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Top 500 Donna Tartt Quotes (2025 Update)
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Donna Tartt Quote: “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.”
Donna Tartt Quote: “I slept all day, face down in the pillow, a comfortable dead-man’s float only remotely disturbed by a chill undertow of reality – talk, footsteps, slamming doors – which threaded fitfully through the dark, blood-warm waters of dream.”
Donna Tartt Quote: “On the way to Francis’s, a pregnant dog ran across the road in front of us. “That,” said Henry, “is a very bad omen.” But of what he wouldn’t say.”
Donna Tartt Quote: “Maybe good luck was like bad luck in that it took awhile for it to sink in. You don’t feel anything at first. The feeling came later on.”
Donna Tartt Quote: “Because: if our secret defines us, as opposed to the face we show the world: then the painting was the secret that raised me above the surface of life and enabled me to know who I am. And it’s there: in my notebooks, every page, even though it’s not. Dream and magic, magic and delirium. The Unified Field Theory. A secret about a secret.”
Donna Tartt Quote: “Because – the line of beauty is the line of beauty. It doesn’t matter if it’s been through the Xerox machine a hundred times... Still with greatness, there’s a jolt at the end of the wire. It doesn’t matter how often you grab hold of the line, or how many people have grabbed hold of it before you. It’s the same line. Fallen from a higher life. It still carries some of the same shock.”
Donna Tartt Quote: “It didn’t occur to me then, though it certainly does now, that it was years since I’d roused myself from my stupor of misery and self-absorption; between anomie and trance, inertia and parenthesis and gnawing my own heart out, there were a lot of small, easy, everyday kindnesses I’d missed out on; and even the word kindness was like rising from unconsciousness into some hospital awareness of voices, and people, from a stream of digitized machines.”
Donna Tartt Quote: “I am gifted at blending myself into any given milieu – you’ve never seen such a typical California teenager as I was, nor such a dissolute and callous pre-med student – 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 leaf upon which it sits, no matter how perfectly it has approximated the the subtleties of the particular shade.”
Donna Tartt Quote: “It was like waking from a nightmare to a worse nightmare.”
Donna Tartt Quote: “There’s a big anti-intellectual strain in the American south, and there always has been. We’re not big on thought.”
Donna Tartt Quote: “I think innocence is something that adults project upon children that’s not really there.”
Donna Tartt Quote: “One’s thought patterns become different, he said, when forced into the confines of a rigid and unfamiliar tongue. Certain common ideas become inexpressible; other, previously undreamt-of ones spring to life, finding miraculous new articulation.”
Donna Tartt Quote: “Reason is always apparent to a discerning eye. But luck? It’s invisible, erratic, angelic.”
Donna Tartt Quote: “Why do I care about all the wrong things, and nothing at all for the right ones? Or, to tip it another way: how can I see so clearly that everything I love or care about is illusion, and yet – for me, anyway – all that’s worth living for lies in that charm?”
Donna Tartt Quote: “But strange and marvelous as she was, a wisp of silk in a forest of black wool, she was not at all the fragile creature one would ever have her seem. In many ways she was as cool and competent as Henry; tough-minded and solitary in her habits, and in many ways as aloof .”
Donna Tartt Quote: “The storytelling gift is innate: one has it or one doesn’t. But style is at least partly a learned thing: one refines it by looking and listening and reading and practice – by work.”
Donna Tartt Quote: “I do not now nor did I ever have anything in common with any of them, nothing except a knowledge of Greek and the year of my life I spent in their company. And if love is a thing held in common, I suppose we had that in common, too, though I realize that might sound odd in light of the story I am about to tell.”
Donna Tartt Quote: “We were heading into the clumsy territory of my mother’s funeral, stretched-out silences, wrong smiles, the place where words didn’t work.”
Donna Tartt Quote: “Sometimes when I saw him at a distance – fists in pockets, whistling, bobbing along with his springy old walk – I would have a strong pang of affection mixed with regret. I forgave him, a hundred times over, and never on the basis of anything more than this: a look, a gesture, a certain tilt of his head.”
Donna Tartt Quote: “I think romantics are frequently the best classicists. He laughed. “The great romantics are often failed classicists. But that’s beside the point, isn’t it?”
Donna Tartt Quote: “My hopes for a relationship with her were wholly unreal, whereas my ongoing misery, and frustration, were an all-too-horrible reality. Was groundless, hopeless romantic obsession any way to waste the rest of my life?”
Donna Tartt Quote: “I felt rotten. Dead butterfly floating on the surface of the pool. Audible machine hum. Drowned crickets and beetles swirling in the plastic filter baskets. Above, the setting sun flared gaudy and inhuman, blood-red shelves of cloud that suggested end-times footage of catastrophe and ruin: detonations on Pacific atolls, wildlife running before sheets of flame.”
Donna Tartt Quote: “But I am getting sentimental. Sometimes, when I think about these things, I do.”
