Quotes from Donna Tartt

it wasn't that the future...seemed bad or frightening so much as incomprehensible, a blot of black ink on the horizon.

never the way it seems—all good, all bad.

Pepto-Bismol straight from the bottle.

But it's so heartbreaking and unnecessary how we lose things. From pure carelessness. Fires, wars. The Parthenon, used as a munitions storehouse. I guess that anything we manage to save from history is a miracle.

could a ghost embody itself through wavelengths, electronic dots, a picture tube? What are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a dead star?

and 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.

you are, and you are very very gifted at all the aspects of the business I don't care to deal with, and you

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

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.

Whatever teaches us to talk to ourselves is important: whatever teaches us to sing ourselves out of despair.

This is very good," I said, half a minute or so later, just as the first euphoric sparkle was starting to hit my synapses.

so that for an indeterminate interlude I drifted in and out pleasantly on the verge of death. Cities, centuries. In and out I glided of slow moments, delightful, shades drawn, empty cloud dreams and evolving shadows

Once, over dinner, Henry was quite startled to learn from me that men had walked on the moon. "No," he said, putting down his fork. "It's true," chorused the rest, who had somehow managed to pick this up along the way. "I don't believe it." "I saw it," said Bunny. "It was on television." "How did they get there? When did this happen?").

All summer long I had been practically delirious: tingling, daffy, energized, running on gin and shrimp cocktail and the invigorating whock of tennis balls.

On the way to Francis's, a pregnant dog ran across the road in front of us. "That," said Henry, "is a very bad omen." But of what he wouldn't say.

Because I love Henry. Henry's dead. I can't help it. I still love him.

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.

Together, they were like one of those superhero alliances in the comic books, invincible, an unconquerable confederation of boredom and confusion.

He's always up in the clouds with Plato or something.

And it may be a superhuman effort to lose oneself so completely, but that's nothing compared to the effort of getting oneself back again.

Un yo que no quieres. Unos sentimientos que no puedes evitar.

it would be a long, long time before I heard anything from Boris again.

her hair pulled back in one of those tremendous preppy bows from the Talbots catalogue.

You couldn't beat him away from Greek with a stick.