Top 500 Donna Tartt Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 3 of 10

101. “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

102. “I was behind in school, there were papers to write and exams were coming up but still I was young; the grass was green and the air was heavy with the sound of bees and I had just come back from the brink of Death itself, back to the sun and air. Now I was free; and my life, which I had thought was lost, stretched out indescribably precious and sweet before me.”

— Donna Tartt

103. “Things would have been terribly strange and unbalanced without her. She was the Queen who finished out the suit of dark Jacks, dark King, and Joker.”

— Donna Tartt

104. “He’s telling you that living things don’t last – it’s all temporary. Death in life. That’s why they’re called natures mortes. Maybe you don’t see it at first with all the beauty and bloom, the little speck of rot. But if you look closer – there it is.”

— Donna Tartt

105. “Colors so bright, they nearly broke my heart.”

— Donna Tartt

106. “It’s a terrible thing, what we did,” said Francis abruptly. “I mean, this man was not Voltaire we killed. But still. It’s a shame. I feel bad about it.”

— Donna Tartt

107. “A teahouse amid the cherry blossoms, on the way to death. p136.”

— Donna Tartt

108. “When we are strongest – who draws back? Most merry – who falls down laughing? When we are very bad, – what can they do to us? – ARTHUR RIMBAUD.”

— Donna Tartt

109. “Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us.”

— Donna Tartt

110. “Because, here’s the truth: life is catastrophe. The basic fact of existence – of walking around trying to feed ourselves and find friends and whatever else we do – is catastrophe.”

— Donna Tartt

111. “And that’s why I’ve chosen to write these pages as I’ve written them. For only by stepping into the middle zone, the polychrome edge between truth and untruth, is it tolerable to be here and writing this at all.”

— Donna Tartt

112. “It is here that the stilted mannequins of my initial acquaintance begin to yawn and stretch and come to life. It was months before the gloss and mystery of newness, which kept me from seeing them with much objectivity, would wear entirely off... it is here, in my memory, that they cease being totally foreign and begin to appear, for the first time, in shapes very like their bright old selves.”

— Donna Tartt

113. “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. “And how can we lose this maddening.”

— Donna Tartt

114. “Here is my experience. Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you.”

— Donna Tartt

115. “Anything is grand if it’s done on a large enough scale.”

— Donna Tartt

116. “That is to say: I wanted to maintain the illusion that their dealings with me were completely straightforward; that we were all friends, and no secrets, though the plain fact of it was that there were plenty of things they didn’t let me in on and would not for some time. And though I tried to ignore this I was aware of it all the same.”

— Donna Tartt

117. “And it’s a temptation for any intelligent person, and especially for perfectionists such as the ancients and ourselves, to try to murder the primitive, emotive, appetitive self. But that is a mistake.”

— Donna Tartt

118. “It seems to me that psychology is only another word for what the ancients called fate.”

— Donna Tartt

119. “I suppose the shock of recognition is one of the nastiest shocks of all.”

— Donna Tartt

120. “After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great. To escape the cognitive mode of experience, to transcend the accident of one’s moment of being.”

— Donna Tartt

121. “I’d been assured, at age 21 or so, by a well-known editor who saw the first part of The Secret History in what was basically its final form, that it would never be published because “no woman has ever written a successful novel from a male point of view.””

— Donna Tartt

122. “While to a certain extent Milton is right-the mind is its own place and in itself can make a Heaven of Hall and so forth-it is nonetheless clear that Plano was modeled less on Paradise than that other, more dolorous city.”

— Donna Tartt

123. “Because I don’t care what anyone says or how often or winningly they say it: no one will ever, ever be able to persuade me that life is some awesome, rewarding treat.”

— Donna Tartt

124. “How was it possible to miss someone as much as I missed my mother? I missed her so much I wanted to die: a hard, physical longing, like a craving for air underwater.”

— Donna Tartt

125. “But just when I thought I was going to get away, the creaky machinery of his face began to grind and a cardboard dawn of recognition was lowered, with jerks, from the dusty proscenium.”

— Donna Tartt

126. “I began to realize, with some little horror, that she was nothing more than a lowbrow, pop-psychology version of Sylvia Plath. It lasted forever, like some weepy and endless made-for-TV movie – all the clinging, all the complaints, all the parking-lot confessions of “inadequacy” and “poor self-image,” all those banal sorrows.”

— Donna Tartt

127. “I suppose there is a certain crucial interval in everyone’s life when character is fixed forever;.”

