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We belonged together; there was a dream rightness and magic to it, inarguable; the thought of her flooded every corner of my mind with light and poured brightness into miraculous lofts I hadn't even known were there, vistas that seemed to exist not at all except in relationship to her. -- Donna Tartt
Are you happy here?" I said at last.
He considered this for a moment. "Not particularly," he said. "But you're not very happy where you are, either. -- Donna Tartt
I see that as usual I've gone on too long and that I'm running out of room, but I do hope that you are happy and well, and it's all a little less lonely out there than you may have feared. If there's anything I can do for you back here, or if I can help you in any way, please know that I will. -- Donna Tartt
Here is my experience. Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you. What you want to live and be happy in the world is a woman who has her own life and lets you have yours. -- Donna Tartt
Pepto-Bismol straight from the bottle. -- Donna Tartt
Because, here's the truth: life is catastrophe. The basic fact of existence - of walking around trying to feed ourselves and find friends and whatever else we do - is catastrophe. -- Donna Tartt
I am sorry, as well, to present such a sketchy and disappointing exegesis of what is in fact the central part of my story. -- Donna Tartt
A goodbye at the gate," said Hobie. He seemed to be talking partly to himself. "That's what he would have wanted. The parting glimpse, the death haiku - he wouldn't have liked to leave without stopping to speak to someone along the way. 'A teahouse amid the cherry blossoms on the way to death. -- Donna Tartt
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. -- Donna Tartt
I believe, in a funny way, the job of the novelist is to be out there on the fringes and speaking for an experience that has not really been spoken for. -- Donna Tartt
my own fatal tendency to try to make interesting people good. And -- Donna Tartt
good-natured groom on -- Donna Tartt
Changing the plan at the last moment. "Oh, come on. The chicken can wait. Can't it? Sure it can." He was talking a mile a minute. "You can put the other thing back -- Donna Tartt
The novel is about five students of classics who are studying with a classics professor, and they take the ideas of the things that they're learning from him a bit too seriously, with terrible consequences. -- Donna Tartt
In America, the rich man tries to pretend that the poor man is his equal in every respect but money, which is simply not true. -- Donna Tartt
Well, a change of scenery may be good for you," said Hobie when I went down to see him before I left. "Even if the scene isn't what you'd choose. -- Donna Tartt
I'd given up trying to explain Hobie to Boris: the house, the workshop, his thoughtful way of listening (...) but more than anything a sort of pleasing atmosphere of mind: foggy, autumnal, a mild and welcoming micro-climate that made me feel safe and comfortable in his company. -- Donna Tartt
But he knew absolutely everything - work that other people didn't know how to do or care to learn anymore - it hangs by a thread, this trade, generation to generation. -- Donna Tartt
He was about as erotic as an old football coach. -- Donna Tartt
But then, six months ago, my dad hauled me with him to this shaddy town in Alaska. Seward Peninsula, just below Arctic Circle? And then, middle of May - we flew to Fairbanks on a prop plane, and then we came here. -- Donna Tartt
While to a certain extent Milton is right-the mind is its own place and in itself can make a Heaven of Hall and so forth-it is nonetheless clear that Plano was modeled less on Paradise than that other, more dolorous city. -- Donna Tartt
We'd have to devise a plan, probably a rather Pyrrhic and unsatisfactory one. -- Donna Tartt
How could the apartment have seemed so permanent and solid-looking when it was only a stage set, waiting to be struck and carried away by movers in uniform? -- Donna Tartt
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? -- Donna Tartt
Isn't the whole point of things - beautiful things - that they connect you to some 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? -- Donna Tartt
And besides (I told myself) wasn't it time to Move Forward, Let Go, turn from the garden that was locked to me? Live In The Present, Focus On The Now instead of grieving for what I could never have? -- Donna Tartt
Mine, mine. Fear, idolatry, hoarding. The delight and terror of the fetishist. -- Donna Tartt
Did she ever have the sense of observing herself from afar, as I often did, as if the explosion had knocked my body and my soul into two separate entities that remained about six feet apart from one another? -- Donna Tartt
Henry. Please." I was on the verge of tears. "What's the matter with you? Have you lost your mind? Don't you understand what's going on?" He stood up, dusted his hands on his trousers. -- Donna Tartt
God has tortured Theo plenty. If suffering makes noble, then he is a prince. -- Donna Tartt
Bunny put away his copy of The Bride of Fu Manchu and started carrying around a volume of Homer instead. -- Donna Tartt
Small, everyday things can lift us out of despair. But nobody can do it for you. You're the one who has to watch for the open door. -- Donna Tartt
Worse: the thought of returning to any kind of normal routine seemed disloyal, wrong. It kept being a shock every time I remembered it, a fresh slap: she was gone. Every new event - everything I did for the rest of my life - would only separate us more and more: days she was no longer a part -- Donna Tartt
when what she needed was something concrete, some small final memory to slip its hand in hers and accompany her - sightless now, stumbling - through this sudden desert of existence which stretched before her from the present moment until the end of life. -- Donna Tartt
I hadn't been at school since the day before my mother died and as long as I stayed away her death seemed unofficial somehow. But once I went back it would be a public fact. Worse: the thought of returning to any kind of normal routine seemed disloyal, wrong. -- Donna Tartt
I could do what I had to. I'd done it before: gone blank, pushed forward. -- Donna Tartt
Is it easy to see things in retrospect. But I was ignorant then of everything but my own happiness. -- Donna Tartt
Are you going somewhere?" I said, regarding him timidly. The suit made him seem a different person, less melancholy and distracted, more capable - unlike the Hobie of my first visit, with his bedraggled aspect of an elegant but mistreated polar bear. -- Donna Tartt
Of huddled anonymity like old black and white photos I'd seen of bank crashes and bread lines in the 1930s. -- Donna Tartt
sometimes you have to lose to win. -- Donna Tartt
A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don't get to choose our own hearts. We can't make ourselves want what's good for us or what's good for other people. We don't get to choose the people we are. -- Donna Tartt
Yet my longing for her was like a bad cold that had hung on for years despite my conviction that I was sure to get over it at any moment. -- Donna Tartt
Sometimes you can do all the right things and not succeed. And that's a hard lesson of reality. -- Donna Tartt
More than anything I was relieved that in my unfamiliar babbling-and-wanting-to-talk state I'd stopped myself from blurting the thing I'd never said, even though it was something we both knew well enough without me saying out loud to him in the street - which was, of course, I love you. -- Donna Tartt
There are such things as ghosts. People everywhere have always known that. And we believe in them every bit as much as Homer did. Only now, we call them by different names. Memory. The unconscious. -- Donna Tartt
He was the kind of man people liked to entrust with their sadnesses. -- Donna Tartt
Wade straight through life, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and heart open. -- Donna Tartt
It's our task to immerse ourselves ... while keeping eyes and hearts open ... -- Donna Tartt
Even if we're not always so glad to be here, it's our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. -- Donna Tartt
Criticism at the wrong time, even if it's legitimate criticism, can be seriously damaging and make the writer lose faith in what he's doing. It's the timing that's all-important. -- Donna Tartt
Even if it meant that she had failed, she was glad. And if what she'd wanted had been impossible from the start, still there was a certain lonely comfort in the fact that she'd known it was impossible and had gone ahead and done it anyway. -- Donna Tartt
They were playing old Bob Dylan, more than perfect for narrow Village streets close to Christmas and the snow whirling down in big feathery flakes, the kind of winter where you want to be walking down a city street with your arm around a girl like on the old record cover -- Donna Tartt
I was confused by this sudden glare of attention; it was as if the characters in a favorite painting, absorbed in their own concerns, had looked up out of the canvas and spoken to me. -- Donna Tartt
And yet she was wholly herself: a rarity. -- Donna Tartt
Whatever reason, an evening nodding and unconscious in my bedroom at Hobie's had begun to seem like a perfectly reasonable response to the holiday lights, the holiday crowds, the incessant Christmas bells with their morbid funeral note, Kitsey's candy-pink notebook from Kate's Paperie with tabs -- Donna Tartt
A scrap of seventeenth-century sunlight compressed into dots and pixels, -- Donna Tartt
Janet who said excellent! in answer to everything and drank coffee from a pink mug that said Janet. -- Donna Tartt
Mr. Dial grinned. His small teeth, his wide-set eyes and his bulging forehead - plus his habit of looking at the class in profile, rather than straight on - gave him the slight aspect of an unfriendly dolphin. -- Donna Tartt
If I'm not working, I'm not happy. That's it. That's the prerequisite for me for happiness. -- Donna Tartt
I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much. -- Donna Tartt
The most satisfying of languages, Latin. -- Donna Tartt
It's beautiful here, but morning light can make the most vulgar things tolerable. -- Donna Tartt
You amaze me," he said. "You think nothing exists if you can't see it. -- Donna Tartt
How was it that a complex, a nervous and delicately calibrated mind like my own, was able to adjust itself perfectly after a shock like the murder, while Bunny's eminently more sturdy and ordinary one was knocked out of kilter? -- Donna Tartt
Well if you wake up intending to murder someone at two o'clock, you hardly think what you're going to feed the corpse for dinner."
