Top 500 Donna Tartt Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “She was beautiful, too. That’s almost secondary; but still, she was.”

— Donna Tartt

452. “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

453. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

455. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

457. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

459. “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

460. “The shock of first seeing a birch tree at night, rising up in the dark as cool and slim as a ghost. And the nights, bigger than imagining: black and gusty and enormous, disordered and wild with stars.”

— 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. “Nothing’, he said. ‘Except that my life, for the most part, has been very stale and colorless. Dead, I mean. The world has always been an empty place to me. I was incapable of enjoying even the simplest things. I felt dead in everything I did.’ He brushed the dirt from his hands. ‘But then it changed,’ he said. ‘The night I killed that man.”

— Donna Tartt

463. “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

464. “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

465. “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

466. “But – just when I’ve managed to harden my heart, he’ll turn around and be so sweet. I always fall for it. I don’t know why.”

— Donna Tartt

467. “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

468. “It was one of the reasons I loved him: for that flattering light in which he saw me, for the person I was when I was with him, for what it was he allowed me to be.”

— Donna Tartt

469. “Every shrink, every career counselor, every Disney princess knows the answer: “Be yourself.” “Follow your heart.”

— Donna Tartt

470. “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

471. “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

472. “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

473. “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

474. “Death is the mother of Beauty. And what is Beauty? Terror.”

— Donna Tartt

475. “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

476. “A November stillness was settling like a deadly oxymoron on the April landscape.”

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

478. “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

479. “A guesstimate?” prompted the man Enrique. “About your dad?” “Ballpark will do,” the Korean lady said.”

— Donna Tartt

480. “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

481. “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

482. “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

483. “Eugene accepted the legitimacy of such phenomena, much as he and his brothers accepted the pageantry and feuds of World Federation professional wrestling, not caring much if some of the matches were fixed.”

— Donna Tartt

484. “What’s worth living for? what’s worth dying for? what’s completely foolish to pursue?”

— Donna Tartt

485. “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

486. “It’s often pain tha makes us more aware of self.”

— Donna Tartt

487. “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

488. “It was a beautiful night, full moon, the meadow like silver and the housefronts throwing square black shadows sharp as cutouts on the grass.”

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

491. “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

492. “For if disaster and oblivion have followed this painting down through time – so too has love.”

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

494. “Harriet was going to be in the eighth grade next year; and what she had not expected was the horrifying new indignity of being classed-for the first time ever-a “Teen Girl”: a creature without mind, wholly protuberance and excretion, to judge from the literature she was given.”

— Donna Tartt

495. “And as much as I’d like to believe there’s a truth beyond illusion, I’ve come to believe that there’s no truth beyond illusion.”

— Donna Tartt

496. “Cinnamon-colored walls, rain on the windowpanes, vast quiet and a sense of depth and distance, like the varnish over the background of a nineteenth-century painting.”

— Donna Tartt

497. “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

498. “Everything was going beautifully, on the brink of taking wing, and I had a feeling that I’d never had, that reality itself was transforming around us in some beautiful and dangerous fashion, that we were being driven by a force we didn’t understand, towards an end I did not know.”

— Donna Tartt

499. “The swish of the oars and the hypnotic thrum of dragonflies blended with his academic monotone.”

— Donna Tartt

500. “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