Top 500 Donna Tartt Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

256. “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

257. “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

258. “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

259. “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

260. “I think innocence is something that adults project upon children that’s not really there.”

— Donna Tartt

261. “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

262. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

264. “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

265. “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

266. “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

267. “The idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than almost anything.”

— Donna Tartt

268. “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

269. “But I am getting sentimental. Sometimes, when I think about these things, I do.”

— Donna Tartt

270. “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

271. “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

272. “Picasso says. ‘Bad artists copy, good artists steal.”

— Donna Tartt

273. “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

274. “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

275. “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

276. “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

277. “Probably I’ll be dead soon.”

— Donna Tartt

278. “And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky...”

— Donna Tartt

279. “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

280. “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

281. “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

282. “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

283. “It was like waking from a nightmare to a worse nightmare.”

— Donna Tartt

284. “I felt like a lifetime had come and gone since my night with Pippa and I thought how happy I’d been, rushing to meet her in the sharp-edged winter darkness, my elation at spotting her under a streetlamp out in front of Film Forum and how I’d stood on the corner to savor it – the joy of watching her watch for me. Her expectant watching-the-crowd face. Me she was watching for: me. And the heart-shock of believing, for only a moment, that you might just have what could never be yours.”

— Donna Tartt

285. “There’s a big anti-intellectual strain in the American south, and there always has been. We’re not big on thought.”

— Donna Tartt

286. “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

287. “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

288. “But, if I dare say it, it wasn’t until I had helped kill a man that I realized how elusive and complex an act a murder can actually be, and not necessarily attributable to one dramatic motive.”

— Donna Tartt

289. “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

290. “Bad artists copy, good artists steal.”

— Donna Tartt

291. “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

292. “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

293. “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

294. “Lying awake, I tried to recall all my best memories of her – to freeze her in my mind so I wouldn’t forget her – but instead of birthdays and happy times I kept remembering things like how a few days before she was killed she’d stopped me halfway out the door to pick a thread off my school jacket.”

— Donna Tartt

295. “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

296. “La belleza es terror. Temblamos ante todo lo que llamamos bello.”

— Donna Tartt

297. “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

298. “Bunny put away his copy of The Bride of Fu Manchu and started carrying around a volume of Homer instead.”

— Donna Tartt

299. “Because, here’s the truth: life is catastrophe.”

— Donna Tartt

300. “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