"Aspargus is in season," said Francis helpfully. -- Donna Tartt
The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to make things up. -- Donna Tartt
Sure how that was going to work, but once I got Boris out of the house I could figure something out. "Please, come on." "Is State Care that bad in America?" said Boris doubtfully. -- Donna Tartt
The world won't come to me...so I must go to it. -- Donna Tartt
("It's crazy," she'd said, "but I'd be perfectly happy if I could sit looking at the same half dozen paintings for the rest of my life. I can't think of a better way to go insane.") -- Donna Tartt
Things will come to you and you're not going to know exactly how they fit in. You have to trust in the way they all fit together, that your subconscious knows what you're doing. -- Donna Tartt
I see so little of you these days, Richard," he said. "I feel that you're becoming just a shadow in my life. -- Donna Tartt
But just when I thought I was going to get away, the creaky machinery of his face began to grind and a cardboard dawn of recognition was lowered, with jerks, from the dusty proscenium. -- Donna Tartt
Well, I think storytellers have always found murder a fascinating device. -- Donna Tartt
A guesstimate?" prompted the man Enrique. "About your dad?" "Ballpark will do," the Korean lady said. -- Donna Tartt
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. -- Donna Tartt
There was a strong sense of being alone, in wintry deadness. Nothing made sense in any direction. -- Donna Tartt
With the striped umbrella and the pistachio ices? -- Donna Tartt
Charles Portis shows his mastery of place and the more complicated subtleties of time. -- Donna Tartt
I think it's hard to write about children and to have an idea of innocence. -- Donna Tartt
But the intimacy, the smallness, also made me feel shut out; and I found myself hurrying past the inviting little doorways with my head down, very aware of all the convivial Sunday-morning lives unrolling around me in private. -- Donna Tartt
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. We can't escape who we are. -- Donna Tartt
Good doesn't always follow from good deeds, nor bad deeds result from bad, does it? Even the wise and good cannot see the end of all actions. -- Donna Tartt
I loved her every minute of every day, heart and mind and soul and all of it, and it was getting late and I wanted the place never to close, never. -- Donna Tartt
As tiny as she was, the resemblance sounded: her coloring, her eyes, her head cocked at the same angle and hair as red as his. -- Donna Tartt
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. For -- Donna Tartt
On the other hand, I mean, that is what writers have always been supposed to do, was to rely on their own devices and to - I mean, writing is a lonely business. -- Donna Tartt
How had I fetched up into this strange new life, where drunk foreigners shouted around me in the night, and all my clothes were dirty, and nobody loved me? -- Donna Tartt
There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty-unless she is wed to something more meaningful-is always superficial -- Donna Tartt
I've written only two novels, but they're both long ones, and they each took a decade to write. -- Donna Tartt
I called, my voice false-sounding and hoarse, slipping the painting into an extra pillowcase and hiding it under the bed before hurrying out of the room. -- Donna Tartt
Hely's feelings didn't run very deep; he lived in sunny shallows where it was always warm and bright. -- Donna Tartt
We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it?" "To live," said Camilla. "To live forever, -- Donna Tartt
No. I've always been drawn to broken, wild terrain. The oddest tongues come from such places, and the strangest mythologies, and the oldest cities, and the most barbarous religions -- Donna Tartt
It's so heartbreaking and unnecessary how we lose things. From pure carelessness. Fires, wars. The Parthenon, used as a munitions storehouse. I guess that anything we manage to save from history is a miracle. p28 -- Donna Tartt
People die, sure," my mother was saying. "But it's so heartbreaking and unnecessary how we lose things. From pure carelessness. Fires, wars. The Parthenon, used as a munitions storehouse. I guess that anything we manage to save from history is a miracle. -- Donna Tartt
Boris laughed, and threw out some fake-looking gang sign. "Suit yourself, yo," he said, in his "gangsta" voice (discernible from his regular voice only by the hand gesture and the "yo") as he got up and roll-walked out. "Nigga gotz to eat. -- Donna Tartt
And as we leave Donne and Walton on the shores of Metahemeralism, we wave a fond farewell to those famous chums of yore. -- Donna Tartt
Hordes of people on the street, lighted Christmas trees sparkling high on penthouse balconies and complacent Christmas music floating out of shops, and weaving in and out of crowds I had a strange feeling of being already dead, -- Donna Tartt
To really be centered and to really work well and to think about the kinds of things that I need to think about, I need to spend large amounts of time alone. -- Donna Tartt
I'm not blaming anything on your mom, I'm way past that. It's just that she loved you so much, I always felt like kind of an interloper with you guys. Stranger-in-my-own-house kind of thing. You two were so close - " he laughed, sadly - "there wasn't much room for three. -- Donna Tartt
Her eyes
lined with black makeup
stared blankly at the ceiling; and her tan was obviously sprayed on since her skin had a healthy apricot glow even though the top of her head was missing. -- Donna Tartt
The first duty of the novelist is to entertain. It is a moral duty. People who read your books are sick, sad, traveling, in the hospital waiting room while someone is dying. Books are written by the alone for the alone. -- Donna Tartt
I've been thinking a lot about what Hobie said: about those images that strike the heart and set it blooming like a flower, images that open up some much, much larger beauty that you can spend your whole life looking for and never find. -- Donna Tartt
To a certain extent Milton is right - the mind is its own place and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell -- Donna Tartt
But while I have never considered myself a very good person, neither can I bring myself to believe that I am spectacularly bad one. Perhaps it's simply impossible to think of oneself in such a way. -- Donna Tartt
How was it possible to miss someone as much as I missed my mother? I missed her so much I wanted to die: a hard, physical longing, like a craving for air underwater. -- Donna Tartt
Actually, I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel. -- Donna Tartt
With a beautiful girl I could have consoled myself that she was out of my league; that I was so haunted and stirred even by her plainness suggested - ominously - a love more binding than physical affection, some tar-pit of the soul where I might flop around and malinger for years. -- Donna Tartt
Let's both be good, and truthful, and kind to each other, and let's be happy together and have fun always. -- Donna Tartt
Death is the mother of beauty," said Henry. "And what is beauty?" "Terror. -- Donna Tartt
And 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. -- Donna Tartt
It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially. -- Donna Tartt
It happened in New York, April 10th, nineteen years ago. Even my hand balks at the date. I had to push to write it down, just to keep the pen moving on the paper. It used to be a perfectly ordinary day, but now it sticks up on the calendar like a rusty nail. -- Donna Tartt
Exactly that girl, not the prettiest, but the no-makeup and kind of ordinary-looking girl he'd chosen to be happy -- Donna Tartt
Maybe the one had to be lost for the others to be found? -- Donna Tartt
Um, we don't hit women in America." He scowled, and spit out an apple seed. "No. Americans just persecute smaller countries that believe different from them. -- Donna Tartt
As long as I am acting out of love, I feel I am doing best I know how. -- Donna Tartt
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.
