Donna Tartt Quotes

40 Sourced Quotes

When you feel homesick,' he said, 'just look up. Because the moon is the same wherever you go.

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

Donna Tartt
And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.

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
But sometimes, unexpectedly, grief pounded over me in waves that left me gasping; and when the waves washed back, I found myself looking out over a brackish wreck which was illumined in a light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead.

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
And as much as I'd like to believe there's a truth beyond illusion, I've come to believe that there's no truth beyond illusion. 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
I hope we're all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?

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
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
Who was it said that coincidence was just God's way of remaining anonymous?

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

Donna Tartt
And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky—so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.

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
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
After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great

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
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
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
There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty-unless she is wed to something more meaningful-is always superficial

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
When I looked at the painting I felt the same convergence on a single point: a glancing sun-struck instance that existed now and forever. Only occasionally did I notice the chain on the finch's ankle, or think what a cruel life for a little living creature—fluttering briefly, forced always to land in the same hopeless place.

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

Donna Tartt
Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.

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
Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.

Donna Tartt