Donna Tartt quotes - page 4

Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction. (Donna Tartt)
The world won't come to me... so I must go to it. View quote
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. View quote
Donna Tartt
... and yet isn't it always the inappropriate thing, the thing that doesn't quite work, that's oddly the dearest? View quote
Donna Tartt
It's funny, but thinking back on it now, I realize that this particular point in time, as I stood there blinking in the deserted hall, was the one point at which I might have chosen to do something very much different from what I actually did. But of course I didn't see this crucial moment for what it actually was; I suppose we never do. Instead, I only yawned, and shook myself from the momentary daze that had come upon me, and went on my way down the stairs. View quote
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. View quote
Donna Tartt
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. View quote
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. View quote
Donna Tartt
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 monstrous 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. View quote
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. View quote
Donna Tartt
Some things are too terrible to grasp at once. Other things - naked, sputtering, indelible in their horror - are too terrible to really grasp ever 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. (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. View quote
Donna Tartt
Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones that I did not. View quote
Donna Tartt
We are so customed to disguise ourselves to others that, in the end, we become disguised to ourselves. View quote
Donna Tartt
Can't good come around sometimes through some strange back doors? View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Donna Tartt
though I can digress with the best of them, I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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)
How quickly he fell; how soon it was over. View quote
Donna Tartt
They understand not only evil, it seemed, but the extravagance of tricks with which evil presents itself as good. View quote
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? View quote
Donna Tartt
... my head in the rainclouds, my heart in the sky. View quote
Donna Tartt