Top 500 Donna Tartt Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 10 of 10

451. “The ice cream slows down your digestion. The coke settles your stomach and the caffeine cures your headache. Sugar gives you energy.”

— Donna Tartt

452. “I wish you smoked. I don’t know why you don’t. You weren’t an athlete in high school or anything, were you?” “No.” “That’s why Bun doesn’t smoke. Some clean-living type of football.”

— Donna Tartt

453. “I suppose I was only a little depressed, now the novelty of it had worn off, at the wildly alien character of the place in which I found myself: a strange land with strange customs and peoples and unpredictable weathers. I thought I was sick, though I don’t believe I really was; I was just cold all the time and unable to sleep, sometimes no more than an hour or two a night.”

— Donna Tartt

454. “The thing to remember,” said Dave, the psychiatrist who had been assigned to me by the city, “is that you’ll be taken care of no matter what.” He was a thirtyish guy with dark clothes and trendy eyeglasses who always looked as if he’d just come from a poetry reading in the basement of some church.”

— Donna Tartt

455. “You know, sometimes there’s a light at the table, like a visible halo, and you’re it, you know? You’re the light?”

— Donna Tartt

456. “He doesn’t care that Bunny is dead. I could forgive him if that was why he felt this way, but it isn’t. He wouldn’t care if we killed half a dozen people. All that matters to him is keeping his own name out of it.”

— Donna Tartt

457. “Hot thunder of whisper against my cheek.”

— Donna Tartt

458. “It was suffused with a weak, academic light – different from Plano, different from anything I had ever known – a light that made me think of long hours in dusty libraries, and old books, and silence.”

— Donna Tartt

459. “You wan’t to know what Classics are?” said a drunk Dean of Admissions to me at a faculty party a couple of years ago. “I’ll tell you what Clasdics are. War and homos.” A sententious and vulgar statement, certainly, but like many such gnomic vulgarities, it also contains a tiny splinter of truth.”

— Donna Tartt

460. “You could grasp it in an instant, you could live in it forever.”

— Donna Tartt

461. “Who’s to say that gamblers don’t really understand it better than anyone else? Isn’t everything worthwhile a gamble? Can’t good come around sometimes through some strange back doors?”

— Donna Tartt

462. “We had so many happy days in the country that fall that from this vantage they merge into a sweet and indistinct blur. Around Halloween the last, stubborn wildflowers died away and the wind became sharp and gusty, blowing sbowers of yellow leaves on the gray, wrinkled surface of the lake. On those chill afternoons when the sky was like lead and the clouds were racing, we stayed in the library, banking huge fires to keep warm. Bare willows clicked on the windowpanes like skeleton fingers.”

— Donna Tartt

463. “As we walked outside together, into the Christmas crowds, I felt unsteady and sorrowful; and the ribbon-wrapped buildings, the glitter of windows only deepened the oppressive sadness: dark winter skies, gray canyon of jewels and furs and all the power and melancholy of wealth.”

— Donna Tartt

464. “I had nothing to offer her. I was illness, instability, everything she wanted to get away from.”

— Donna Tartt

465. “Initially, I had thought with hard work I could overcome a fundamental squeamishness and distaste for my subject, that perhaps with even harder work I could simulate something like a talent for it. But this was not the case. As the months went by I remained uninterested, if not downright sickened, by my study of biology; my grades were poor.”

— Donna Tartt

466. “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 light about her so that to see anything through her eyes was to see it in brighter colors than ordinary –.”

— Donna Tartt

467. “It was Boris I missed, the whole impulsive mess of him: gloomy, reckless, hot-tempered, appallingly thoughtless. Boris pale and pasty, with his shoplifted apples and his Russian-language novels, gnawed-down fingernails and shoelaces dragging in the dust. Boris – budding alcoholic, fluent curser in four languages – who snatched food from my plate when he felt like it and nodded off drunk on the floor, face red like he’d been slapped.”

— Donna Tartt

468. “When I disagreed – strenuously – and asked what was wrong with focusing one’s entire attention on only two things, if those two things were Art and Beauty, Laforgue replied: “There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty – unless she is wed to something more meaningful – is always superficial.”

— Donna Tartt

469. “It was six o’clock in the morning, and the sun was rising over the mountains, and the birches, and the impossibly green meadows; and to me, dazed with night and no sleep and three days on the highway, it was like a country from a dream.”

— Donna Tartt

470. “Fatal tendency to try to make interesting people good.”

— Donna Tartt

471. “I watched it all happen quite calmly – without fear, without pity, without anything but a kind of stunned curiosity – so that the impression of the event is burned indelibly upon my optic nerves, but oddly absent from my heart.”

— Donna Tartt

472. “In the old days, the snow would drift up to the eaves of the roofs and people would be trapped in their houses and starve to death, they wouldn’t be found until spring.”

— Donna Tartt

473. “He, in some senses, was the author of this drama and had waited in the wings a long while for this moment, where he could step onto the stage and assume the role he’d written for himself: cool but friendly; hesitant; reticent with details; bright, but not as bright as he actually was.”

