Top 500 Donna Tartt Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “We stood looking at each other. It was raining. She looked at me with her rain-colored eyes.”

— Donna Tartt

302. “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

303. “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

304. “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

305. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

308. “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

309. “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

310. “It made me feel less mortal, less ordinary. It was support and vindication; it was sustenance and sum. It was the keystone that held the whole cathedral up. And it was awful to learn, by having it so suddenly vanish from under me, that all my adult life I’d been privately sustained by that great, hidden, savage joy: the conviction that my whole life was balanced atop a secret that might at any movement blow me part.”

— Donna Tartt

311. “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

312. “I – ” At her tone, at once intimate and formal, a terrible sadness came over me, and when we looked at each other it seemed that the whole past was redefined and brought into focus by this moment, clear as glass, a complexity of stillness that was rainy afternoons in spring, a dark chair in the hallway, the light-as-air touch of her hand on the back of my head.”

— Donna Tartt

313. “Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away.”

— Donna Tartt

314. “In Paradise Lost he pushes English to its very limits but I think no language without noun cases could possibly support the structural order he attempts to impose.”

— Donna Tartt

315. “Joan of Arc had led armies when she was hardly older than Harriet. Yet, for Christmas last year, Harriet’s father had given Harriet an insulting board game for girls called What Shall I Be? It was a particularly flimsy game, meant to offer career guidance but no matter how well you played, it offered only four possible futures: teacher, ballerina, mother, or nurse.”

— Donna Tartt

316. “Probably I’ll be dead soon.”

— Donna Tartt

317. “At first I thought they were playing to an.”

— Donna Tartt

318. “I prefer to think of it as redistribution of matter.”

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

323. “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

324. “Charles Portis shows his mastery of place and the more complicated subtleties of time.”

— Donna Tartt

325. “Even if you don’t like Poe – he invented the detective story. And science fiction. In essence, he invented a huge part of the twentieth century.”

— Donna Tartt

326. “From his genial cursing, his infrequent shaving, the relaxed way he talked around the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, it was almost as if he were playing a character: some cool guy from a fifties noir or maybe Ocean’s Eleven, a lazy, sated gangster with not much to lose. Yet even in the midst of his new laid-backness he still had that crazed and slightly heroic look of schoolboy insolence, all the more stirring since it was drifting towards autumn, half-ruined and careless of itself.”

— Donna Tartt

327. “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

328. “All those years I’d drifted along too glassy and insulated for any kind of reality to push through: a delirium which had spun me along on its slow, relaxed wave since childhood, high and lying on the shag carpet in Vegas laughing at the ceiling fan, only I wasn’t laughing any more, Rip van Winkle wincing and holding his head on the ground about a hundred years too late.”

— Donna Tartt

329. “Taking on challenging projects is the way that one grows and extends one’s range as a writer, one’s technical command, so I consider the time well-spent.”

— Donna Tartt

330. “I am sorry, as well, to present such a sketchy and disappointing exegesis of what is in fact the central part of my story.”

— Donna Tartt

331. “It was a myth you couldn’t function on opiates: shooting up was one thing but for someone like me-jumping at pigeons beating from the sidewalk, afflicted with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder practically to the point of spasticity and cerebral palsy-pills were the key to being not only competent, but high-functioning.”

— Donna Tartt

332. “Adrift in an air of charged significance, doubt struck me: was it a real memory, had he really spoken those words to me, or was I dreaming?”

— Donna Tartt

333. “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

334. “Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us. Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that’s why we’re so anxious to lose them, don’t you think?”

— Donna Tartt

335. “Goyen there. Sadly not for sale.” “Van Goyen? I would have sworn that was a Corot.” “From here, yes, you might.” He was pleased at the comparison. “Very similar painters – Vincent.”

— Donna Tartt

336. “Understand, by saying ‘God,’ I am merely using ‘God’ as reference to long-term pattern we can’t decipher.”

— Donna Tartt

337. “A truck shot past in a whine of spray.”

— Donna Tartt

338. “He looked very tired, a regard which manifested itself not in dark circles, or pallor, but a dreamy and bright-cheeked sadness.”

— Donna Tartt

339. “For weeks, I’d been frozen, sealed-off; now, in the shower, I would turn up the water as hard as it would go and howl, silently. Everything was raw and painful and confusing and wrong and yet it was as if I’d been dragged from freezing water through a break in the ice, into sun and blazing cold.”

— Donna Tartt

340. “Well – think about this. What if all your actions and choices, good or bad, made no difference to God? What if the pattern is pre-set? No no – hang on – this is a question worth struggling with. What if our badness and mistakes are the very thing that set our fate and bring us round to good? What if, for some of us, we can’t get there any other way?”

— Donna Tartt

341. “A sunstruck instant that existed now and forever.”

— Donna Tartt

342. “There’s no ‘rational grounds’ for anything I care about.”

— Donna Tartt

343. “I don’t think I can explain the despair my surroundings inspired in me. Though I now suspect, given the circumstances and my disposition, I would’ve been unhappy anywhere, in Biarritz or Caracas or the Isle of Capri, I was then convinced that my unhappiness was indigenous to that place.”

— Donna Tartt

344. “It’s hard for me to show work while I’m writing, because other people’s comments will influence what happens.”

— Donna Tartt

345. “Life: vacant, vain, intolerable. What loyalty did I owe it? None whatsoever.”

— Donna Tartt

346. “Mr. Dial grinned. His small teeth, his wide-set eyes and his bulging forehead – plus his habit of looking at the class in profile, rather than straight on – gave him the slight aspect of an unfriendly dolphin.”

— Donna Tartt

347. “We looked at each other. And it occurred to me that despite his faults, which were numerous and spectacular, the reason I’d liked Boris and felt happy around him from almost the moment I’d met him was that he was never afraid. You didn’t meet many people who moved freely through the world with such a vigorous contempt for it and at the same time such oddball and unthwartable faith in what, in childhood, he had liked to call “the Planet of Earth.”

— Donna Tartt

348. “It never occurred to me that half of the population of Vermont wasn’t experiencing pretty much what I put myself through every night- bone-crackling cold that made my joints ache, cold so relentless I felt it in my dreams: ice floes, lost expeditions, the lights of search planes swinging over whitecaps as I floundered alone Arctic Seas.”

— Donna Tartt

349. “Children – if you think back really what it was like to be a child and what it was like to know other children – children lie all the time.”

— Donna Tartt

350. “She was the Queen who finished out the suit of dark Jacks, dark King and Joker.”

— Donna Tartt