But I wouldn't say that. It was rosepetals I wanted to throw, not a poison dart. -- Donna Tartt
This is the East Coast, boy. I know they're pretty laissez-faire about dress in your neck of the woods, but back here 52. they don't let you run around in your bathing suit all year long.
Blacks and blues, that's the ticket, blacks and blues ... (Bunny Corcoran to Richard Papen) -- Donna Tartt
Yet if you scratched very deep at that idea of pattern (which apparently he had never taken the trouble to do), you hit an emptiness so dark that it destroyed, categorically, anything you'd ever looked at or thought of as light. -- Donna Tartt
Sky darkened rapidly, darker every second; the wind rustled the trees in the park and the new leaves on the trees stood out tender and yellow against black clouds. -- Donna Tartt
When we are sad ... it can be comforting to cling to familiar objects, to things that don't change. -- Donna Tartt
The Little Friend is a long book. It's also completely different from my first novel: different landscape, different characters, different use of language and diction, different approach to story. -- Donna Tartt
And - maybe it's ridiculous to go on in this vein, although it doesn't matter since no one's ever going to see this - but does it make any sense at all to know that it ends badly for all of us, even the happiest -- Donna Tartt
We stood looking at each other. It was raining. She looked at me with her rain-colored eyes. -- Donna Tartt
We were heading into the clumsy territory of my mother's funeral, stretched-out silences, wrong smiles, the place where words didn't work. -- Donna Tartt
Everything takes me longer than I expect. It's the sad truth about life. -- Donna Tartt
What is unthinkable is undoable -- Donna Tartt
I had said goodbye to her once before, but it took everything I had to say goodbye to her then, again, for the last time, like poor Orpheus turning for a last backward glance at the ghost of his only love and in the same heartbeat losing her forever: hinc illae lacrimae, hence those tears. -- Donna Tartt
Time slid from under me in drifts like ice skids on the highway, punctuated by sudden sharp flashes where my wheels caught and I was flung into ordinary time: -- Donna Tartt
The books I loved in childhood - the first loves - I've read so often that I've internalized them in some really essential way: they are more inside me now than out. -- Donna Tartt
Not to look back or feel sad about things, that home is wherever I am. -- Donna Tartt
War? One can lose oneself in the joy of battle, in fighting for a glorious cause, but there are not many glorious causes for which to fight these days. -- Donna Tartt
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. -- Donna Tartt
You are, and you are very very gifted at all the aspects of the business I don't care to deal with, and you -- Donna Tartt
Taking on challenging projects is the way that one grows and extends one's range as a writer, one's technical command, so I consider the time well-spent. -- Donna Tartt
Children love secret club houses. They love secrecy even when there's no need for secrecy. -- Donna Tartt
She closed her eyes, dark-lidded, dark shadows beneath them; she really was older, not the glancing-eyed girl I had fallen in love with but no less beautiful for that; beautiful now in a way that less excited my senses than tore at my very heart. -- Donna Tartt
George Sanders's had been the best, an Old Hollywood classic, my father had known it by heart and liked to quote from it. Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. -- Donna Tartt
There were plenty of girls at school prettier than Harriet, and nicer. But none of them were as smart, or as brave. How could he make her love him, make her notice when he wasn't there? -- Donna Tartt
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. -- Donna Tartt
Flapping crows. Shiny beetles crawling in the undergrowth. A patch of sky, frozen in a cloudy retina, reflected in a puddle on the ground. Yoo-hoo. Being and nothingness. -- Donna Tartt
Even on the highest levels it was smoke and mirrors; everyone was furnishing a stage set. -- Donna Tartt
Always remember, the person we're really working for is the person who's restoring the piece a hundred years from now. He's the one we want to impress. -- Donna Tartt
I'd unboxed so much china from funeral sales and broken-up households that there was something almost unspeakably sad about the pristine, gleaming displays, with their tacit assurance that shiny new tableware promised an equally shiny and tragedy-free future. -- Donna Tartt
Hard to put things right. You don't often get that chance. Sometimes all you can do is not get caught. -- Donna Tartt
Even now I remember those pictures, like pictures in a storybook one loved as a child. Radiant meadows, mountains vaporous in the trembling distance; leaves ankle-deep on a gusty autumn road; bonfires and fog in the valleys; cellos, dark window-panes, snow. -- Donna Tartt
They all shared a certain coolness, a cruel, mannered charm which was not modern in the least but had the strange cold breath of the ancient world : they were magnificent creatures, such eyes, such hands, such looks - sic oculos, sic ille manus, sic ora ferebat. -- Donna Tartt
Clearly something had gone wrong, badly, only I wasn't quite sure what - apart from knowing that I was responsible somehow, in the generalized miasma of shame and unworthiness and being-a-burden that never quite left me. -- Donna Tartt
Years ago, in an old notebook, I wrote: "One of Julian's most attractive qualities is his inability to see anyone, or anything, in its true light." And under it, in a different ink, "maybe one of my most attractive qualities, as well(?)" -Richard -- Donna Tartt
There was a horrible, erratic thumping in my chest, as if a large bird was trapped inside my ribcage and beating itself to death. -- Donna Tartt
No money, holes in my socks, living off oatmeal. -- Donna Tartt
I was as depressed as I have ever been in my life. -- Donna Tartt
If he really wanted to be happy in the world, Horst? To have any kind of joyful or happy life? He should pay twenty grand to go back to his rapid detox place and then come here and smoke Buddha Haze and stand in a museum all day long. -- Donna Tartt
The storytelling gift is innate: one has it or one doesn't. But style is at least partly a learned thing: one refines it by looking and listening and reading and practice - by work. -- Donna Tartt
Chlorotic, with a sunken chest, he smoked incessantly, wore cheap shirts that had grayed in the wash, drank endless cups of sugary tea. -- Donna Tartt
Out on the lawn, Bunny had just knocked Henry's ball about seventy feet outside the court. There was a ragged burst of laughter; faint, but clear, it floated back across the evening air. That laughter haunts me still. -- Donna Tartt
He looked very tired, a regard which manifested itself not in dark circles, or pallor, but a dreamy and bright-cheeked sadness. -- Donna Tartt
a gunpowder factory exploded at Delft in the 1600s, that the painter had been so haunted and obsessed by the destruction of his city that he painted it over and over. -- Donna Tartt
I'd been assured, at age 21 or so, by a well-known editor who saw the first part of The Secret History in what was basically its final form, that it would never be published because "no woman has ever written a successful novel from a male point of view." -- Donna Tartt
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: familiar faces, glad greetings ... -- Donna Tartt
I waited for him to pick up the thread again - and when he didn't, we sat there peacefully, while I sipped my cooling tea (Lapsang Souchong, smoky and peculiar) and felt the strangeness of my life, and where I was. -- Donna Tartt
Even in some smoky post-catastrophe Manhattan you could imagine him swaying genially at the door in the rags of his former uniform, the Barbours up in the apartment burning old National Geographics for warmth, living off gin and tinned crabmeat. -- Donna Tartt
It seemed the best thing was just to come right out and say it. 'You know,' I said, 'I'm really not attracted to you. I mean, not that -'
'Isn't that interesting,' he said coolly. 'I'm really not attracted to you, either.'
'But -'
'You were there. -- Donna Tartt
And someplace, if there is a place where lists are kept, and credit given, I am sure there is a gold star by his name. -- Donna Tartt
But how," said Charles, who was close to tears, "how can you possibly justify cold-blooded murder?'
