Top 500 Donna Tartt Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Minie balls and repeating rifles. That was why the body count was so high. We had trench warfare in America way before WW1. p128.”

— Donna Tartt

52. “No money, holes in my socks, living off oatmeal.”

— Donna Tartt

53. “The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to entertain, to make things up. The art of what I do lies not in research or even recollection but primarily in invention.”

— Donna Tartt

54. “I never got used to the way the horizon there could just erase itself and leave you marooned, adrift, in an incomplete dreamscape that was like a sketch for the world you knew...”

— Donna Tartt

55. “And the flavor of Pippa’s kiss – bittersweet and strange – stayed with me all the way back uptown, swaying and sleepy as I sailed home on the bus, melting with sorrow and loveliness, a starry ache that lifted me up above the windswept city like a kite: my head in the rainclouds, my heart in the sky.”

— Donna Tartt

56. “I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive.”

— Donna Tartt

57. “Storytelling and elegant style don’t always go hand in hand.”

— Donna Tartt

58. “Actually, I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel.”

— Donna Tartt

59. “Maybe good luck was like bad luck in that it took a while to sink in.”

— Donna Tartt

60. “I’d rather write one good book than ten mediocre ones.”

— Donna Tartt

61. “Hobie’s reassuring hand on my shoulder, a strong, comforting pressure, like an anchor letting me know that everything was okay. I hadn’t felt a touch like that since my mother died – friendly, steadying in the midst of confusing events – and, like a stray dog hungry for affection, I felt some profound shift in allegiance, blood-deep, a sudden, humiliating, eyewatering conviction of this place is good, this person is safe, I can trust him, nobody will hurt me here.”

— Donna Tartt

62. “The novel is about five students of classics who are studying with a classics professor, and they take the ideas of the things that they’re learning from him a bit too seriously, with terrible consequences.”

— Donna Tartt

63. “I think it’s hard to write about children and to have an idea of innocence.”

— Donna Tartt

64. “Even if you need, and want, a second opinion, it can be dangerous to have people telling you what they think you ought to add, or cut, before you’ve even finished telling your story. One loses heart; one loses energy and interest. Or at least I do.”

— Donna Tartt

65. “The shame that tormented me was all the more corrosive for having no very clear origin: I didn’t know why I felt so tainted, and worthless, and wrong-only that I did, and whenever I looked up from my books I was swamped by slimy waters rushing in from all sides.”

— Donna Tartt

66. “And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch.”

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

68. “I’ve written only two novels, but they’re both long ones, and they each took a decade to write.”

— Donna Tartt

69. “There’s an expectation these days that novels – like any other consumer product – should be made on a production line, with one dropping from the conveyor belt every couple of years.”

— Donna Tartt

70. “Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones that I did not.”

— Donna Tartt

71. “She was still a girl, a slight lovely girl who lay in bed and ate chocolates, a girl whose hair smelled like hyacinth and whose white scarves fluttered jauntily in the breeze;.”

— Donna Tartt

72. “It’s a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.”

— Donna Tartt

73. “Mais, vrai, J’ai trop pleure! Les aubes sont navrantes. What a sad and beautiful line that is. I’d always hoped that someday I’d be able to use it.”

— Donna Tartt

74. “There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty – unless she is wed to something more meaningful – is always superficial. It is not that your Julian chooses solely to concentrate on certain, exalted things; it is that he chooses to ignore others equally as important.”

— Donna Tartt

75. “The absurd does not liberate; it binds. – ALBERT CAMUS.”

— Donna Tartt

76. “She was a living reverie for me: the mere sight of her sparked an almost infinite range of fantasy, from Greek to Gothic, from vulgar to divine.”

— Donna Tartt

77. “My name is Adnan Nassar and I am Palestinian-American,” he said in a rush. “I came to this country from Syria nine years ago and have since then earned American citizenship and am assistant manager of the Pizza Pad on Highway 6.”

— Donna Tartt

78. “Before, I was paralyzed, though I didn’t really know it,” he said. “It was because I thought too much, lived too much in the mind. It was hard to make decisions. I felt immobilized.”

— Donna Tartt

79. “Her death the dividing mark: Before and After. And though it’s a bleak thing to admit all these years later, still 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 – I.”

— Donna Tartt

80. “There are such things as ghosts. People everywhere have always known that. And we believe in them every bit as much as Homer did. Only now, we call them by different names. Memory. They unconscious. page 519.”

— Donna Tartt

81. “It’s a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to lose control completely? To throw off all the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves?”

— Donna Tartt

82. “To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal!”

— Donna Tartt

83. “To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole;.”

— Donna Tartt

84. “It’s beautiful here, but morning light can make the most vulgar things tolerable.”

— Donna Tartt

85. “Character, to me, is the life’s blood of fiction.”

— Donna Tartt

86. “I thought they spoke Russian in the Ukraine.” “Well, yes. Depends what part of Ukraine. They’re not so different languages, the two.”

— Donna Tartt

87. “What is unthinkable is undoable.”

— Donna Tartt

88. “Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only – if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn’t it? And isn’t the whole point of things – beautiful things – that they connect you to some larger beauty? Those first images that crack your heart wide open and you spend the rest of your life chasing, or trying to recapture, in one way or another?”

— Donna Tartt

89. “I believe having a great diversity of teachers is harmful and confusing for a young mind, in the same way I believe that it is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.”

— Donna Tartt

90. “If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.”

— Donna Tartt

91. “Every new event – everything I did for the rest of my life – would only separate us more and more: days she was no longer a part of, an ever-growing distance between us. Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away.”

— Donna Tartt

92. “The Little Friend is a long book. It’s also completely different from my first novel: different landscape, different characters, different use of language and diction, different approach to story.”

— Donna Tartt

93. “Henry’s a perfectionist, I mean, really-really kind of inhuman – very brilliant, very erratic and enigmatic. He’s a stiff, cold person, Machiavellian, ascetic and he’s made himself what he is by sheer strength of will. His aspiration is to be this Platonic creature of pure rationality and that’s why he’s attracted to the Classics, and particularly to the Greeks – all those high, cold ideas of beauty and perfection.”

— Donna Tartt

94. “Death is the mother of beauty. And what is beauty? Terror. Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming. And if beauty is terror, then what is desire? We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it? To live. To live forever.”

— Donna Tartt

95. “And always, always, that same toast. Live forever.”

— Donna Tartt

96. “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

97. “Because it is dangerous to ignore the existence of the irrational. The more cultivated a person is, the more intelligent, the more repressed, then the more he needs some method of channeling the primitive impulses he’s worked so hard to subdue. Otherwise those powerful old forces will mass and strengthen until they are violent enough to break free, more violent for the delay, often strong enough to sweep the will away entirely.”

— Donna Tartt

98. “But one mustn’t underestimate the primal appeal – to lose one’s self, lose it utterly. And in losing it be born to the principle of continuous life, outside the prison of mortality and time.”

— Donna Tartt

99. “A month or two before, I would have been appalled at the idea of any murder at all. But that Sunday afternoon, as I actually stood watching one, it seemed the easiest thing in the world. How quickly he fell; how soon it was over.”

— Donna Tartt

100. “And how did they drive people mad? They turned up the volume of the inner monologue, magnified qualities already present to great excess, made people so much themselves that they couldn’t stand it.”

— Donna Tartt