Quotes from Donna Tartt

Outside, the treetops tumbled and tossed, with a foamy whoosh like club soda bubbling up in the glass. The windows were open and a damp cool breeze swirled through the curtains, bewitchingly wild and sweet.

but I liked the idea of living in a city - any city, especially a strange one - liked the thought of traffic and crowds, of working in a bookstore, waiting tables in a coffeeshop, who knew what kind of odd, solitary life I might slip into?

He was, like me, an only child. His father (born in Siberia, a Ukrainian national from Novoagansk) was in mining and exploration. "Big important job—he travels the world." Boris's mother—his father's second wife—was dead.

With the striped umbrella and the pistachio ices?

basketball courts ringed with barbed-wire fence.

I'll probably think about it all my life: that candlelit circle, a tableau vivant of the daily, commonplace happiness that was lost when I lost her.

Let's think about this, shall we? Without goals, we aren't motivated, are we? Without goals, we're not financially prosperous! Without goals, we can't achieve what Christ wants for us as Christians and members of the community!" Harriet, he noticed with a bit of a start, was glaring at him rather aggressively.

He was a planet without an atmosphere. x.

and sharp-faced, like Boris, but with an evil red-rimmed gaze and tiny, brownish sawteeth. He made me think of a rabid fox.

the dining halls were strangely quiet without that great braying hee-haw of his echoing in its customary place by the milk machine.

What's worth living for? what's worth dying for? what's completely foolish to pursue?

It does all swing around strangely sometimes, doesn't it?" he said. I was silent, not knowing what to say. "I mean only—" rubbing his eye—"I only understand it, as I get older. How funny time is. How many tricks and surprises." The word trick was all I heard, or understood.

But how can you stand to stay asleep so much?" Harriet had once asked her sister curiously. Allison shrugged. "Isn't it boring?" "I only get bored when I'm awake.

Yes," said Julian, in a tone of voice which managed to convey at once both sympathy with and distaste for the Corcorans.

the minibar cart, even church clocks tolling the hour, de Westertoren, Krijtberg, a dark edge to the clangor, an inwrought fairy-tale sense of doom. By day I sat on the foot of the bed straining to puzzle out the Dutch-language

No. I am rather curious to see what it is like. Besides, I think it's good to change the place where one sleeps from time to time. I believe it gives one more interesting dreams.

She wanted to start with names of things, things she could point to. Like Miss Sullivan with Helen Keller. She'd touch Weenie's nose, and say: 'Nose! That's your nose! You've got a nose!' Then she'd touch her own nose. Then his again. Back and forth." "She must not have had much to do.

It used to be a perfectly ordinary day but now it sticks up on the calendar like a rusty nail.)

I've come to realize that the only truths that matter to me are the ones I don't, and can't, understand. What's mysterious, ambiguous, inexplicable. What doesn't fit into a story, what doesn't have a story. Glint of brightness on a barely-there chain. Patch of sunlight on a yellow wall. The loneliness that separates every living creature from every other

Before the Divine can take over, the mortal self—the dust of us, the part that decays—must be made clean as possible." "How is that?" "Through symbolic acts, most of them fairly universal in the Greek world. Water poured over the head, baths, fasting

There's a pattern and we're a part of it. Yet if you scratched very deep at that idea of pattern, you hit an emptiness so dark that it destroyed, categorically, anything you'd ever looked at or thought of as light.

animal in the sitter (a tendency that

You know what Picasso says. 'Bad artists copy, good artists steal.' Still with real greatness, there's a jolt at the end of the wire. It doesn't matter how often you grab hold of the line, or how many people have grabbed hold of it before you. It's the same line. Fallen from a higher life. It still carries some of the same shock.

and the green lawn, the gaudy tulips, were hushed and expectant beneath the overcast sky. Somewhere a shutter creaked. Above my head, in the wicked black claws of an elm, a marooned kite rattled convulsively, then was still. This is Kansas, I thought. This is Kansas before the cyclone hits.