Quotes from Donna Tartt

Well—think about this. 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?

Who's to say that gamblers don't really understand it better than anyone else? Isn't everything worthwhile a gamble? Can't good come around sometimes through some strange back doors?

What I did experience when alone was a sort of general neurotic horror, a common attack of nerves and self-loathing magnified to the power of ten

No—wait. I'm coming back.

understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole;

When I disagreed—strenuously—and asked what was wrong with focusing one's entire attention on only two things, if those two things were Art and Beauty, Laforgue replied: "There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty—unless she is wed to something more meaningful—is always superficial.

When I walked home at night, things got white around the edges and it seemed I had no past, no memories, that I had been on this exact stretch of luminous, hissing road forever

Bethlehem star. But we were not

Peony, Wisteria, Rose, Passion Flower. And who knows- but maybe that's what's waiting for us at the end of the journey, a majesty unimaginable until the very moment we find ourselves walking through the doors of it, what we find ourselves gazing at in astonishment when God finally takes his hands off our eyes and says: Look!

I believe that having a great diversity of teachers is harmful and confusing for a young mind, in the same way I believe that it is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially

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 come larger beauty? Those first images that crack your heart wide open and you spend the rest of your life chasing, or trying to recapture, in one way or another?...

there is to me about this place a smell of rot, the smell of rot that ripe fruit makes. Nowhere, ever, have the hideous mechanics of birth and copulation and death - those montrous upheavals of life that the Greeks call miasma, defilement - been so brutal or been painted up to look so pretty; have so many people put so much faith in lies and mutability and death death death.

The days were so much alike I barely noticed the months pass.

Does it make any sense at all to know that it ends badly for all of us, even the happiest of us, and that we all lose everything that matters in the end--and yet to know as well, despite all this, as cruelly as the game is stacked, that it's possible to play it with a kind of joy?

Certainly, families like Harriet's (and Hely's) would not tolerate for one moment brick-throwing at children white or black ("or purple," as Edie was fond of piping up in any discussion about skin color). And yet there Harriet was, at the all-white school.

No second chances.

else it is—is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not

They understood not only evil, it seemed, but the extravagance of tricks with which evil presents itself as good.

The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil.

I wanted her to know just how much I loved her while also letting her know that she bore not one particle of blame for not loving me back.

It was a beautiful night, full moon, the meadow like silver and the housefronts throwing square black shadows sharp as cutouts on the grass.

Nothing,' he said. 'Except that my life, for the most part, has been very stale and colorless. Dead, I mean. The world has always been an empty place to me. I was incapable of enjoying even the simplest things. I felt dead in everything I did.

the line of beauty is the line of beauty. It doesn't matter if it's been through the Xerox machine a hundred times.

It was one thing to see a painting in a museum but to see it in all those lights and moods amd seasons was to see it a thousamd different ways