Henry lit a cigarette. "I prefer to think of it," he had said, "as redistribution of matter. -- Donna Tartt
So I'm not a Southern writer in the commonly held sense of the term, like Faulkner or Eudora Welty, who took the South for their entire literary environment and subject matter. -- Donna Tartt
never the way it seems - all good, all bad. -- Donna Tartt
Bleakly, Harriet gazed out into the antiseptic gloom. A weight lay upon her, and a darkness. 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. -- Donna Tartt
For that you should read the original. In very great poetry the music often comes through even when one doesn't know language. I loved Dante passionately before I knew a word of Italian. -- Donna Tartt
He was a bad painter and a vicious gossip, with a vocabulary composed almost entirely of obscenities, guttural verbs, and the word postmodernist. -- Donna Tartt
Your silence is not acceptable. -- Donna Tartt
Strenuous occasions where (jumpy, un-opiated, wracked to the last synapse), -- Donna Tartt
She told me she loved him." "Well, girls always love assholes," said Platt, not bothering to dispute this. "Haven't you noticed? -- Donna Tartt
Why do I care about all the wrong things, and nothing at all for the right ones? Or, to tip it another way: how can I see so clearly that everything I love or care about is illusion, and yet - for me, anyway - all that's worth living for lies in that charm? -- Donna Tartt
Sometimes, when there's been an accident and reality is too sudden and strange to comprehend, the surreal will take over. Action slows to a dreamlike glide, frame by frame; the motion of a hand, a sentence spoken, fills an eternity. -- Donna Tartt
No, he's asleep. Where's my mother? Is -- Donna Tartt
It was a clear, black morning, encrusted with stars. -- Donna Tartt
But, if I dare say it, it wasn't until I had helped kill a man that I realized how elusive and complex an act a murder can actually be, and not necessarily attributable to one dramatic motive. -- Donna Tartt
I was worried that my exuberant drug use had damaged my brain and my nervous system and maybe even my soul in some irreparable and perhaps not readily apparent way. -- Donna Tartt
It may be a superhuman effort to lose oneself so completely, but that's nothing compared to the effort of getting oneself back again -- Donna Tartt
The ceilings had set off a ghostly echo, giving all that desperate hilarity the quality of a memory even as I sat listening to it, memories of things I'd never known. -- Donna Tartt
Bethlehem star. But we were not -- Donna Tartt
My hopes for a relationship with her were wholly unreal, whereas my ongoing misery, and frustration, were an all-too-horrible reality. Was groundless, hopeless romantic obsession any way to waste the rest of my life? -- Donna Tartt
Other means) claiming to Hobie that I'd already sold the -- Donna Tartt
Those first days before classes started I spent alone in my whitewashed room, in the bright meadows of Hampden. And I was happy in those first days as really I'd never been before, roaming like a sleepwalker, stunned and drunk with beauty. -- Donna Tartt
Their reality was far more interesting than any idealized version could possibly be -- Donna Tartt
From the window, above the clatter of pots and the slamming of cabinets, Francis was singing, as though it was the happiest song in the world: 'We are the little black sheep who have gone astray ... Baa baa baa ... Gentlemen songsters off on a spree ... Doomed from here to eternity ... -- Donna Tartt
For weeks, I'd been frozen, sealed-off; now, in the shower, I would turn up the water as hard as it would go and howl, silently. 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. -- Donna Tartt
The lamplight was eerie, and, standing there motionless in our bathrobes, sleepy, with shadows flickering all around, I felt as though I had woken from one dream into an even more remote one, some bizarre wartime bomb shelter of the unconscious. -- Donna Tartt
furniture polish: 16 parts beeswax, 4 parts resin, 1 part Venice turpentine, -- Donna Tartt
I'd yearned for the darkness and repose of Hobie's house, its crowded rooms and old-wood smell, tea leaves and tobacco smoke, bowls of oranges on the sideboard and candlesticks scalloped with puddled beeswax. -- Donna Tartt
Even if you need, and want, a second opinion, it can be dangerous to have people telling you what they think you ought to add, or cut, before you've even finished telling your story. One loses heart; one loses energy and interest. Or at least I do. -- Donna Tartt
Lights and moods and seasons was to see it a thousand different ways and to keep it shut in the dark - a thing made of light, that only lived in light - was wrong in more ways than I knew how to explain. More than wrong: it was crazy. -- Donna Tartt
The light of long ago is different from the light of today, and yet here, in this house, I'm reminded of the past at every turn. -- Donna Tartt
A sunstruck instant that existed now and forever. -- Donna Tartt
Matters progressed. -- Donna Tartt
And I know I said earlier that he was perfect but he wasn't perfect, far from it; he could be silly and vain and remote and often cruel and still we loved him, in spite of, because. -- Donna Tartt
I think innocence is something that adults project upon children that's not really there. -- Donna Tartt
DeFrees, a dealer in nineteenth-century watercolors who for all her stiff clothes and strong perfumes was a hugger and a cuddler, with the old-ladyish habit of liking -- Donna Tartt
Because: if our secrets define us, as opposed to the face we show the world: then the painting was the secret that raised me above the surface of life and enabled me to know who I am. And it's there: in my notebooks, every page, even though it's not. -- Donna Tartt
Grown children (an oxymoron, I realize) veer instinctively to extremes: the young scholar is much more a pedant than his older counterpart. And I, being young myself, took these pronouncements of Henry's very seriously. I doubt if Milton himself could have impressed me more. -- Donna Tartt
She was beautiful, too. That's almost secondary; but still, she was. -- Donna Tartt
She was the missing kingdom, the unbruised part of myself I'd lost with my mother. -- Donna Tartt
I'm not sure whay I've been drawn to this subject, except that murder is a subject that has always drawn people for as long as people have been telling stories. -- Donna Tartt
In my own humorless state I failed to see anything except what I construed as certain tragic similarities between Gatsby and myself. -- Donna Tartt
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. -- Donna Tartt
and yet, whenever he started with the questions I froze stiff, as if I'd been pushed onstage in a play where I didn't know the lines. -- Donna Tartt
Because it is dangerous to ignore the existence of the irrational. The more cultivated a person is, the more intelligent, the more repressed, then the more he needs some method of channeling the primitive impulses he's worked so hard to subdue. -- Donna Tartt
Love doesn't conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool. -- Donna Tartt
And that was it: infinite loop; no alt-tab out. You could force close, shut down the computer, start all over and run it again, and the game would still lock up and freeze at the same place. "Where's Popper?" No cheat code. Game over. There was no way past that moment. -- Donna Tartt
And her laugh was enough to make you want to kick over what you were doing and follow her down the street. -- Donna Tartt
When I'm writing, I am concentrating almost wholly on concrete detail: the color a room is painted, the way a drop of water rolls off a wet leaf after a rain. -- Donna Tartt
I'd always rather stand or fall on my own mistakes. There's nothing worse than looking back, in a published book, at a line edit or a copy edit that you felt queasy about and didn't want to take, but took anyway. -- Donna Tartt
They turned up the volume of the inner monologue, magnified qualities already present to great excess, made people so much themselves that they couldn't stand it. And how can we lose this maddening -- Donna Tartt
She was the golden thread running through everything, a lens that magnified beauty so that the whole world stood transfigured in relation to her, and her alone. -- Donna Tartt
And how did they drive people mad? They turned up the volume of the inner monologue, magnified qualities already present to great excess, made people so much themselves that they couldn't stand it. -- Donna Tartt
And, lying on my bed in some biscuit-colored hotel room in Nice, with a balcony facing the Promenade des Anglais, I watch the clouds reflected on sliding panes and marvel even how my sadness can make me happy ... -- Donna Tartt
All of the above. -- Donna Tartt
It was like waking from a nightmare to a worse nightmare. -- Donna Tartt
Anything is grand if it's done on a large enough scale. -- Donna Tartt
We being round thee, forget to die. -- Donna Tartt
won't last, it's -- Donna Tartt
His subconscious mind knocked loose from its perch and flapping in the hollow corridors of his skull as erratically as a bat -- Donna Tartt
I began to see new buildings, too, which were connected by futuristic walkways lit from beneath. Long, cool perspectives of modern architecture, rising phosphorescent and eerie from the rubble. -- Donna Tartt
Credulous father, a distinguished judge who had spent his final -- Donna Tartt
Well, is true. I did know. Because if possible to paint fakes that look like that? Las Vegas would be the most beautiful city in the history of earth! -- Donna Tartt
Right, I said, after an off-balance pause. A knocker, in the trade, was a shark who charmed his way into old people's homes: to cheat them of valuables -- Donna Tartt
I never realized, you know, how much we rely on appearances," he said. "It's not that we're so smart, it's just that we don't look like we did it. We might as well be a bunch of Sunday-school teachers as far as everyone else is concerned. But these guys won't be taken in by that. -- Donna Tartt
The pursuit of pure beauty is a trap, a fast track to bitterness and sorrow, that beauty has to be wedded to something more meaningful. -- Donna Tartt
I was wide awake, and yet part of me was so glassed-off and numb I was practically in a coma. -- Donna Tartt
There's a big anti-intellectual strain in the American south, and there always has been. We're not big on thought. -- Donna Tartt
Side by side they were very much alike, in similarity less of lineament than of manner and bearing, a correspondence of gestures which bounced and echoed between them so that a blink seemed to reverberate, moments later, in a twitch of the other's eyelid. -- Donna Tartt
Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it's going to kill us. -- Donna Tartt
But it was excruciating to emerge from my eerie submarine existence into this harsh stampede of noise and light. -- Donna Tartt
There had been a trapped thought about to emerge, something essential and unspeakable, released by the mention of those blank-faced soldiers. Now it was all gone but the image: dead boys with limbs akimbo, staring into the sky. -- Donna Tartt
Real age, as I came to see from the genuine pieces that passed through my hands, was variable, crooked, capricious, singing here and sullen there, warm asymmetrical streaks on a rosewood cabinet from where a slant of sun had struck it while the other side was as dark as the day it was cut. -- Donna Tartt
And what does a person with such romantic temperament seek in the study of the classics?
