Top 500 Donna Tartt Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “You could grasp it in an instant, you could live in it forever.”

— Donna Tartt

452. “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

453. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

455. “It has always been hard for me to talk about Julian without romanticizing him. In many ways, I loved him the most of all; and it is with him that I am most tempted to embroider, to flatter, to basically reinvent.”

— Donna Tartt

456. “Why did I obsess over people like this? Was it normal to fixate on strangers in this particular vivid, fevered way? I didn’t think so. It was impossible to imagine some random passer-by on the street forming quite such an interest in me.”

— Donna Tartt

457. “I’d stopped myself from blurting the thing on the edge of my tongue, the thing I’d never said, even though it was something we both knew well enough without me saying it out loud to him in the street- which was, of course, I love you.”

— Donna Tartt

458. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

460. “At the silence, my heart went cold. Dead flowers stood rotting in the massive Chinese vases and a shut-up heaviness overweighed the room: the air almost too stale to breathe... It was a stillness I knew; this was a house closed in on itself when someone had died.”

— Donna Tartt

461. “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

462. “The chronological sorting of memories is an interesting business.”

— Donna Tartt

463. “I don’t expect you to understand but it’s rough to be in love with the wrong person.”

— Donna Tartt

464. “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

465. “I felt my heart limping in my chest, and was revolted by it, a pitiful muscle, sick and bloody, pulsing against my ribs.”

— Donna Tartt

466. “It was as if I’d suffered a chemical change of the spirit: as if the acid balance of my psyche had shifted and leached the life out of me in aspects impossible to repair, or reverse, like a frond of living coral hardened to bone.”

— Donna Tartt

467. “Hobie had an iron constitution. Whenever he came down with something himself, he drank a Fernet-Branca and kept going.”

— Donna Tartt

468. “They were a pair of white mice, I thought – only Kitsey was a spun-sugar, fairy-princess mouse whereas Andy was more the kind of luckless, anemic, pet-shop mouse you might feed to your boa constrictor. “Get.”

— Donna Tartt

469. “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.”

— Donna Tartt

470. “And yet it was remarkable too how his world limped on without him. Strange, I thought, as I jumped a sheet of water at the curb, how a few hours could change everything – or rather, how strange to find that the present contained such a bright shard of the living past, damaged and eroded but not destroyed.”

— Donna Tartt

471. “It was a stillness I knew; this was how a house closed in on itself when someone had died.”

— Donna Tartt

472. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

474. “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

475. “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

476. “But I didn’t. And, in truth, it was maybe better that I didn’t- I say that now, though it was something I regretted bitterly for a while. More than anything I was relieved that in my unfamiliar babbling-and-wanting-to-talk state I’d stopped myself from blurting the thing on the edge of my tongue, the thing I’d never said, even though it was something we both knew well enough without me saying it out loud to him in the street- which was, of course, I love you.”

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

478. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

480. “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

481. “I am a Californian by birth and also, I have recently discovered, by nature. The last is something I admit only now, after the fact.”

— Donna Tartt

482. “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

483. “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

484. “She, I thought, was very beautiful, in an unsettling, almost medieval way which would not be apparent to the casual observer.”

— Donna Tartt

485. “And how can we lose this maddening self, lose it entirely? Love? Yes, but as old Cephalus once heard Sophocles say, the least of us know that love is a cruel and terrible master. One loses oneself for the sake of the other, but in doing so becomes enslaved and miserable to the most capricious of all the gods.”

— Donna Tartt

486. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

489. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

491. “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

492. “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

493. “You had to hand it to her: she was as cool as dammit.”

— Donna Tartt

494. “It’s not about outward appearances but inward significance.”

— Donna Tartt

495. “If this was a movie, I thought, looking pleasantly into the pleasant beefy face of the policeman – if this was a movie, we’d all be fidgeting and acting really suspicious.”

— Donna Tartt

496. “We don’t like to admit it, but the idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than almost anything. All truly civilized people – the ancients no less than us – have civilized themselves through the wilful repression of the old, animal self.”

— Donna Tartt

497. “I’ll probably think about it all my life: that candlelit circle, a tableau vivant of the daily, commonplace happiness that was lost when I lost her.”

— Donna Tartt

498. “No law against throwing a coat in the canal, is there?” “I would have thought so, yes.” “Well – who knows. Not very widely enforced law, if you ask me.”

— Donna Tartt

499. “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

500. “I knew it deeply and irrationally like knowledge in a dream.”

— Donna Tartt