Top 500 Donna Tartt Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 4 of 10

151. “We can’t choose what we want and don’t want and that’s the hard lonely truth. Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us. We can’t escape who we are.”

— Donna Tartt

152. “Aristotle said in the poetics, that objects such as corpses, painful to view in themselves, can become delightful to contemplate in a work of art.”

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

154. “All my life, people have taken my shyness for sullenness, snobbery, bad temper of one sort or another.”

— Donna Tartt

155. “Pragmatists are often strangely superstitious.”

— Donna Tartt

156. “I was as depressed as I have ever been in my life.”

— Donna Tartt

157. “And I know I said earlier that he was perfect but he wasn’t perfect, far from it; he could be silly and vain and remote and often cruel and still we loved him, in spite of, because.”

— Donna Tartt

158. “Whatever else one may say about guilt, it certainly lends one diabolical powers of invention;.”

— Donna Tartt

159. “But somehow, despite my efforts, I am never able to blend myself in entirely and remain in some respects quite distinct from my surroundings, in the same way that a green chameleon remains a distinct entity from the green leaf upon which it sits, no matter how perfectly it has approximated the subtleties of the particular shade.”

— Donna Tartt

160. “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.”

— Donna Tartt

161. “It does not do to be frightened of things about which you know nothing.”

— Donna Tartt

162. “I had said goodbye to her once before, but it took everything I had to say goodbye to her then, again, for the last time, like poor Orpheus turning for a last backward glance at the ghost of his only love and in the same heartbeat losing her forever: hinc illae lacrimae, hence those tears.”

— Donna Tartt

163. “It’s awful being a child,” she said, simply, “at the mercy of other people.”

— Donna Tartt

164. “Books are written by the alone for the alone.”

— Donna Tartt

165. “That was a cozy night, a happy night; lamps lit, sparkle of glasses, rain falling heavy on the roof. Outside, the treetops tumbled and tossed, with a foamy whoosh like club soda bubbling up in the glass. The windows were open and a damp cool breeze swirled through the curtains, bewitchingly wild and sweet.”

— Donna Tartt

166. “In fact, I can’t think of much I’d like better than for him to step into the room right now, glasses fogged and smelling of damp wool, shaking the rain from his hair like an old dog and saying: ‘Dickie, my boy, what you got for a thirsty old man to drink tonight?”

— Donna Tartt

167. “We drank our tea. The lamplight was warm and the apartment still and snug. At home in bed, in my private abyss of longing, the scenes i dreamed of always began like this: drowsy drunken hour, the two of us alone, scenarios in which invariably she would brush against me as if by chance, or lean coveniently close, cheek touching mine, to point out a passage in a book, opportunities that i would seize, gently but manfully, as exordium to more violent pleasures.”

— Donna Tartt

168. “Maybe that’s why I tend to equate physical beauty with qualities with which it has absolutely nothing to do. I see a pretty mouth or a moody pair of eyes and imagine all sorts of deep affinities, private kinships.”

— Donna Tartt

169. “Or rather, I dreamed of her constantly, only as absence, not presence: a breeze blowing through a just-vacated house, her handwriting on a notepad, the smell of her perfume, streets in strange lost towns where I knew she’d been walking only a moment before but had just vanished, a shadow moving away against a sunstruck wall. Sometimes I spotted her in a crowd, or in a taxicab pulling away, and these glimpses of her I treasured despite the fact that I was never able to catch up with her.”

— Donna Tartt

170. “I was confused by this sudden glare of attention; it was as if the characters in a favorite painting, absorbed in their own concerns, had looked up out of the canvas and spoken to me.”

— Donna Tartt

171. “In my own humorless state I failed to see anything except what I construed as certain tragic similarities between Gatsby and myself.”

— Donna Tartt

172. “What are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a dead star?”

— Donna Tartt

173. “It happened in New York, April 10th, nineteen years ago. Even my hand balks at the date. I had to push to write it down, just to keep the pen moving on the paper. It used to be a perfectly ordinary day, but now it sticks up on the calendar like a rusty nail.”

— Donna Tartt

174. “That surge of power and delight, of confidence, of control. That sudden sense of the richness of the world. Its infinite possibility.”

— Donna Tartt

175. “As for Charles – well, basically, he likes girls. If he’s drunk, I’ll do. 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

176. “And-maybe it’s ridiculous to go on in this vein, although it doesn’t matter since no one’s ever going to see this – but does it make any sense at all to know that it ends badly for all of us, even the happiest of us, and that we all lose everything that matters in the end – and yet to know as well, despite all this, as cruelly as the game is stacked, that it’s possible to play it with a kind of joy?”

