Quotes by Donna Tartt

“You could study the connections for years and never work it out-it was all about things coming together,things falling apart,time warp, my mother standing out in front of the museum when time flick...”

“And 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...”

“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?”

“It was a myth you couldn't function on opiates: shooting up was one thing but for someone like me-jumping at pigeons beating from the sidewalk, afflicted with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder practic...”

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

“...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...”

“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; bonfi...”

“. . . is it better to throw yourself head first and laughing into the holy rage calling your name?”

“What if our badness and mistakes are the very thing that set our fate and bring us round to good? What if, for some of us, we can't get there any other way?”

“What if is more complicated than that? What if maybe opposite is true as well? Because, if bad can sometimes come from good actions? where does it ever say, anywhere, that only bad can come from b...”

“Maybe the one had to be lost for the others to be found?”

“It's commonplace to say that we 'love' a book, but when we say it, we mean all sorts of things. Sometimes we mean that a book was important to us in out youth, though we haven't picked it up in yea...”

“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 c...”

“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 H...”

“Its a long story. Ill make it short as I can.”

“You'd be surprised, Theo." she said, leaning back in her shawl-shaped chair, "what small, everyday things can lift us out of despair. But nobody can do it for you. You're the one who has to watch f...”

“And though it's a bleak thing to admit all these years later, still I've never met anyone who made me feel loved the way she did. Everything came alive in her company; she cast a charmed theatrical...”

“And as much as I wanted to, I knew I couldn't turn around, that to look at her directly was to violate the laws of her world and mine; she had come to me the only way she could, and our eyes met in...”

“The idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than almost anything.”

“Asparagus is in season.”