— Donna Tartt

474. “I don’t want you to help me.′ She raised her head and looked at me: her gaze hit me hard and sweet as a shot of morphine.”

— Donna Tartt

475. “Henry, in coat and tie, waded out to where Francis stood, his trousers rolled to the knee, and old-fashioned banker in a surrealist painting.”

— Donna Tartt

476. “Give my life, gladly! I will never love any person on the earth like Katya again – not even close. She was the one. I would die and be happy for only one day with her. But – ” pushing his sleeve back down – “you should never get a person’s name tattooed on you, because then you lose the person. I was too young to know that when I got the tattoo.”

— Donna Tartt

477. “I don’t know where Henry was. Probably looking at the moon and reciting some poem from the T’ang Dynasty.”

— Donna Tartt

478. “I am not unused to being confronted with my ow lies, but those of others never fail to throw me for a loop.”

— Donna Tartt

479. “The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil.”

— Donna Tartt

480. “And yet I thought of him almost every day. The Russian novels I had to read for school reminded me of him; Russian novels, and seven pillars of wisdom, and so too the Lower East Side – tattoo parlors and pierogi shops, pot in the air, old polish ladies swaying side to side with grocery bags and kids smoking in the doorways of bars along Second Avenue.”

— Donna Tartt

481. “Waiting at the wrong place, most like.”

— Donna Tartt

482. “Starched shirts and suits fresh from the cleaners’ went a long, long way toward hiding a multitude of sins.”

— Donna Tartt

483. “She was breathing hard, and deep circles of red burned high on her bright cheeks; in all my life I had never seen anyone so maddeningly beautiful as she was at that moment.”

— Donna Tartt

484. “It’s a long story. I’ll make it short as I can.”

— Donna Tartt

485. “But it was also a bit like a failed artist working as a security officer at an art gallery, or a failed author working in a bookshop. There’s a constant reminder of how close you are to the thing you want, and how far away from it you are.”

— Donna Tartt

486. “The sky was a fierce, burning blue, the trees ferocious shades of red and yellow.”

— Donna Tartt

487. “I can’t believe you two,” Henry said crossly. “I reminded you of this last night.” “But we forgot,” said the twins, in simultaneous despair. “How could you?” “Well, if you wake up intending to murder someone at two o’clock, you hardly think what you’re going to feed the corpse for dinner.” “Asparagus is in season,” said Francis helpfully.”

— Donna Tartt

488. “It was sometimes difficult to believe that Dr. Roland was a tenured professor in the Social Science Department of this, a distinguished college. He was more like some gabby old codger who would sit next to you on a bus and try to show you bits of paper he kept folded in his wallet.”

— Donna Tartt

489. “Intentionally or no: I had extinguished a light at the heart of the world.”

— Donna Tartt

490. “Birds can sing and fish can swim and I can do this.”

— Donna Tartt

491. “After class, I wandered downstairs in a dream, my head spinning, but acutely, achingly conscious that I was alive and young on a beautiful day.”

— Donna Tartt

492. “By contrast Hobie lived and wafted like some great sea mammal in his own mild atmosphere, the dark brown of tea stains and tobacco, where every clock in the house said something different and time didn’t actually correspond to the standard measure but instead meandered along at its own sedate tick-tock, obeying the pace of his antique-crowded backwater, far from the factory-built, epoxy-glued version of the world.”

— Donna Tartt

493. “The whole evening had left me with a keen sense of inadequacy and failure which grew keener with every step. I moved relentlessly over the evening, back and forth, straining to remember exact words, telling inflections, any subtle insults or kindnesses I might’ve missed, and my mind – quite willingly – supplied various distortions.”

— Donna Tartt

494. “The swish of the oars and the hypnotic thrum of dragonflies blended with his academic monotone.”

— Donna Tartt

495. “In the water, a dark plume of blood blossomed by her foot; as I blinked, a thin red tendril spiraled up and curled over her pale toes, undulating in the water like a thread of crimson smoke.”

— Donna Tartt

496. “Shock and aura. Things are stronger and brighter and I feel on the edge of something inexpressible. Coded messages in the in-flight magazines. Energy Shield. Uncompromising Care. Electricity, colors, radiance. Everything is a signpost pointing to something else.”

— Donna Tartt

497. “Son of a Clemson football star turned banker.”

— Donna Tartt

498. “I didn’t have many friends but whether this was due to choice or circumstance I do not now know.”

— Donna Tartt

499. “As is true of most incipient bad things in life, i had not really prepared myself for this possibility.”

— Donna Tartt

500. “From William Blake to Lady Gaga, from Rousseau to Rumi to Tosca to Mister Rogers, it’s a curiously uniform message, accepted from high to low: when in doubt, what to do? How do we know what’s right for us? Every shrink, every career counselor, every Disney princess knows the answer: “Be yourself.” “Follow your heart.”

— Donna Tartt