If by romantic you mean solitary and introspective, I think romantics are frequently the best classicists. -- Donna Tartt
Well, I've already got ten thousand set aside. That's a good start. If you think about it when we get home, give me your Social and next time I drop by the bank, I'll open an account in your name, okay? -- Donna Tartt
Picking up the phone to say hello, somehow I never had. Are you okay? -- Donna Tartt
jeans jacket, catching him in a chokehold, pistol at -- Donna Tartt
(meaning Death) always wins but that doesn't mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we're not -- Donna Tartt
Over to the Asia Society, and now she's out doing a bit of Christmas shopping. She says you, ah, you're meeting her later tonight? -- Donna Tartt
That Mossberg," Boris said to me, accepting the bottle passed over the front seat. "Evil dirty thing. Sawed off
? sprays pellets here to Hamburg. Aim it way the fuck away from everyone and still you will hit half the people in the room. -- Donna Tartt
Because, between 'reality' on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there's a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic. -- Donna Tartt
Over and over, I kept thinking I've got to go home and then, for the millionth time, I can't. -- Donna Tartt
Safe trip. I love you. No kidding. -- Donna Tartt
The smells, the shadows, even the dappled pale trunks of the plane trees lifted my spirits -- Donna Tartt
All my life, people have taken my shyness for sullenness, snobbery, bad temper of one sort or another. -- Donna Tartt
And what would I do ? Part of me was immobile, stunned with despair, like those rats that lose hope in laboratory experiments and lie down in the maze to starve. -- Donna Tartt
And though there was something pathetic about it - taking comfort in her left-behind things like a puppy snuggled in an old coat ... -- Donna Tartt
I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe. -- Donna Tartt
But Beauty - unless she is wed to something more meaningful - is always superficial. It -- Donna Tartt
I never got used to the way the horizon there could just erase itself and leave you marooned, adrift, in an incomplete dreamscape that was like a sketch for the world you knew... -- Donna Tartt
It seems to me that psychology is only another word for what the ancients called fate. -- Donna Tartt
The shame that tormented me was all the more corrosive for having no very clear origin: I didn't know why I felt so tainted, and worthless, and wrong-only that I did, and whenever I looked up from my books I was swamped by slimy waters rushing in from all sides. -- Donna Tartt
In fact, I can't think of much I'd like better than for him to step into the room right now, glasses fogged and smelling of damp wool, shaking the rain from his hair like an old dog and saying: 'Dickie, my boy, what you got for a thirsty old man to drink tonight? -- Donna Tartt
I am an alcoholic. I'm the first to admit that. I can't drink at all. One drink is too many and a thousand's not enough. -- Donna Tartt
No second chances. -- Donna Tartt
I see you are philosopher by nature. -- Donna Tartt
Harsh lights and narrow hallways, images which did not seem so much theatrical or foreign as imbued with the indelible quality of memory, of experience lived. -- Donna Tartt
I have only to glance over my shoulder for all those years to drop away and I see it behind me again, the ravine, rising all green and black through the saplings, a picture that will never leave me. -- Donna Tartt
Whe can't escape who we are -- Donna Tartt
Who was it that said that coincidence was just God's way of remaining anonymous? -- Donna Tartt
There is no truth beyond illusion ... between 'reality' on the one hand, and the point where reality comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and magic. -- Donna Tartt
We had trench warfare in America way before World War I. Most people don't know that. -- Donna Tartt
Back there or maybe even taken an actual shit, and then tried to cover it up with a bunch of coconut air freshener that smelled like suntan lotion. The seats were greasy, and patched with duct tape, and the shocks were nearly gone. Whenever we struck a -- Donna Tartt
He would deny this is confronted, citing evasively his affection for Dante and Giotto, but anything overtly religious filled him with a pagan alarm; and I believe that like Pliny, whom he resembled in so many respects, he secretly thought it to be a degenerate cult carried to extravagant lengths. -- Donna Tartt
Children - if you think back really what it was like to be a child and what it was like to know other children - children lie all the time. -- Donna Tartt
Three years is a long time." "It is to us. But in the scheme of things - not at all. I mean," said Andy reasonably, "look at some poor dumb bunny like Sabine Ingersoll or that idiot James Villiers. Forrest fucking Longstreet. -- Donna Tartt
The idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than almost anything. -- Donna Tartt
... still when I lost her, I lost sight of any landmark that might have led me someplace happier, to some more populated or congenial life ... -- Donna Tartt
garden hoes, there was a small but conspicuous headline. -- Donna Tartt
But if you close the door ... the night could last forever ... -- Donna Tartt
The other day, I tried to remember what was the word for 'dragonfly' and couldn't. -- Donna Tartt
Well, girls always love assholes," said Platt, not bothering to dispute this. "Haven't you noticed?" No, I thought bleakly, untrue. Else why didn't Pippa love me? -- Donna Tartt
Every new event - everything I did for the rest of my life - would only separate us more and more: days she was no longer a part of, an ever-growing distance between us. Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away. -- Donna Tartt
Time, and repeated screenings, have endowed the memory with a menace the original did not possess. -The Secret History, pg. 260 -- Donna Tartt
affectionate exasperated breath I knew -- Donna Tartt
Before, I was paralyzed, though I didn't really know it," he said. "It was because I thought too much, lived too much in the mind. It was hard to make decisions. I felt immobilized. -- Donna Tartt
To 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; -- Donna Tartt
Never do what you can't undo. -- Donna Tartt
And it's a temptation for any intelligent person, and especially for perfectionists such as the ancients and ourselves, to try to murder the primitive, emotive, appetitive self. But that is a mistake. -- Donna Tartt
Well, the Dutch invented the microscope," she said. "They were jewelers, grinders of lenses. They want it all as detailed as possible because even the tiniest things mean something. -- Donna Tartt
In this swarm of cigarettes and dark sophistication they appeared here and there like figures from an allegory; or long-dead celebrants from some forgotten garden party -- Donna Tartt
Then there's the business of standardized tests. Henry refused to take the SATs - he'd probably score off the charts if he did, but he's got some kind of aesthetic objection to them. -- Donna Tartt
Distracted themselves with all kinds of gadgets and devices, flooding themselves incessantly with information and texts and communication and entertainment from every direction to try to make themselves forget it: where we were, what we were. -- Donna Tartt
Adrift in an air of charged significance, doubt struck me: was it a real memory, had he really spoken those words to me, or was I dreaming? -- Donna Tartt
Well, whatever one thinks of the Roman Church, it is a worthy and powerful foe. I could accept that sort of conversion with grace. But I shall be very disappointed indeed if we lose him to the Presbyterians. -- Donna Tartt
Or
to quote another paradoxical gem of my dad's: sometimes you have to lose to win. -- Donna Tartt
Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells awaited them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital. -- Donna Tartt
When you're worried about something,' said Henry abruptly, 'have you ever tried thinking in a different language? -- Donna Tartt
The center of my earth is you -- Donna Tartt
For in the deepest, most unshakable part of myself reason was useless. -- Donna Tartt
I hope we're all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime? -- Donna Tartt
He's telling you that living things don't last - it's all temporary. Death in life. -- Donna Tartt
It's a perfectly handy skill for any boy to know." "Certainly it is, if he needs to hail a passing tugboat. -- Donna Tartt
You are - all your experience just kind of accumulates, and the novel takes a richness of its own simply because it has the weight of all those years that one's put into it. -- Donna Tartt
