Top 500 Donna Tartt Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “It’s a long story. I’ll make it short as I can.”

— Donna Tartt

452. “Si tenemos un alma lo bastante fuerte, podemos arrancarnos el velo y contemplar cara a cara la desnuda y terrible belleza; dejar que el dios nos consuma, nos devore, nos quiebre los huesos. Y luego nos escupa renacidos.”

— Donna Tartt

453. “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

454. “And if beauty is terror, then what is desire?”

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

456. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

458. “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

459. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

461. “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

462. “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

463. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

467. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

469. “Her death was my fault. Other people have always been a little too quick to assure me that it wasn’t; and yes, only a kid, who could have known, terrible accident, rotten luck, could have happened to anyone, it’s all perfectly true and I don’t believe a word of it.”

— Donna Tartt

470. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

474. “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

475. “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

476. “But walking through it all was one thing; walking away, unfortunately, has proved to be quite another, and though once I thought I had left that ravine forever on an April afternoon long ago, now I am not so sure.”

— Donna Tartt

477. “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

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. “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

480. “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

481. “Consequently their relationship with their dead brother was of the most intimate sort, his strong, bright, immutable character shining changelessly against the vagueness and vacillation of their own characters, and the characters of people that they knew; and they grew up believing that this was due to some rare, angelic incandescence of nature on Robin’s part, and not at all to the fact that he was dead.”

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

483. “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

484. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

486. “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

487. “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

488. “You went there?” “Yes – Dallas. Uncle Harry and Aunt Tess lived there for a while. There’s nothing to do but go to the movies and you can’t walk anywhere, people have to drive you. Also they have rattlesnakes, and the death penalty, which I think is primitive and unethical in ninety-eight per cent of cases. But it’ll probably be better for her there.” “Why?”

— Donna Tartt

489. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

491. “Catfish’s high spirits were inexhaustible; he was cheerful no matter what happened, and he was unable to understand that not everyone was so resilient.”

— Donna Tartt

492. “The candles, the orange gleam of firelight where she’d been standing made me think of the warmth of the wine bar, as if the light itself might be a passageway back to the night before and the little wooden table where we had sat knee to knee, her face washed with the same orange-tinged light.”

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

494. “He had never seen a gunshot wound. He kept asking what if felt like? dull or sharp? an ache or a burn? My head was spinning and naturally I could give him no kind of coherent answer but I remember thinking dimly that it was sort of like the first time I got drunk, or slept with a girl; not quite what one expected, really, but once it happened it couldn’t be any other way. Neon lights: Motel 6, Dairy Queen. Colors so bright, they nearly broke my heart.”

— Donna Tartt

495. “I think he did save me, though. And someplace, if there is a place where lists are kept, and credit given, I am sure there is a gold star by his name. But I am getting sentimental. Sometimes, when I think about these things, I do.”

— Donna Tartt

496. “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

497. “But then, six months ago, my dad hauled me with him to this shaddy town in Alaska. Seward Peninsula, just below Arctic Circle? And then, middle of May – we flew to Fairbanks on a prop plane, and then we came here.”

— Donna Tartt

498. “The business had upset him, that I knew, but I also knew that there was something about the operatic sweep of the search which could not fail to appeal to him and that he was pleased, however obscurely, with the aesthetics of the thing.”

— Donna Tartt

499. “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

500. “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