Top 500 Donna Tartt Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “They were playing old Bob Dylan, more than perfect for narrow Village streets close to Christmas and the snow whirling down in big feathery flakes, the kind of winter where you want to be walking down a city street with your arm around a girl like on the old record cover.”

— Donna Tartt

202. “But if I’ve learned one thing in my short sad life, it is that that particular platitude is a lie. Love doesn’t conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.”

— Donna Tartt

203. “In New York, everything reminded me of my mother – every taxi, every street corner, every cloud that passed over the sun – but out in this hot mineral emptiness, it was as if she had never existed; I could not even imagine her spirit looking down on me. All trace of her seemed burned away in the thin desert air.”

— Donna Tartt

204. “But even that day, there on the porch, with Charles beside me and the smell of wood smoke in the air, it had the quality of a memory; there it was, before my eyes, and yet too beautiful to believe.”

— Donna Tartt

205. “Wade straight through life, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and heart open.”

— Donna Tartt

206. “We looked at each other. And it occurred to me that despite his faults, which were numerous and spectacular, the reason I liked Boris and felt happy around him from almost the moment I’d met him was that he never afraid.”

— Donna Tartt

207. “I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much.”

— Donna Tartt

208. “I never realized, you know, how much we rely on appearances,” he said. “It’s not that we’re so smart, it’s just that we don’t look like we did it. We might as well be a bunch of Sunday-school teachers as far as everyone else is concerned. But these guys won’t be taken in by that.”

— Donna Tartt

209. “She was the missing kingdom, the unbruised part of myself I’d lost with my mother.”

— Donna Tartt

210. “Here is my experience. Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you. What you want to live and be happy in the world is a woman who has her own life and lets you have yours.”

— Donna Tartt

211. “It was a clear, black morning, encrusted with stars.”

— Donna Tartt

212. “Is it easy to see things in retrospect. But I was ignorant then of everything but my own happiness.”

— Donna Tartt

213. “Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that’s why we’re so anxious to lose them, don’t you think? Remember.”

— Donna Tartt

214. “I see so little of you these days, Richard,” he said. “I feel that you’re becoming just a shadow in my life.”

— Donna Tartt

215. “Well, she doesn’t have anything to do with it, Richard, you’re just like that guy in ‘Dragnet’ that always wants the facts.”

— Donna Tartt

216. “I was so haunted and stirred even by her plainness suggested – ominously – a love more binding than physical affection, some tar-pit of the soul where I might flop around and malinger for years.”

— Donna Tartt

217. “We don’t like to admit it,” said Julian, “but the idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than anything. All truly civilized people – the ancients no less than us – have civilized themselves through the willful repression of the old, animal self. Are we, in this room, really very different from the Greeks and the Romans? Obsessed with duty, piety, loyalty, sacrifice? All those things which are to modern tastes so chilling?”

— Donna Tartt

218. “He was a bad painter and a vicious gossip, with a vocabulary composed almost entirely of obscenities, guttural verbs, and the word “postmodernist.”

— Donna Tartt

219. “Beauty is terror. We want to be devoured by it, to hide ourselves in that fire which refines us.”

— Donna Tartt

220. “All right,” said Julian, looking around the table. “I hope we’re all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?”

— Donna Tartt

221. “Only occasionally did I notice the chain on the finch’s ankle, or think what a cruel life for a little living creature – fluttering briefly, forced always to land in the same hopeless place.”

— Donna Tartt

222. “Well, the Dutch invented the microscope,” she said. “They were jewelers, grinders of lenses. They want it all as detailed as possible because even the tiniest things mean something.”

— Donna Tartt

223. “Clearly something had gone wrong, badly, only I wasn’t quite sure what – apart from knowing that I was responsible somehow, in the generalized miasma of shame and unworthiness and being-a-burden that never quite left me.”

— Donna Tartt

224. “Henry saw it, too. “Like something from Tolstoy, isn’t it?” he remarked. Julian looked over his shoulder, and I was startled to see that there was real delight on his face. “Yes,” he said. “Isn’t it, though?”

— Donna Tartt

225. “I was struck by something rather obvious – namely, that any religious ritual is arbitrary unless one is able to see past it to a deeper meaning.”

— Donna Tartt

226. “With a beautiful girl I could have consoled myself that she was out of my league; that I was so haunted and stirred even by her plainness suggested – ominously – a love more binding than physical affection, some tar-pit of the soul where I might flop around and malinger for years.”

— Donna Tartt

227. “Asparagus is in season.”

— Donna Tartt

228. “War? One can lose oneself in the joy of battle, in fighting for a glorious cause, but there are not many glorious causes for which to fight these days.”

