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

452. “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

453. “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

454. “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

455. “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

456. “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

457. “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

458. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

460. “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

461. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

464. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

466. “As I lay on my side, staring at a pool of white moonlight on the wooden floor, a gust of wind blew the curtains out, long and pale as ghosts. As though an invisible hand were leafing through them, the.”

— Donna Tartt

467. “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

468. “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

469. “Everything was lost, I had fallen off the map: the disorientation of being in the wrong apartment, with the wrong family, was wearing me down, so I felt groggy and punch-drunk, weepy almost, like an interrogated prisoner prevented from sleeping for days. Over and over, I kept thinking I’ve got to go home and then, for the millionth time, I can’t.”

— Donna Tartt

470. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

472. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

474. “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

475. “7522, the last four digits of Boris’s home phone in Vegas.”

— Donna Tartt

476. “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

477. “She was beautiful, too. That’s almost secondary; but still, she was.”

— Donna Tartt

478. “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

479. “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

480. “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

481. “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

482. “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

483. “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

484. “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

485. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

489. “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

490. “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

491. “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

492. “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

493. “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

494. “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

495. “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

496. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

500. “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