Quotes from Donna Tartt

For the truth of the situation was that he would do whatever she asked of him, whatever it was, and they both knew it.

What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can't be trusted—

Probably I'll be dead soon.

Dead flowers stood rotting in the massive Chinese vases and a shut-up heaviness overweighed the room: the air almost too stale to breathe, the exact, suffocating feel of our apartment when Mrs. Barbour took me back to Sutton Place to get some things I needed. It was a stillness I knew; this was a house closed in on itself when someone died.

transubstantiation

Una cosa era ver un cuadro en un museo, pero contemplarlo bajo todas esas luces, estados anímicos y estaciones diferentes era apreciarlo de mil formas distintas; guardarlo encerrado en la oscuridad —un objeto hecho de luz, que solo vivía en la luz— no estaba bien por muchas razones que no sabría explicar.

It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from all the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one's burned tongues and skinned knees, that one's aches and pains are all one's own. Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us.

Yet every time I remembered it I was suffused with a glow of warmth.

Do you remember last fall, in Julian's class, when we studied what Plato calls telestic madness? Bakcheia? Dionysiac frenzy?" "Yes," I said, rather impatiently. It was just like Henry to bring up something like this right now. "Well, we decided to try to have one." For a moment I thought I hadn't understood him. "What?" I said. "I said we decided to try to have a bacchanal.

I was fascinated by strangers, wanted to know what food they ate and what dishes they ate it from, what movies they watched and what music they listened to, wanted to look under their beds and in their secret drawers and night tables and inside the pockets of their coats. Often I saw interesting-looking people on the street and thought about them restlessly for days, imagining their lives, making up stories about them on the subway or the crosstown bus.

Everything was raw and painful and confusing and wrong and yet it was as if I'd been dragged from freezing water through a break in the ice, into sun and blazing cold.

Delirium: unmoored and drifting.

aware that Allison's eyes were on him, stepped backwards and began instead to swivel his lower body in an oddly lascivious and adult-looking little dance.

But one mustn't underestimate the primal appeal—to lose one's self, lose it utterly. And in losing it be born to the principle of continuous life, outside the prison of mortality and time.

I followed after her with a sort of dazed sense of lost time, delighted by her preoccupation, how oblivious she seemed of the minutes flying.

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.

I hate Gucci," said Francis. "Do you?" said Henry, glancing up from his reverie. "Really? I think it's rather grand." "Come on, Henry." "Well, it's so expensive, but it's so ugly too, isn't it? I think they make it ugly on purpose. And yet people buy it out of sheer perversity.

My father was mean, and our house ugly, and my mother didn't pay much attention to me; my clothes were cheap and my haircut too short and no one at school seemed to like me that much; and since all this had been true for as long as I could remember, I felt things would doubtless continue in this depressing vein as far as I could foresee.

There's only a double abyss: between painter and imprisoned bird; between the record he left of the bird and our experience of it, centuries later.

All of the above.

was surprised at his reaction. "So it was a brawl," he said, with childish delight.

Well, hey, you don't have anything to worry about then, do you?

If this was a movie, I thought, looking pleasantly into the pleasant beefy face of the policeman—if this was a movie, we'd all be fidgeting and acting really suspicious.

And besides, is death really so terrible a thing? It seems terrible to you, because you are young, but who is to say he is not better off now than you are? Or—if death is a journey to another place—that you will not see him again?