Top 500 Donna Tartt Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “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

452. “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

453. “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

454. “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

455. “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

456. “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

457. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

460. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

462. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

464. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

467. “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

468. “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

469. “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

470. “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

471. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

474. “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

475. “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

476. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

479. “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

480. “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

481. “The atoms in my head were spinning apart; the sparkle of the bump had already begun to turn, apprehension and disquiet moving in subtly like dark air before a thunderstorm. For a long, somber moment we looked at each other: high chemical frequency, solitude to solitude, like two Tibetan monks on a mountaintop.”

— Donna Tartt

482. “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

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

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

— Donna Tartt

486. “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

487. “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

488. “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

489. “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

490. “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

491. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

493. “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

494. “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

495. “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

496. “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

497. “Welty himself used to talk about fateful objects. Every dealer and antiquaire recognizes them. The pieces that occur and recur. Maybe for someone else, not a dealer, it wouldn’t be an object. It’d be a city, a color, a time of day. The nail where your fate is liable to catch and snag.”

— Donna Tartt

498. “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

499. “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

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

— Donna Tartt