Top 500 Donna Tartt Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “For a moment I was disoriented, seized by panic; could a ghost embody itself through wavelengths, electronic dots, a picture tube? What are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a dead star?”

— Donna Tartt

452. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

455. “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

456. “And who knows-but maybe that’s what’s waiting for us at the end of the journey, a majesty unimaginable until the very moment we find ourselves walking through the doors of it, what we find ourselves gazing at in astonishment when God finally takes His hands off our eyes and says: Look!”

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

458. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

460. “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

461. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

463. “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

464. “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

465. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

467. “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

468. “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

469. “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

470. “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

471. “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

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. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

477. “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

478. “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

479. “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

480. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

482. “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

483. “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

484. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

486. “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

487. “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

488. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

490. “In a certain sense it was simply play-acting but at Hampden, where creative expression was valued above all else, play-acting was itself a kind of work, and people went about their grief as seriously as small children will sometimes play quite grimly and without pleasure in make-believe offices and stores.”

— Donna Tartt

491. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

493. “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

494. “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

495. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

497. “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

498. “7522, the last four digits of Boris’s home phone in Vegas.”

— Donna Tartt

499. “Maybe he’d divined in me – correctly – this cowardice, this hideous pack instinct which would enable me to fall into step without question.”

— Donna Tartt

500. “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