Quotes from Donna Tartt

Not timid, not even hopeless, but steady and holding its place. Refusing to pull back from the world.

Sometimes she pulled her mother's old college clothes out of the closet (pastel sweaters with moth holes, elbow gloves in every color, an aqua prom dress that—on Harriet—dragged a foot upon the ground).

telephone, "Myriam's not my wife! This—" he handed

Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it

wheels caught and I was flung into ordinary

I suppose there is a certain crucial interval in everyone's life when character is fixed forever.

A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind." What would Thoreau have made of Las Vegas: its lights and rackets, its trash and daydreams, its projections and hollow façades?

Come then, and let us pass a leisure hour in storytelling, and our story shall be the education of our heroes. —PLATO, Republic, BOOK II

living things don't last—it's all temporary. Death in life. That's why they're called natures mortes. Maybe you don't see it at first with all the beauty and bloom, the little speck of rot. But if you look closer—there it is.

defensively.

One likes to think there's something in it, that old platitude amor vincit omnia. But if I've learned one thing in my short sad life, it is that that particular platitude is a lie. Love doesn't conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.

We had trench warfare in America way before World War I. Most people don't know that.

I believe that it is better to know one book intimately that a hundred superficially

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.

Some things are too terrible to grasp at once. Other things—naked, sputtering, indelible in their horror—are too terrible to really ever grasp at all. It is only later, in solitude, in memory, that the realization dawns: when the ashes are cold; when the mourners have departed; when one looks around and finds oneself—quite to one's surprise—in an entirely different world.

For if the modern mind is whimsical and discursive, the classical mind is narrow, unhesitating, relentless. It is not a quality of intelligence that one encounters frequently these days. But though I can digress with the best of them, I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive

they grew dark and foamy in the cool.

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. Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that's why we're so anxious to lose them, don't you think?

Who was it said that coincidence was just God's way of remaining anonymous?

I knew my mother's feet, her clothes, her two-tone black and white shoes - and long after I was sure of it I made myself stand in their midst, folded deep inside myself like a sick pigeon with its eyes closed.

It was so dark I could hardly see her. The weight of her arm was wonderfully comfortable, and her gin-sweet breath was warm on my cheek.

Weren't we, as sentient beings, put upon the earth to be happy, in the brief time allotted to us?

Nothing is lonelier or more disorienting than insomnia

What about school then? Favorite subjects?" "History, I guess. English too," I said when he didn't answer. "But English is going to be really boring for the next six weeks?we stopped doing literature and went back to the grammar book and now we're diagramming sentences.