Donna Tartt Quotes

40 Sourced Quotes

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.

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

Donna Tartt
She closed her eyes, dark-lidded, dark shadows beneath them; she really was older, not the glancing-eyed girl I had fallen in love with but no less beautiful for that; beautiful now in a way that less excited my senses than tore at my very heart.

Donna Tartt
I suppose the shock of recognition is one of the nastiest shocks of all.

Donna Tartt
What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can't be trusted—? 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 all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight towards a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster?

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

Donna Tartt
As we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn't touch.

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.

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.

Donna Tartt
Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it's going to kill us.

Donna Tartt