— Donna Tartt

229. “Beauty – unless she is wed to something more meaningful – is always superficial.”

— Donna Tartt

230. “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. Never mind that half a dozen jerks are clustered round the same person, just because they’ve been duped by the same pair of eyes.”

— Donna Tartt

231. “A wine-colored welt of scar tissue had bubbled up in the little stab hole; it was interesting to look at, like a small blob of pink glue, and it reminded her in a good way of Lawrence of Arabia, burning himself with matches. Evidently that sort of thing built soldierly character. “The trick,” he’d said in the movie, “is not to mind that it hurts.” In the vast and ingenious scheme of suffering, as Harriet was now beginning to understand it, this was a trick well worth learning.”

— Donna Tartt

232. “Never do what you can’t undo.”

— Donna Tartt

233. “Running might take her forward, it could even take her home; but it couldn’t take her back–not ten minutes, ten hours, not ten years or days. And that was tough, as Hely would say. Tough: since back was the way she wanted to go, since the past was the only place she wanted to be.”

— Donna Tartt

234. “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. There are other advantages, more difficult to speak of, things which ancient sources only hint at and which I myself only understood after the fact.”

— Donna Tartt

235. “The lamplight was eerie, and, standing there motionless in our bathrobes, sleepy, with shadows flickering all around, I felt as though I had woken from one dream into an even more remote one, some bizarre wartime bomb shelter of the unconscious.”

— Donna Tartt

236. “The most satisfying of languages, Latin.”

— Donna Tartt

237. “Beauty is terror.”

— Donna Tartt

238. “In films, we are voyeurs, but in novels, we have the experience of being someone else: knowing another person’s soul from the inside. No other art form does that. And this is why sometimes, when we put down a book, we find ourselves slightly altered as human beings. Novels change us from within.”

— Donna Tartt

239. “We being round thee, forget to die.”

— Donna Tartt

240. “WHEN I WAS A boy, after my mother died, I always tried hard to hold her in my mind as I was falling asleep so maybe I’d dream of her, only I never did. 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.”

— Donna Tartt

241. “And–since this willful amnesia had kept Robin’s death from being translated into that sweet old family vernacular which smoothed even the bitterest mysteries into comfortable, comprehensible form–the memory of that day’s events had a chaotic, fragmented quality, bright mirror-shards of nightmare which flared at the smell of wisteria, the creaking of a clothes-line, a certain stormy cast of spring light.”

— Donna Tartt

242. “It’s not about outward appearances but inward significance. A grandeur in the world, but not of the world, a grandeur that the world doesn’t understand. That first glimpse of pure otherness, in whose presence you bloom out and out and out.”

— Donna Tartt

243. “His warmth, which seemed to presume upon some happy old intimacy we did not share, had thrown me into awkwardness.”

— Donna Tartt

244. “Sometimes I wondered exactly what it might take to break Andy out of his math-nerd turret: a tidal wave? Decepticon invasion? Godzilla tromping down Fifth Avenue? He was a planet without an atmosphere.”

— Donna Tartt

245. “But those sparkling blue shallows- so enticing at first glance- had not yet graded off into depths, so that sometimes I got the disconcerting sensation of wading around in knee-high waters hoping to step into a drop-off, a place deep enough to swim.”

— Donna Tartt

246. “It’s funny, but thinking back on it now, I realize that this particular point in time, as I stood there blinking in the deserted hall, was the one point at which I might have chosen to do something very different from what I actually did. But of course I didn’t see this crucial moment then for what is was; I suppose we never do.”

— Donna Tartt

247. “And that was it: infinite loop; no alt-tab out. You could force close, shut down the computer, start all over and run it again, and the game would still lock up and freeze at the same place. “Where’s Popper?” No cheat code. Game over. There was no way past that moment.”

— Donna Tartt

248. “They really knew how to work this edge, the Dutch painters – ripeness sliding into rot. The fruit’s perfect but it won’t last, it’s about to go. And see here especially,” she said, reaching over my shoulder to trace the air with her finger, “this passage – the butterfly.” The underwing was so powdery an delicate it looked as if the color would smear if she touched it. “How beautiful he plays it. Stillness with a tremble of movement.”

— Donna Tartt

249. “We don’t like to admit it,” said Julian, “but the idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than almost anything.”

— Donna Tartt

250. “For humans-trapped in biology-there was no mercy: we lived a while, we fussed around for a bit and died, we rotted in the ground like garbage. Time destroyed us all soon enough. But to destroy, or lose, a deathless thing-to break bonds stronger than the temporal-was a metaphysical uncoupling all its own, a startling new flavor of despair.”

— Donna Tartt