Quotes from Donna Tartt

I don't want you to help me.' She raised her head and looked at me: her gaze hit me hard and sweet as a shot of morphine.

It was normal, then, that he should be missed, even mourned—for it's a hard thing when someone dies at a school like Hampden, where we were all so isolated, and thrown so much together. But I was surprised at the wanton display of grief which spewed forth once his death became official. It seemed not only gratuitous, but rather shameful given the circumstances.

And this is either a completely disastrous question or the most sensible one I've ever asked in all my life.

I could feel my heart beating, hear the clicks and ticks and hisses of the large elderly building slumbering around me. Everyone was asleep. Even the distant horn-honks and the occasional rattle of trucks out on Fifty-Seventh Street seemed faint and uncertain, as lonely as a noise from another planet.

Penso che in questo caso dovremmo chiamarla ironia della sorte, più che divina provvidenza. Sì, ma perché vuoi darle un nome? E se fossero la stessa cosa?

At one time I had liked the idea, that the act, at least, had bound us together; we were not ordinary friends, but friends till-death-do-us-part. This thought had been my only comfort in the aftermath of Bunny's death. Now it made me sick, knowing there was no way out. I was stuck with them, with all of them, for good.

Worry! What a waste of time. All the holy books were right. Clearly 'worry' was the mark of a primitive and spiritually unevolved person. What was that line from Yeats, about the bemused Chinese sages? All things fall and are built again. Ancient glittering eyes. This was wisdom. People had been raging and weeping and destroying things for centuries and wailing about their puny individual lives, when—what was the point? All this useless sorrow?

I thought of all the places I'd been and all the places I hadn't, a world lost and vast and unknowable, dingy maze of cities and alleyways, far-drifting ash and hostile immensities, connections missed, things lost and never found.

I wanted to say something profound, that Julian was only human, that he was old, that flesh and blood are frail and weak and that there comes a time when we have to transcend our teachers.

Bloodshed is a terrible thing, but the bloodiest parts of Homer and Aeschylus are often the most magnificent - for example, that glorious speech of Klytemnestra's in the Agamemnon that I love so much.

It kept being a shock every time I remembered it, a fresh slap: she was gone.

I was wide awake, and yet part of me was so glassed-off and numb I was practically in a coma.

Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you

Part of me was immobile, stunned with despair, like those rats that lose hope in laboratory experiments and lie down in the maze to starve.

I have to say I personally have never drawn such a sharp line between 'good' and 'bad' as you. For me: that line is often false. The two are never disconnected. One can't exist without the other. As long as I am acting out of love, I feel I am doing best I know how.

Objects in the apartment wobbled with my fatigue: halos shimmered around the table lamp; the stripe of the wallpaper seemed to vibrate.

In a certain sense it was simply play-acting but at Hampden, where creative expression was valued above all else, play-acting was itself a kind of work, and people went about their grief as seriously as small children will sometimes play quite grimly and without pleasure in make-believe offices and stores.

People loved to think they were getting a deal. Four times out of five they would look right past what they didn't want to see.

Every time I thought of it my stomach squirmed, so that my first instinct was to slam the lid down hard and think of something else.

I hadn't been at school since the day before my mother died and as long as I stayed away her death seemed unofficial somehow. But once I went back it would be a public fact. Worse: the thought of returning to any kind of normal routine seemed disloyal, wrong.

The shock of first seeing a birch tree at night, rising up in the dark as cool and slim as a ghost. And the nights, bigger than imagining: black and gusty and enormous, disordered and wild with stars.

only truths that matter to me are the ones I don't, and can't, understand.

I felt I understood the secret grandeur of dying, all the knowledge held back from all humankind until the very end:

Janet who said excellent! in answer to everything and drank coffee from a pink mug that said Janet.