Top 500 Donna Tartt Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

205. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

208. “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

209. “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

210. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

217. “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

218. “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

219. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

222. “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

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

228. “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

229. “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

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. “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

232. “Reason is always apparent to a discerning eye. But luck? It’s invisible, erratic, angelic.”

— Donna Tartt

233. “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

234. “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

235. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

237. “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

238. “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

239. “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

240. “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

241. “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

242. “Never do what you can’t undo.”

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

244. “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

245. “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

246. “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

247. “The twilights out there were florid and melodramatic, great sweeps of orange and crimson and Lawrence-in-the-desert vermilion, then night dropping dark and hard like a slammed door.”

— Donna Tartt

248. “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

249. “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

250. “Beauty is terror.”

— Donna Tartt