Quotes from Donna Tartt

I don't think I can explain the despair my surroundings inspired in me. Though I now suspect, given the circumstances and my disposition, I would've been unhappy anywhere, in Biarritz or Caracas or the Isle of Capri, I was then convinced that my unhappiness was indigenous to that place.

Somehow, even shrouded and entombed in the storage locker, it had worked itself free and into some fraudulent public narrative, a radiance that glowed in the mind of the world.

And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn't touch.

and the farther I walked away, the more upset I got, at the loss of one of the few stable and unchanging docking-points in the world that I'd taken for granted.

the place where words didn't work.

I felt disincarnate, cut loose from myself. How it would feel to be back in my body again I couldn't imagine.

La gente muere, eso está claro. Pero la pérdida de ciertos objetos es tan trágica e innecesaria... Por puro descuido. En incendios y en guerras. Como el Partenón, que utilizaron como almacén de pólvora. Supongo que todo lo que logramos rescatar de la Historia es un milagro.

I found to my surprise that at the start they'd been nearly as bewildered by me as I by them. It never occurred to me that my behavior could seem to them anything but awkward and provincial, certainly not that it would appear as enigmatic as it in fact did.

She'd learned things she never knew, things she had no idea of knowing, and yet in a strange way it was the hidden message of Captain Scott: that victory and collapse were sometimes the same thing.

some clear, personable spark seemed to fly up through his eyes and I saw the creature he really was—and he, I believe, saw me. For an instant we were wired together and humming, like two engines on the same circuit.

The idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than almost anything.

We don't like to admit it," said Julian, "but the idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than almost anything.

I]t is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.

You had to hand it to her: she was as cool as dammit.

And the strange thing was: I knew that most people didn't see her as I did — if anything, found her a bit odd-looking with her off-kilter walk and her spooky redhead pallor. For whatever dumb reason I had always flattered myself that I was the only person in the world who really appreciated her— that she would be shocked and touched and maybe even come to view herself in a whole new light if she knew just how beautiful I found her.

When we are sad—at least I am like this—it can be comforting to cling to familiar objects, to the things that don't change.

Forgive me for all the things I did, but mostly for the things I didn't

What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can't be trusted —? What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight towards a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster?

It seemed my whole life was composed of these disjointed fractions of time, hanging around in one public place and then another, as if I were waiting for trains that never came.

for the first time I realized how lonely the next two months would really be, with the school closed, the snow deep, everyone gone.

And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky—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. And

But for all foreseeable time to come- for as long as history was written, until the icecaps melted and the streets of Amsterdam were awash with water- the painting would be remembered and mourned. Who knew, or cared, the names of the Turks who blew the roof of the Parthenon? the mullahs who had ordered the destruction of the Buddhas at Bamiyan? Yet living or dead:their acts stood. It was the worst kind of immortality. Intentionally or no: I had extinguished at light at the heart of the world.

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?

The painting had made me feel less mortal, less ordinary. It was support and vindication; it was sustenance and sum. It was the keystone that had held the whole cathedral up.