Donna Tartt Quote: “Flapping crows. Shiny beetles crawling in the undergrowth. A patch of sky, frozen in a cloudy retina, reflected in a puddle on the ground. Yoo-hoo. Being and nothingness.”
Donna Tartt Quote: “Still with real greatness, there’s a jolt at the end of the wire. It doesn’t matter how often you grab hold of the line, or how many people have grabbed hold of it before you. It’s the same line. Fallen from a higher life. It still carries some of the same shock.”
Donna Tartt Quote: “I’d always rather stand or fall on my own mistakes. There’s nothing worse than looking back, in a published book, at a line edit or a copy edit that you felt queasy about and didn’t want to take, but took anyway.”
Donna Tartt Quote: “Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells awaited them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital.”
Donna Tartt Quote: “Henry. Please.” I was on the verge of tears. “What’s the matter with you? Have you lost your mind? Don’t you understand what’s going on?” He stood up, dusted his hands on his trousers.”
Donna Tartt Quote: “And maybe I was coping awfully well, I don’t know. Certainly I wasn’t howling aloud or punching my fist through windows or doing any of the things I imagined people might do who felt as I did. But sometimes, unexpectedly, grief pounded over me in waves that left me gasping; and when the waves washed back, I found myself looking out over a brackish wreck which was illumined in a light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead.”
Donna Tartt Quote: “You are – all your experience just kind of accumulates, and the novel takes a richness of its own simply because it has the weight of all those years that one’s put into it.”
Donna Tartt Quote: “Bleakly, Harriet gazed out into the antiseptic gloom. A weight lay upon her, and a darkness. She’d learned things she never knew, things she had no idea of knowing, and yet in a strange way it was the hidden message of Captain Scott: that victory and collapse were sometimes the same thing.”
Donna Tartt Quote: “Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely?”
Donna Tartt Quote: “Picasso says. ‘Bad artists copy, good artists steal.”
Donna Tartt Quote: “With distaste, Harriet reflected upon how life had beaten down the adults she knew, every single grown-up. Something strangled them as they grew older, made them doubt their own powers-laziness? Habit? Their grip slackened; they stopped fighting and resigned themselves to what happened. “That’s Life.” That’s what they all said. “That’s Life, Harriet, that’s just how it is, you’ll see.”
Donna Tartt Quote: “Bad artists copy, good artists steal.”
Donna Tartt Quote: “Bunny put away his copy of The Bride of Fu Manchu and started carrying around a volume of Homer instead.”
Donna Tartt Quote: “No. I’ve always been drawn to broken, wild terrain. The oddest tongues come from such places, and the strangest mythologies, and the oldest cities, and the most barbarous religions.”
Donna Tartt Quote: “I believe, in a funny way, the job of the novelist is to be out there on the fringes and speaking for an experience that has not really been spoken for.”
Donna Tartt Quote: “Though he didn’t treat them as equals – he didn’t treat anyone as an equal, actually – neither did he resort to the condescending friendliness of the wealthy.”
Donna Tartt Quote: “First rule of restorations. Never do what you can’t undo.”
Donna Tartt Quote: “La belleza es terror. Temblamos ante todo lo que llamamos bello.”
Donna Tartt Quote: “Maybe the one had to be lost for the others to be found?”
Donna Tartt Quote: “There’s nothing like having a sympathetic reader who asks the right questions, who understands what you’re trying to achieve and only wants to make it better.”
Donna Tartt Quote: “Well, I do have some maiden aunts that are not quite like the aunts in the book, but I definitely do have a couple of them, and a couple of old aunties.”
Donna Tartt Quote: “On the other hand, I mean, that is what writers have always been supposed to do, was to rely on their own devices and to – I mean, writing is a lonely business.”
Donna Tartt Quote: “The thought of her gave me such a continual anguish that I could no more forget her than an aching tooth. It was involuntary, hopeless, compulsive. For years she had been the first thing I remembered when I woke up, the last thing that drifted through my mind as I went to sleep, and during the day she came to me obtrusively, obsessively, always with a painful shock.”
Donna Tartt Quote: “And as much as I’d like to believe there’s a truth beyond illusion, I’ve come to believe that there’s no truth beyond illusion. Because, between ‘reality’ on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there’s a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic.”
Donna Tartt Quote: “To really be centered and to really work well and to think about the kinds of things that I need to think about, I need to spend large amounts of time alone.”
Donna Tartt Quote: “At home, my mother had known how to suffocate my dad’s anger by growing silent, a low, unwavering flame of contempt that sucked all the oxygen out of the room and made everything he said and did seem ridiculous.”
Donna Tartt Quote: “Who knew, or cared, the names of the Turks who blew the roof off the Parthenon? the mullahs who had ordered the destruction of the Buddhas at Bamiyan? Yet living or dead: their acts stood. It was the worst kind of immortality. Intentionally or no: I had extinguished a light at the heart of the world.”
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