When you feel homesick,' he said, 'just look up. Because the moon is the same wherever you go. -- Donna Tartt
Richard Papen: As it happened, I knew Gartrell. He was a bad painter and a vicious gossip, with a vocabulary composed almost entirely of obscenities, gutteral verbs, and the world postmodernist. -- Donna Tartt
Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming. -- Donna Tartt
Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones that I did not. -- Donna Tartt
There's nothing like having a sympathetic reader who asks the right questions, who understands what you're trying to achieve and only wants to make it better. -- Donna Tartt
Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs. -- Donna Tartt
I turned, painting in hand, to show it to her, and then realized she wasn't there. Or - she was there and she wasn't. Part of her was there, but it was invisible. The invisible part was the important part. This was something I hadn't understood before. -- Donna Tartt
Basketball courts ringed with barbed-wire fence. -- Donna Tartt
It was interesting to see the change that came over Boris when he was speaking another language - a sort of livening, or alertness, a sense of a different and more efficient person occupying his body. -- Donna Tartt
You should never get a person's name tattooed on you, because then you lose the person. I was too young to know that when I got the tattoo. -- Donna Tartt
Worrying, Potter! Don't stand there and look so unhappy! If we lose, we win, and if we win, we win! Everything is good! -- Donna Tartt
It's a big shift. I don't know quite how to explain it. Between wanting and not wanting, caring and not caring. Of course it's a lot more than that too. Shock and aura. Things are stronger and brighter and I feel on the edge of something inexpressible. -- Donna Tartt
It does not do to be frightened of things about which you know nothing," he said. "You are like children. Afraid of the dark. -- Donna Tartt
I had nothing to offer her. I was illness, instability, everything she wanted to get away from. -- Donna Tartt
Barbour, who had come down to the curb with me, said smoothly: -- Donna Tartt
A month or two before, I would have been appalled at the idea of any murder at all. But that Sunday afternoon, as I actually stood watching one, it seemed the easiest thing in the world. -- Donna Tartt
Had I stayed in California I might have ended up in a cult or at the very least practicing some weird dietary restriction. -- Donna Tartt
And if beauty is terror," said Julian, "then what is desire? We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it?"
"To live," said Camilla.
"To live forever," said Bunny, chin cupped in palm. -- Donna Tartt
And yet isn't it always the inappropriate thing, the thing that doesn't quite work, that's oddly the dearest? -- Donna Tartt
A wilderness of gilt, gleaming in the slant from the dust-furred windows: gilded cupids, gilded commodes and torchieres, and
undercutting the old-wood smell
the reek of turpentine, oil paint, and varnish. -- Donna Tartt
Our large age difference made us shy with each other; there was a formality, a generational reserve; -- Donna Tartt
Only now was it starting to make sense why Lady Macbeth could never scrub the blood off her hands, why it was still there after she washed it away. -- Donna Tartt
Well, she doesn't have anything to do with it, Richard, you're just like that guy in 'Dragnet' that always wants the facts. -- Donna Tartt
Unsettled heart. The fetishism of secrecy. These people understood - as I did - the back alleys of the soul, whispers and shadows, money slipping from hand to hand, the password, the code, the second self, all the hidden consolations that lifted -- Donna Tartt
(When I'd asked Mrs. Barbour where the washing machine was, she'd looked at me as if I'd asked for lye and lard to boil up for soap.) -- Donna Tartt
Beauty is terror. -- Donna Tartt
The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation. -- Donna Tartt
I lost sight of any landmark that might have led me someplace happier, -- Donna Tartt
That surge of power and delight, of confidence, of control. That sudden sense of the richness of the world. Its infinite possibility. -- Donna Tartt
You had to hand it to her: she was as cool as dammit. -- Donna Tartt
I'd rather write one good book than ten mediocre ones. -- Donna Tartt
Another trick - calculated to lure a different, more sophisticated customer - was to bury a piece in the back of the store, reverse the vacuum cleaner over it (instant antiquity!) and allow the nosy customer to ferret it out on his or her own - look, -- Donna Tartt
X. IT WAS EIGHT-THIRTY IN the morning by the time I got to storage, with a sore jaw from grinding -- Donna Tartt
Sometimes it's about playing a poor hand well. -- Donna Tartt
Who cares? If he is good to you? None of us ever find enough kindness in the world, do we? -- Donna Tartt
That's the first law of magic, Specs. Misdirection. Never forget it. -- Donna Tartt
hubris on Henry's, too much Greek prose composition - whatever -- Donna Tartt
This whole town is like a big Fuck You to Thoreau. -- Donna Tartt
Maybe good luck was like bad luck in that it took a while to sink in. -- Donna Tartt
Overly sensitive to the souls of rooms and objects, the emanations -- Donna Tartt
a light that made me think of long hours in dusty libraries, and old books, and silence. -- Donna Tartt
Me she was watching for: me. And the heart-shock of believing, for only a moment, that you might just have what could never be yours. -- Donna Tartt
I mean, this man was not /Voltaire/ we killed. -- Donna Tartt
I thought they spoke Russian in the Ukraine." "Well, yes. Depends what part of Ukraine. They're not so different languages, the two. -- Donna Tartt
All those layers of silence upon silence. -- Donna Tartt
Beauty alters the grain of reality. -- Donna Tartt
else it is - is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not -- Donna Tartt
It's a long story. I'll make it short as I can. -- Donna Tartt
But it's for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work. -- Donna Tartt
Minie balls and repeating rifles. That was why the body count was so high. We had trench warfare in America way before WW1. p128 -- Donna Tartt
A world of ticking clocks and creaking floorboards. -- Donna Tartt
You want to know what Classics are?" said a drunk Dean of Admissions to me at a faculty party a couple of years ago. "I'll tell you what Classics are. Wars and homos. -- Donna Tartt
They were a pair of white mice, I thought - only Kitsey was a spun-sugar, fairy-princess mouse whereas Andy was more the kind of luckless, anemic, pet-shop mouse you might feed to your boa constrictor. "Get -- Donna Tartt
rain - was grappling for her wallet. "Maybe -- Donna Tartt
He was a marvelous talker, a magical talker, and I wish I were able to give a better idea what he said, but it is impossible for a mediocre intellect to render the speech of a superior one -- Donna Tartt
They took the wrong ones! Mistake was made! Everything is unfair! Who do we complain to, in this shitty place? Who is in charge here?] -- Donna Tartt
In order for a long piece of work to engage a novelist over an extended period of time, it has to deal with questions that you find very important, that you're trying to work out. -- Donna Tartt
It would be a long, long time before I heard anything from Boris again. -- Donna Tartt
Whatever teaches us to talk to ourselves is important: whatever teaches us to sing ourselves our of despair. -- Donna Tartt
The vitality of the act was entirely obfuscated, the beauty, the terror, the sacrifice.' He took one last drag of this cigarette and put it out. 'Quite simply,' he said, 'we didn't believe. And belief was the one condition which was absolutely necessary. Belief, and absolute surrender. -- Donna Tartt
And though in the clockless, temperature-controlled casino night, words like 'day' and 'Christmas' were fairly meaningless constructs, 'happiness,' amidst the loudly clinked glasses, didn't seem quite such a doomed or fatal idea. -- Donna Tartt
They too, knew this beautiful and harrowing landscape; they'd had the same experience of looking up from their books with fifth-century eyes and finding the world disconcertingly sluggish and alien, as if it were not their home. -- Donna Tartt
You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life -- Donna Tartt
All things fall and are built again. -- Donna Tartt
See?" said Boris, interrupting Vitya right in -- Donna Tartt
really great painting is fluid enough to work its way into the mind and heart through all kinds of different angles, in ways that are unique and very particular. -- Donna Tartt
She was still a girl, a slight lovely girl who lay in bed and ate chocolates, a girl whose hair smelled like hyacinth and whose white scarves fluttered jauntily in the breeze; -- Donna Tartt