— Donna Tartt

128. “What if you had never seen the sea before? What if the only thing you’d ever seen was a child’s picture – blue crayon, choppy waves? Would you know the real sea if you only knew the picture? Would you be able to recognize the real thing even if you saw it? You don’t know what Dionysus looks like. We’re talking about God here. God is serious business.”

— Donna Tartt

129. “Criticism at the wrong time, even if it’s legitimate criticism, can be seriously damaging and make the writer lose faith in what he’s doing. It’s the timing that’s all-important.”

— Donna Tartt

130. “When you’re worried about something,′ said Henry abruptly, ’have you ever tried thinking in a different language?”

— Donna Tartt

131. “Her death the dividing mark: Before and After.”

— Donna Tartt

132. “Son nuestros secretos los que nos definen, y no la cara que mostramos al mundo.”

— Donna Tartt

133. “Sometimes, when there’s been an accident and reality is too sudden and strange to comprehend, the surreal will take over. Action slows to a dreamlike glide, frame by frame; the motion of a hand, a sentence spoken, fills an eternity. Little things – a cricket on a stem, the veined branches on a leaf – are magnified, brought from the background in achingly clear focus. And.”

— Donna Tartt

134. “And isn’t the whole point of things – beautiful things – that they connect you to some larger beauty?”

— Donna Tartt

135. “I liked the idea of living in a city – any city, especially a strange one – liked the thought of traffic and crowds, of working in a bookstore, waiting tables in a coffee shop, who knew what kind of solitary life I might slip into? Meals alone, walking the dogs in the evenings; and nobody knowing who I was.”

— Donna Tartt

136. “Nihil sub sole novum, I thought as I walked back down the hall to my room. Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.”

— Donna Tartt

137. “Everything takes me longer than I expect. It’s the sad truth about life.”

— Donna Tartt

138. “If he had his wits about him Bunny would surely keep his mouth shut; but now, with his subconscious mind knocked loose from its perch and flapping in the hollow corridors of his skull as erratically as a bat, there was no way to be sure of anything he might do.”

— Donna Tartt

139. “It was better never to have been born – never to have wanted anything, never to have hoped for anything.”

— Donna Tartt

140. “But while I have never considered myself a very good person, neither can I bring myself to believe that I am spectacularly bad one. Perhaps it’s simply impossible to think of oneself in such a way.”

— Donna Tartt

141. “In the first week of April the weather turned suddenly, unseasonably, insistently lovely. The sky was blue, the air warm and windless, and the sun beamed on the muddy ground with all the sweet impatience of June. Toward the fringe of the wood, the young trees were yellow with the first tinge of new leaves; woodpeckers laughed and drummed in the copses and, lying in bed with my window open, I could hear the rush and gurgle of the melted snow running in the gutters all night long.”

— Donna Tartt

142. “He was a marvelous talker, a magical talker, and I wish I were able to give a better idea what he said, but it is impossible for a mediocre intellect to render the speech of a superior one.”

— Donna Tartt

143. “I met her my first year of college, and was initially attracted to her because she seemed an intelligent, brooding malcontent like myself; but after about a month, during which time she’d firmly glued herself to me, I began to realize, with some little horror, that she was nothing more than a lowbrow, pop-psychology version of Sylvia Plath.”

— Donna Tartt

144. “Nothing is lonelier or more disorienting than insomnia.”

— Donna Tartt

145. “The light of long ago is different from the light of today and yet here, in this house, I’m reminded of the past at every turn.”

— Donna Tartt

146. “I felt I understood the secret grandeur of dying, all the knowledge held back from all humankind until the very end: no pain, no fear, magnificent detachment, lying in state upon the death barge and receding into the grand immensities like an emperor, gone, gone, observing all the distant scurryers on shore, freed from all the old human pettiness of love and fear and grief and death.”

— Donna Tartt

147. “Worse: the thought of returning to any kind of normal routine seemed disloyal, wrong. It kept being a shock every time I remembered it, a fresh slap: she was gone. 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

148. “It’s the place where reality strikes the ideal, where a joke becomes serious and anything serious is a joke. The magic point where every idea and its opposite are equally true.”

— Donna Tartt

149. “And besides, is death really so terrible a thing? It seems terrible to you, because you are young, but who is to say he is not better off now than you are? Or – if death is a journey to another place – that you will not see him again?” He opened his lexicon and began to search for his place. “It does not do to be frightened of things about which you know nothing,” he said. “You are like children. Afraid of the dark.”

— Donna Tartt

150. “Isn’t everything worthwhile a gamble? Can’t good come around sometimes through some strange back doors?”

— Donna Tartt