Top 500 Donna Tartt Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “Picasso says. ‘Bad artists copy, good artists steal.”

— Donna Tartt

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

256. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

258. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

260. “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

261. “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

262. “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

263. “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

264. “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

265. “Asparagus is in season.”

— Donna Tartt

266. “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

267. “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

268. “Maybe the one had to be lost for the others to be found?”

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

270. “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

271. “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

272. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

274. “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

275. “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

276. “First rule of restorations. Never do what you can’t undo.”

— Donna Tartt

277. “Hobie’s reassuring hand on my shoulder, a strong, comforting pressure, like an anchor letting me know that everything was okay. I hadn’t felt a touch like that since my mother died – friendly, steadying in the midst of confusing events – and, like a stray dog hungry for affection, I felt some profound shift in allegiance, blood-deep, a sudden, humiliating, eyewatering conviction of this place is good, this person is safe, I can trust him, nobody will hurt me here.”

— Donna Tartt

278. “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

279. “We looked at each other and just laughed; everything was hysterically funny, even the playground slide was smiling at us, and at some point, deep in the night, when we were swinging on the jungle gym and showers of sparks were flying out of our mouths, I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.”

— Donna Tartt

280. “Occasionally a car swooshed by in the rain and its headlights would swing round momentarily and illuminate the room-the pool table, snowshoes on the wall and the rowing machine, the armchair in which Henry sat, motionless, a glass in his hand and the cigarette burning low between his fingers. For a moment his face, pale and watchful as a ghost’s, would be caught in the headlights and then, very gradually, it would slide back into the dark.”

— Donna Tartt

281. “I began to see new buildings, too, which were connected by futuristic walkways lit from beneath. Long, cool perspectives of modern architecture, rising phosphorescent and eerie from the rubble.”

— Donna Tartt

282. “I remember a story I read once, a soldier, was it at Shiloh? He was talking to me but not with his whole attention. Gettysburg? a soldier so mad with shock that he started burying birds and squirrels on the battlefield. You had lot of little things killed too, in the crossfire, little animals. Many tiny graves. p128.”

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

284. “Mr. MacNatt was an auto-parts salesman; Mrs. MacNatt was shaped like a pigeon and sold Avon.”

— Donna Tartt

285. “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

286. “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

287. “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

288. “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

289. “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

290. “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

291. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

293. “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

294. “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.”

— Donna Tartt

295. “We stood looking at each other. It was raining. She looked at me with her rain-colored eyes.”

— Donna Tartt

296. “Hely’s feelings didn’t run very deep; he lived in sunny shallows where it was always warm and bright.”

— Donna Tartt

297. “There wasn’t a single meaning. There were many meanings. It was a riddle expanding out and out and out.”

— Donna Tartt

298. “People don’t pay attention to ninety percent of what they see.”

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

300. “All of a sudden, images from every crime movie I’d ever seen began to pop into my mind – the windowless room, the harsh lights and narrow hallways, images which did not seem so much theatrical or foreign as imbued with the indelible quality of memory, of experience lived.”

— Donna Tartt