The dead appear to us in dreams because that's the only way they can make us see them; what we see is only a projection, beamed from a great distance, light shining at us from a dead star ... -- Donna Tartt
But even that day, there on the porch, with Charles beside me and the smell of wood smoke in the air, it had the quality of a memory; there it was, before my eyes, and yet too beautiful to believe. -- Donna Tartt
Even if you don't like Poe - he invented the detective story. And science fiction. In essence, he invented a huge part of the twentieth century. -- Donna Tartt
How quickly he fell; how soon it was over. -- Donna Tartt
It was reassuring to know that far away, whales swam untroubled in Baltic waters and monks in arcane time zones chanted ceaselessly for the salvation of the world. -- Donna Tartt
Fact it seemed we had been doing things, such as stringing necklaces of rainbow-colored candy while the radio played Belle and Sebastian -- Donna Tartt
the atmosphere it breathed was like the light-rinsed airiness of a wall opposite an open window. -- Donna Tartt
There's an expectation these days that novels - like any other consumer product - should be made on a production line, with one dropping from the conveyor belt every couple of years. -- Donna Tartt
Hard to believe that the world had ended and yet somehow these ridiculous activities kept grinding on. -- Donna Tartt
Even when I leaned in as far as I dared without being obvious, -- Donna Tartt
He was a planet without an atmosphere. -- Donna Tartt
I was struck by something rather obvious - namely, that any religious ritual is arbitrary unless one is able to see past it to a deeper meaning. -- Donna Tartt
Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction. -- Donna Tartt
How strange to find that the present contained such a bright shard of the living past, damaged and eroded but not destroyed. -- Donna Tartt
When she went back to the telephone Hely's breath, on the other end, was ragged and secretive. -- Donna Tartt
I slept all day, face down in the pillow, a comfortable dead-man's float only remotely disturbed by a chill undertow of reality - talk, footsteps, slamming doors - which threaded fitfully through the dark, blood-warm waters of dream. -- Donna Tartt
In short: I felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way. -- Donna Tartt
Though Julian could be marvelously kind in difficult circumstances of all sorts, I sometimes got the feeling that he was less pleased by kindness itself than by the elegance of the gesture. -- Donna Tartt
He had an orange stain on his mouth from the prawns, the old jabberwock. -- Donna Tartt
Starched shirts and suits fresh from the cleaners' went a long, long way toward hiding a multitude of sins. -- Donna Tartt
A teahouse amid the cherry blossoms, on the way to death. p136 -- Donna Tartt
What do you think about America?"
"Everyone always smiles so big! Well - most people. Maybe not so much you. I think it looks stupid. -- Donna Tartt
Life is catastrophe ... Everything is unfair. Who do we complain to in this shitty place? ... We all lose everything that matters in the end ... it's possible to play it with a kind of joy.p.767, The Goldfinch -- Donna Tartt
Yet (moment by painful moment, breath by painful breath) one got through things. -- Donna Tartt
afterlife, the space between earth and not-earth, world and not-world, highly polished floors and glass-roof cathedral echoes and the whole anonymous -- Donna Tartt
And sharp-faced, like Boris, but with an evil red-rimmed gaze and tiny, brownish sawteeth. He made me think of a rabid fox. -- Donna Tartt
At this question, I felt a sharp rush of despair - for as bad as I felt there was nothing he could do for me, and from his face, I realized he knew that, too. -- Donna Tartt
Nature red in tooth and claw.' Perhaps she doesn't -- Donna Tartt
If I had grown up in that house I couldn't have loved it more, couldn't have been more familiar with the creak of the swing, or the pattern of the clematis vines on the trellis, or the velvety swell of land as it faded to gray on the horizon ... The very colors of the place had seeped into my blood. -- Donna Tartt
With a grief no less sharp for not being intimate with its object. -- Donna Tartt
But poor Andy - even before he was skipped ahead a grade - had always been a chronically picked-upon kid: scrawny, twitchy, lactose-intolerant, with skin so pale it was almost transparent, and a penchant for throwing out words like 'noxious' and 'chthonic' in casual conversation. -- Donna Tartt
His warmth, which seemed to presume upon some happy old intimacy we did not share, had thrown me into awkwardness. -- Donna Tartt
Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness. -- Donna Tartt
I really do work in solitude. -- Donna Tartt
Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. -- Donna Tartt
All that blind, infantile hunger to save and be saved, to repeat the past and make it different, had somehow attached itself, ravenously, to her. -- Donna Tartt
But romantic vision can also lead one away from certain very hard, ugly truths about life that are important to know. -- Donna Tartt
Be still, O little one, for I am Death. Another cobra had said that, in something else by Kipling. The cobras in his stories were heartless but they spoke beautifully, like wicked kings in the Old Testament. -- Donna Tartt
What's worth living for? what's worth dying for? what's completely foolish to pursue? -- Donna Tartt
Pragmatists are often strangely superstitious. -- Donna Tartt
Honestly can't remember much else about those years -- Donna Tartt
By happy contrast, Hobie's whole day revolved around dinner. -- Donna Tartt
Over 2,000 reptiles await you. -- Donna Tartt
As much fun as it is to read a book, writing a book is one level deeper than that. -- Donna Tartt
an excuse to bring out the bottle of sherry and visit -- Donna Tartt
Fate is cruel but maybe not random. Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn't mean we have to bow and gravel to it. -- Donna Tartt
It's hard for me to show work while I'm writing, because other people's comments will influence what happens. -- Donna Tartt
She was as cool as dammit. -- Donna Tartt
At first I thought they were playing to an -- Donna Tartt
I supposed that when anyone accustomed to working with the mind is faced with a straightforward action, there's a tendency to embellish, to make it overly clever. On paper there's a certain symmetry. Now that I'm faced with the prospect of executing it I realize how hideously complicated it is. -- Donna Tartt
Maybe, I thought- reaching in the bag, taking out a stack of money and looking it over- maybe good luck was like bad luck in that it took a while to sink in. You didn't feel anything at first. -- Donna Tartt
He'd probably just crawl in the corner and starve. Like a hamster you forgot to feed. -- Donna Tartt
But the first rule of restorations, as he'd taught me earlier on, was that you never did what you couldn't reverse. -- Donna Tartt
It does all swing around strangely sometimes, doesn't it. -- Donna Tartt
and Mathilde still had -- Donna Tartt
wheels caught and I was flung into ordinary -- Donna Tartt
Whatever else one may say about guilt, it certainly lends one diabolical powers of invention; -- Donna Tartt
No matter how hard I tried to wish him out of the picture - for there he always was, in my hands and my voice and my walk ... -- Donna Tartt
[I] thought of that line from The Iliad I love so much, about Pallas Athene and the terrible eyes shining. -- Donna Tartt
My novels aren't really generated by a single conceptual spark; it's more a process of many different elements that come together unexpectedly over a long period of time. -- Donna Tartt
MIGHT HAVE LIKED Xandra in other circumstances - which, I guess, is sort of like saying I might have liked the kid who beat me up if he hadn't beat me up. -- Donna Tartt
Different cultures and all that, but it's true what they say about the Japanese being undemonstrative. -- Donna Tartt
Twelve years after Robin's death, no one knew any more about how he had ended up hanged from a tree in his own yard than they had on the day it happened. -- Donna Tartt
And what is beauty?" "Terror. -- Donna Tartt
He sailed through the world guided only by the dim lights of impulse and habit, confident that his course would throw up no obstacles so large that they could not be plowed over with sheer force of momentum. -- Donna Tartt
It's not about outward appearances but inward significance. A grandeur in the world, but not of the world, a grandeur that the world doesn't understand. That first glimpse of pure otherness, in whose presence you bloom out and out and out.
