Donna Tartt Quotes

And as we leave Donne and Walton on the shores of Metahemeralism, we wave a fond farewell to those famous chums of yore.

Well, I think storytellers have always found murder a fascinating device.

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.

Who cares? If he is good to you? None of us ever find enough kindness in the world, do we?

Beauty alters the grain of reality.

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.

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

Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction

Actually, I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel.

I really do work in solitude.

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.

There's a big anti-intellectual strain in the American south, and there always has been. We're not big on thought.

I guess that anything we manage to save from history is a miracle.

Love doesn't conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.

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.

No money, holes in my socks, living off oatmeal.

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.

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.

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.

I think it's hard to write about children and to have an idea of innocence.

I hope we're all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?

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.

In short: I felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way.

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.

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.

The trouble is when people read about authors, they don't feel compelled to read the authors' work.

A different and much deeper sort of beauty altogether. The thing and yet not the thing.

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

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

their reality was far more interesting than any idealized version could possibly be

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.

What do you think about America?""Everyone always smiles so big! Well—most people. Maybe not so much you. I think it looks stupid.

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.

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

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.

Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw, " that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?

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.

When we are sad...it can be comforting to cling to familiar objects, to things that don't change.

When we are sad—at least I am like this—it can be comforting to cling to familiar objects, to the things that don't change.

He looked very tired, a regard which manifested itself not in dark circles, or pallor, but a dreamy and bright-cheeked sadness.

...not to look back or feel sad about things, that home is wherever I am.

Birds can sing and fish can swim and I can do this.

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.

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.

I sometimes get the feeling that he was less pleased by kindness itself than by the elegance of the gesture.

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.

. . . 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?