Top 500 Donna Tartt Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “Even if life is great – keep it to yourself. You don’t want to tempt the devil.”

— Donna Tartt

352. “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

353. “Cloke Rayburn, a school friend of Corcoran’s and one of those who first notified police, said that Corcoran ’is a real straight guy – definitely not mixed up in drugs or anything like that.”

— Donna Tartt

354. “Even in some smoky post-catastrophe Manhattan you could imagine him swaying genially at the door in the rags of his former uniform, the Barbours up in the apartment burning old National Geographics for warmth, living off gin and tinned crabmeat.”

— Donna Tartt

355. “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

356. “Probably I’ll be dead soon.”

— Donna Tartt

357. “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.”

— Donna Tartt

358. “People loved to think they were getting a deal. Four times out of five they would look right past what they didn’t want to see.”

— Donna Tartt

359. “And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch.”

— Donna Tartt

360. “When she went back to the telephone Hely’s breath, on the other end, was ragged and secretive.”

— Donna Tartt

361. “I’m not sure whay I’ve been drawn to this subject, except that murder is a subject that has always drawn people for as long as people have been telling stories.”

— Donna Tartt

362. “Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally believed to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petrie dish of melodrama and distortion.”

— Donna Tartt

363. “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

364. “I hate Gucci. It’s so expensive, but it’s so ugly too, isn’t it? I think they make it ugly on purpose. And yet people buy it out of sheer perversity.”

— Donna Tartt

365. “Outside, it was cool and still, the sky a hazy shade of white peculiar to autumn mornings...”

— Donna Tartt

366. “The description of shock and grief hot so close to home: “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 illuminated 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

367. “Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it... We want to be devoured by it, to hide ourselves in that fire which refines us.”

— Donna Tartt

368. “They understand not only evil, it seemed, but the extravagance of tricks with which evil presents itself as good.”

— Donna Tartt

369. “It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from all the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one’s burned tongues and skinned knees, that one’s aches and pains are all one’s own.”

— Donna Tartt

370. “In very great poetry the music often comes through even when one doesn’t know the language. I loved Dante passionately before I knew a word of Italian.”

— Donna Tartt

371. “Bloodshed is a terrible thing, but the bloodiest parts of Homer and Aeschylus are often the most magnificent – for example, that glorious speech of Klytemnestra’s in the Agamemnon that I love so much.”

— Donna Tartt

372. “She raised up on tiptoe and gave me a cool, soft kiss that tasted of Popsicles. Oh you, I though, my heart beating fast and shallow.”

— Donna Tartt

373. “There’s a pattern and we’re a part of it. Yet if you scratched very deep at that idea of pattern, you hit an emptiness so dark that it destroyed, categorically, anything you’d ever looked at or thought of as light.”

— Donna Tartt

374. “Because I don’t care what anyone says or how often or winningly they say it: no one will ever, ever be able to persuade me that life is some awesome, rewarding treat. Because, here’s the truth: life is a catastrophe. The basic fact of existence – of walking around trying to feed ourselves and find friends and whatever else we do – is a catastrophe.”

— Donna Tartt

375. “The discussion that day was about loss of self, about Plato’s four divine madness, about madness of all sorts; he began by talking about what he called the burden of the self, and why people want to lose the self in the first place.”

— Donna Tartt

376. “My heart – which, thrilled at my daring, had held its breath for a moment or two – began suddenly to beat quite wildly.”

— Donna Tartt

377. “By his own choice, he had so little contact with the outside world that he frequently considered the commonplace to be bizarre: an automatic-teller machine, for instance, or some new peculiarity in the supermarket – cereal shaped like vampires, or unrefrigerated yogurt sold in pop-top cans.”

— Donna Tartt

378. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

380. “You’re a Homeric scholar?′ I might have said yes, but I had the feeling he’d be glad to catch me in a mistake and he would be able to do it easily. ‘I like Homer’ I said weakly. He regarded me chill distaste. ‘I love Homer’ He said.”

