Top 500 Donna Tartt Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Donna Tartt

2. “Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you.”

— Donna Tartt

3. “It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.”

— Donna Tartt

4. “All those layers of silence upon silence.”

— Donna Tartt

5. “I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.”

— Donna Tartt

6. “Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us.”

— Donna Tartt

7. “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

8. “The books I loved in childhood – the first loves – I’ve read so often that I’ve internalized them in some really essential way: they are more inside me now than out.”

— Donna Tartt

9. “The first duty of the novelist is to entertain. It is a moral duty. People who read your books are sick, sad, traveling, in the hospital waiting room while someone is dying. Books are written by the alone for the alone.”

— Donna Tartt

10. “Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.”

— Donna Tartt

11. “Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only – if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn’t it? And isn’t the whole point of things – beautiful things – that they connect you to some larger beauty?”

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

13. “You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life.”

— Donna Tartt

14. “Sometimes it’s about playing a poor hand well.”

— Donna Tartt

15. “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

16. “But it’s for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work.”

— Donna Tartt

17. “But romantic vision can also lead one away from certain very hard, ugly truths about life that are important to know.”

— Donna Tartt

18. “If I’m not working, I’m not happy. That’s it. That’s the prerequisite for me for happiness.”

— Donna Tartt

19. “Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.”

— Donna Tartt

20. “Love doesn’t conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.”

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

22. “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

23. “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

24. “A veces tienes que perder para ganar.”

— Donna Tartt

25. “Not quite what one expected, but once it happened one realized it couldn’t be any other way.”

— Donna Tartt

26. “Does such a thing as ‘the fatal flaw,’ that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn’t. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.”

— Donna Tartt

27. “Children love secret club houses. They love secrecy even when there’s no need for secrecy.”

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

29. “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

30. “Even if it meant that she had failed, she was glad. And if what she’d wanted had been impossible from the start, still there was a certain lonely comfort in the fact that she’d known it was impossible and had gone ahead and done it anyway.”

— Donna Tartt

31. “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

32. “What’s mysterious, ambiguous, inexplicable. What doesn’t fit into a story, what doesn’t have a story. Glint of brightness on a barely-there chain. Patch of sunlight on a yellow wall. The loneliness that separates every living creature from every other living creature. Sorrow inseparable from joy.”

— Donna Tartt

33. “As much fun as it is to read a book, writing a book is one level deeper than that.”

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

35. “I really do work in solitude.”

— Donna Tartt

36. “Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. That night I wrote in my journal: “Trees are schizophrenic now and beginning to lose control, enraged with the shock of their fiery new colors. Someone – was it van Gogh? – said that orange is the color of insanity. Beauty is terror. We want to be devoured by it, to hide ourselves in that fire which refines us.”

— Donna Tartt

37. “I hope we’re all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?”

— Donna Tartt

38. “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

39. “Maybe sometimes – the wrong way is the right way? You can take the wrong path and it still comes out where you want to be? Or, spin it another way, sometimes you can do everything wrong and it still turns out to be right?”

— Donna Tartt

40. “Forgive me for for all the things that i did, but mostly for all the things i didn’t do.”

— Donna Tartt

41. “Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.”

— Donna Tartt

42. “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 nursing home. It was better never to have been born-never to have wanted anything, never to have hoped for anything.”

— Donna Tartt

43. “They too, knew this beautiful and harrowing landscape; they’d had the same experience of looking up from their books with fifth-century eyes and finding the world disconcertingly sluggish and alien, as if it were not their home.”

— Donna Tartt

44. “Sometimes when there’s been an accident and reality is too sudden and strange to comprehend, the surreal will take over.”

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

46. “When I’m writing, I am concentrating almost wholly on concrete detail: the color a room is painted, the way a drop of water rolls off a wet leaf after a rain.”

— Donna Tartt

47. “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

48. “Who was it said that coincidence was just God’s way of remaining anonymous?”

— Donna Tartt

49. “Sometimes you can do all the right things and not succeed. And that’s a hard lesson of reality.”

— Donna Tartt

50. “Children have very sharp powers of observation – probably sharper than adults – yet at the same time their emotional reactions are murky and much more primitive.”

— Donna Tartt