— Donna Tartt

177. “Horrific as it was, the present dark, I was afraid to leave it for the other, permanent dark – jelly and bloat, the muddy pit. I had seen the shadow of it on Bunny’s face – stupid terror; the whole world opening upside down; his life exploding in a thunder of crows and the sky expanding empty over his stomach like a white ocean. Then nothing. Rotten stumps, sowbugs crawling in the fallen leaves. Dirt and dark.”

— Donna Tartt

178. “Out on the lawn, Bunny had just knocked Henry’s ball about seventy feet outside the court. There was a ragged burst of laughter; faint, but clear, it floated back across the evening air. That laughter haunts me still.”

— Donna Tartt

179. “Well, whatever one thinks of the Roman Church, it is a worthy and powerful foe. I could accept that sort of conversion with grace. But I shall be very disappointed indeed if we lose him to the Presbyterians.”

— Donna Tartt

180. “They all shared a certain coolness, a cruel, mannered charm which was not modern in the least but had the strange cold breath of the ancient world : they were magnificent creatures, such eyes, such hands, such looks – sic oculos, sic ille manus, sic ora ferebat.”

— Donna Tartt

181. “I have only to glance over my shoulder for all those years to drop away and I see it behind me again, the ravine, rising all green and black through the saplings, a picture that will never leave me.”

— Donna Tartt

182. “Be still, O little one, for I am Death. Another cobra had said that, in something else by Kipling. The cobras in his stories were heartless but they spoke beautifully, like wicked kings in the Old Testament.”

— Donna Tartt

183. “What if our badness and mistakes are the very thing that set our fate and bring us round to good? What if, for some of us, we can’t get there any other way?”

— Donna Tartt

184. “Even now I remember those pictures, like pictures in a storybook one loved as a child. Radiant meadows, mountains vaporous in the trembling distance; leaves ankle-deep on a gusty autumn road; bonfires and fog in the valleys; cellos, dark window-panes, snow.”

— Donna Tartt

185. “I don’t know where to begin.” He paused, and took a drink. “Do you remember last fall, in Julian’s class, when we studied what Plato calls telestic madness? Bakcheia? Dionysiac frenzy?” “Yes,“I said rather impatiently. It was just like Henry to bring up something like this right now. “Well, we decided to try to have one.” For a moment I thought I hadn’t understood him. “What?” I said? “I said we decided to try to have a bacchanal.”

— Donna Tartt

186. “I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.”

— Donna Tartt

187. “It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from all the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one’s burned tongues and skinned knees, that one’s aches and pains are all one’s own. Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us. Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that’s why we’re so anxious to lose them...”

— Donna Tartt

188. “All her grace was in her vagueness. Her voice was soft, her manner languid, her features blurred and dreamy.”

— Donna Tartt

189. “We have art in order not to die from the truth. – NIETZSCHE.”

— Donna Tartt

190. “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

191. “And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky – so the space where I exist, and I want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.”

— Donna Tartt

192. “Buffalo is a long way from New York City; but apart from a dreamlike, feverish stop in Syracuse, where I walked and watered Popper and bought us a couple of cheese danishes because there wasn’t anything else – I managed to sleep almost the whole way, through Batavia and Rochester and Syracuse and Binghamton, with my cheek against the window and cold air coming through at the crack, the vibration taking me back to Wind, Sand and Stars and a lonely cockpit high above the desert.”

— Donna Tartt

193. “The ceilings had set off a ghostly echo, giving all that desperate hilarity the quality of a memory even as I sat listening to it, memories of things I’d never known.”

— Donna Tartt

194. “All of a sudden I found myself able to see him as the world saw him, as I myself had seen him when I first met him – cool, well-mannered, rich, absolutely beyond reproach. It was a convincing illusion that even I, who knew the essential falseness of it, felt oddly comforted.”

— Donna Tartt

195. “And I’m hoping there’s some larger truth about suffering here, or at least my understanding of it – although I’ve come to realize that the only truths that matter to me are the ones I don’t, and can’t, understand.”

— Donna Tartt

196. “You want 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 Classics are. Wars and homos.”

— Donna Tartt

197. “You amaze me,” he said. “You think nothing exists if you can’t see it.”

— Donna Tartt

198. “In this swarm of cigarettes and dark sophistication they appeared here and there like figures from an allegory; or long-dead celebrants from some forgotten garden party.”

— Donna Tartt

199. “So I’m not a Southern writer in the commonly held sense of the term, like Faulkner or Eudora Welty, who took the South for their entire literary environment and subject matter.”

— Donna Tartt

200. “Whenever you see flies or insects in a still life – a wilted petal, a black spot on the apple – the painter is giving you a secret message. 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