A self one does not want. A heart one cannot help. -- Donna Tartt
I think this goes more to the idea of 'relentless irony' than 'divine providence. -- Donna Tartt
People loved to think they were getting a deal. Four times out of five they would look right past what they didn't want to see. -- Donna Tartt
Somehow the present had shrunk into a smaller and much less interesting place. -- Donna Tartt
Although, I do have to say, it was difficult to imagine him -- Donna Tartt
We have art in order not to die from the truth. - NIETZSCHE -- Donna Tartt
Then why aren't you happy?" "I don't want to talk about it." "And -- Donna Tartt
A truck shot past in a whine of spray. -- Donna Tartt
Storytelling and elegant style don't always go hand in hand. -- Donna Tartt
There had been nights in the desert where I was so sick with laughter, convulsed and doubled over with aching stomach for hours on end, I would happily have thrown myself in front of a car to make it stop. -- Donna Tartt
Not quite what one expected, but once it happened one realized it couldn't be any other way. -- Donna Tartt
Those guys who wore a wedding ring that didn't really look like a wedding ring - or maybe it wasn't a wedding ring at all and he was just super-proud of his Celtic -- Donna Tartt
Welty's instruction; that I'd had a concussion. That I hadn't -- Donna Tartt
Well, I do have some maiden aunts that are not quite like the aunts in the book, but I definitely do have a couple of them, and a couple of old aunties. -- Donna Tartt
If he had his wits about him Bunny would surely keep his mouth shut; but now, with his subconscious mind knocked loose from its perch and flapping in the hollow corridors of his skull as erratically as a bat, there was no way to be sure of anything he might do. -- Donna Tartt
Nitric acid. Lampblack. Furniture, like all living things, acquired marks and scars over the course of time. The effects of time, visible and invisible. -- Donna Tartt
Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you. -- Donna Tartt
He said well if you can't plan it out ahead of time, you'll just have to work it out as you go along -- Donna Tartt
You could grasp it in an instant, you could live in it forever. -- Donna Tartt
But though it was the most resonant and real-seeming thing that had happened in a long time, I didn't want to spoil it by talking about it... -- Donna Tartt
And the nights, bigger than imagining: black and gusty and enormous, disordered and wild with stars. -- Donna Tartt
Only truths that matter to me are the ones I don't, and can't, understand. -- Donna Tartt
She looked up at me, her eyes large with compassion, with understanding of the solitude and incivility of grief. -- Donna Tartt
Hobie's presence below stairs was an anchor, a friendly weight ... -- Donna Tartt
I would be less frightened of death (not just my own death but Welty's death, Andy's death, Death in general) if I thought a familiar person came to meet us at the door, -- Donna Tartt
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. -- Donna Tartt
I suppose there is a certain crucial interval in everyone's life when character is fixed forever; for me, it was that first fall term I spent at Hampden. -- Donna Tartt
telephone, "Myriam's not my wife! This - " he handed -- Donna Tartt
And the daughter. Bit of a social failure. Well, that's putting it delicately. Quite overweight. Collects the cats, if you know what I mean. -- Donna Tartt
And that's why I've chosen to write these pages as I've written them. For only by stepping into the middle zone, the polychrome edge between truth and untruth, is it tolerable to be here and writing this at all. -- Donna Tartt
I've come to believe that there's no truth beyond -- Donna Tartt
Nothing is lonelier or more disorienting than insomnia. -- Donna Tartt
I often thought how peculiar my life must look to someone reading those letters, far away. -- Donna Tartt
Well, hey, you don't have anything to worry about then, do you? -- Donna Tartt
And if what they say is true
if every great painting is really a self-portrait
what, if anything, is Fabritius saying about himself? -- Donna Tartt
That woman can sell water to a drowning man. -- Donna Tartt
First rule of restorations. Never do what you can't undo. -- Donna Tartt
Children have very sharp powers of observation - probably sharper than adults - yet at the same time their emotional reactions are murky and much more primitive. -- Donna Tartt
Life: vacant, vain, intolerable. What loyalty did I owe it? None whatsoever. -- Donna Tartt
A different and much deeper sort of beauty altogether. The thing and yet not the thing. -- Donna Tartt
Though he didn't treat them as equals - he didn't treat anyone as an equal, actually - neither did he resort to the condescending friendliness of the wealthy. -- Donna Tartt
I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell. -- Donna Tartt
I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive. -- Donna Tartt
What you want is to live and be happy in the world is a woman (or man) who has her (his) own life and lets you have yours -- Donna Tartt
They understand not only evil, it seemed, but the extravagance of tricks with which evil presents itself as good. -- Donna Tartt
I suppose the shock of recognition is one of the nastiest shocks of all. -- Donna Tartt
Waiting at the wrong place, most like. -- Donna Tartt
Had something to say? At any rate. We left our rooms pretty much -- Donna Tartt
The trouble is when people read about authors, they don't feel compelled to read the authors' work. -- Donna Tartt
enough to show the black -- Donna Tartt
You have an unusual equipment for fate, exercise with care!' -- Donna Tartt
Three coffees, two with milk, please," said Francis to the fat woman behind the counter. "No milk, just Cremora." "Well, then, just black, I guess." He turned to us. "Have you seen the paper this morning? -- Donna Tartt
Goyen there. Sadly not for sale." "Van Goyen? I would have sworn that was a Corot." "From here, yes, you might." He was pleased at the comparison. "Very similar painters - Vincent -- Donna Tartt
The sky was a rich, mindless, never-ending blue, like a promise of some ridiculous glory that wasn't really there. -- Donna Tartt
Clearly 'worry' was the mark of a primitive and spiritually unevolved person. -- Donna Tartt
Can't good come around sometimes through some strange back doors? -- Donna Tartt
throw up his hands and say, 'Who, me? I had nothing to do with it.' -- Donna Tartt
it felt adult, sophisticated, slightly alcoholic. -- Donna Tartt
the world won't come to me,' he used to say, 'so I must go to it' - -- Donna Tartt
To try to make some meaning out of all this seems -- Donna Tartt
First things first: find my -- Donna Tartt
An object - any object - was worth whatever you could get somebody to pay for it. -- Donna Tartt
It had been a conscious decision to pull free. It had taken everything I had to do it, like an animal gnawing a limb off to escape a trap. And somehow I had done it; -- Donna Tartt
Understand, by saying 'God,' I am merely using 'God' as reference to long-term pattern we can't decipher. -- Donna Tartt
