around and be so sweet. I always fall for it. I don't know why.

loose tendons; dance world's loss; performance art's gain

but the first rule of restorations, as he'd taught me earlier on, was that you never did what you couldn't reverse.

I'd yearned for the darkness and repose of Hobie's house, its crowded rooms and old-wood smell, tea leaves and tobacco smoke, bowls of oranges on the sideboard and candlesticks scalloped with puddled beeswax.

These were good people, common people; the salt of the earth people; people whom i should count myself fortunate to know

I'm not blaming anything on your mom, I'm way past that. It's just that she loved you so much, I always felt like kind of an interloper with you guys. Stranger-in-my-own-house kind of thing. You two were so close—" he laughed, sadly—"there wasn't much room for three.

Goyen there. Sadly not for sale." "Van Goyen? I would have sworn that was a Corot." "From here, yes, you might." He was pleased at the comparison. "Very similar painters—Vincent

God' as reference to long-term pattern we can't decipher.

But strange and marvelous as she was, a wisp of silk in a forest of black wool, she was not at all the fragile creature one would ever have her seem. In many ways she was as cool and competent as Henry; tough-minded and solitary in her habits, and in many ways as aloof .

Even in some smoky post-catastrophe Manhattan you could imagine him swaying genially at the door in the rags of his former uniform, the Barbours up in the apartment burning old National Geographics for warmth, living off gin and tinned crabmeat.

Things will come to you and you're not going to know exactly how they fit in. You have to trust in the way they all fit together, that your subconscious knows what you're doing.

Where's the nobility in patching up a bunch of old tables and chairs? Corrosive to the soul, quite possibly. I've seen too many estates not to know that. Idolatry! Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only—if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn't it? And isn't the whole point of things—beautiful things—that they connect you to some larger beauty?

We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others, that in the end, we become disguised to ourselves. — FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD

so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.