Quotes by Donna Tartt

“Because I dont care what anyone says or how often or winningly they say it: no one will ever, ever be able to persuade me that life is some awesome, rewarding treat. Because, heres the truth: life ...”

“How much did she remember? I wondered, afire with humiliation yet unable to tear my eyes from her. It wasnt the kind of thing you could ask but still I wanted to know. Did she have nightmares too? ...”

“Putting your time in at the office; dutifully spawning your two point five; smiling politely at your retirement party; then chewing on your bedsheet and choking on your canned peaches at the nursin...”

“Whenever you see flies or insects in a still lifea wilted petal, a black spot on the applethe painter is giving you a secret message. Hes telling you that living things dont lastits all temporary. ...”

“What are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a dead star?That, by the way, is a phrase of Julian's. I remember it from a lecture of his on the Iliad, when Patroklos appears t...”

“What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that cant be trusted? What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health...”

“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 doesnt touch. For if disaster and oblivion ...”

“But Robin: their dear little Robs. More than ten years later, his death remained an agony; there was no glossing any detail; its horror was not subject to repair or permutation by any of the narrat...”

“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 ...”

“During the next week, everyone noticed that my appetite had improved, even Toddy. Are you done with your hunger strike? he asked me curiously, one morning. Toddy, eat your breakfast. But I thought ...”

“But when she was annoyed with me, she had a cold way of saying Apparently in answer to almost anything I said, making me feel stupid. Um, I cant find the can opener. Apparently. Theres going to be ...”

“That surge of power and delight, of confidence, of control. That sudden sense of the richness of the world. Its infinite possibility.”

“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.”

“It seems to me that psychology is only another word for what the ancients called fate.”

“Whats worth living for? whats worth dying for? whats completely foolish to pursue?”

“What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and...”

“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.”

“Everyone basically has one aria to sing over their entire life.”

“It was like waking from a nightmare to a worse nightmare.”

“Why am I made the way I am? 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...”