Top 500 Donna Tartt Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “First rule of restorations. Never do what you can’t undo.”

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

304. “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

305. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

308. “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

309. “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

310. “Heebiejeebieville.”

— Donna Tartt

311. “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

312. “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

313. “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

314. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

317. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

319. “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

320. “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

321. “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

322. “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

323. “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

324. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

326. “Then there’s the business of standardized tests. Henry refused to take the SATs – he’d probably score off the charts if he did, but he’s got some kind of aesthetic objection to them.”

— Donna Tartt

327. “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

328. “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

329. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

331. “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

332. “If love is a thing held in common, I suppose we had that in common, too.”

— Donna Tartt

333. “Though Julian could be marvelously kind in difficult circumstances of all sorts, I sometimes got the feeling that he was less pleased by kindness itself than by the elegance of the gesture.”

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

337. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

339. “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

340. “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

341. “The silence between us was happy and strange, connected by the cord and the icy voices thinly echoing. “You don’t have to talk,” she said. “If you don’t feel like it.” Her eyelids were heavy and her voice was drowsy and like a secret. “People always want to talk but I like being quiet.”

— Donna Tartt

342. “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

343. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

346. “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

347. “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

348. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

350. “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