— Donna Tartt

381. “At one time I had liked the idea, that the act, at least, had bound us together; we were not ordinary friends, but friends till-death-do-us-part. This thought had been my only comfort in the aftermath of Bunny’s death. Now it made me sick, knowing there was no way out. I was stuck with them, with all of them, for good.”

— Donna Tartt

382. “When we are sad – at least I am like this – it can be comforting to cling to familiar objects, to the things that don’t change.”

— Donna Tartt

383. “Her eyes – lined with black makeup – stared blankly at the ceiling; and her tan was obviously sprayed on since her skin had a healthy apricot glow even though the top of her head was missing.”

— Donna Tartt

384. “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

385. “Do you know what Julian says about the Divine Comedy? That it’s incomprehensible to someone who isn’t a Christian? That if one is to read Dante, and understand him, one must become a Christian if only for a few hours? It was the same with this. It had to be approached on its own term, not in a voyeuristic light or even a scholarly one.”

— Donna Tartt

386. “It was like staring into a clear pool that seemed shallow, inches deep, but you might toss a coin in that glassy water and it would fall and fall, spiralling down forever without even striking the bottom.”

— Donna Tartt

387. “The thing to remember,” said Dave, the psychiatrist who had been assigned to me by the city, “is that you’ll be taken care of no matter what.” He was a thirtyish guy with dark clothes and trendy eyeglasses who always looked as if he’d just come from a poetry reading in the basement of some church.”

— Donna Tartt

388. “The interesting thing, in the photograph, was how the fragile little knock-kneed boy – smiling sweetly, pristine in his sailor suit – was also the old man who’d clasped my hand while he was dying: two separate frames, superimposed upon each other, of the same soul. And the painting, above his head, was the still point where it all hinged: dreams and signs, past and future, luck and fate. There wasn’t a single meaning. There were many meanings. It was a riddle expanding out and out and out.”

— Donna Tartt

389. “He was a planet without an atmosphere.”

— Donna Tartt

390. “I thought of all the places I’d been and all the places I hadn’t, a world lost and vast and unknowable, dingy maze of cities and alleyways, far-drifting ash and hostile immensities, connections missed, things lost and never found.”

— Donna Tartt

391. “That is not the point,” he said. “I am an Arab and I resent the racial slurs you make against my people.”

— Donna Tartt

392. “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

393. “Well, a change of scenery may be good for you,” said Hobie when I went down to see him before I left. “Even if the scene isn’t what you’d choose.”

— Donna Tartt

394. “The swish of the oars and the hypnotic thrum of dragonflies blended with his academic monotone. Camilla, flushed and sleepy, trailed her hand in the water. Yellow birch leaves blew from the trees and drifted down to rest on the surface.”

— Donna Tartt

395. “I read The Great Gatsby. It is one of my favorite books and I had taken it out of the library in hopes that it would cheer me up; of course, it only made me feel worse, since in my own humorless state I failed to see anything except what I construed as certain tragic similarities between Gatsby and myself.”

— Donna Tartt

396. “I love this painting because it speaks to all mankind.’ That’s not the reason anyone loves a piece of art. It’s a secret whisper from an alleyway. Psst, you. Hey kid. Yes you.”

— Donna Tartt

397. “What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight towards a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster?”

— Donna Tartt

398. “Sunday was a sad day – early to bed, school the next morning, I was constantly worried my homework was wrong – but as I watched the fireworks go off in the night sky, over the floodlit castles of Disneyland, I was consumed by a more general sense of dread, of imprisonment within the dreary round of school and home: circumstances which, to me at least, presented sound empirical argument for gloom.”

— Donna Tartt

399. “Nihil sub sole novum.”

— Donna Tartt

400. “But still I was lonely. It was Boris I missed, the whole impulsive mess of him: gloomy, reckless, hot-tempered, appallingly thoughtless.”

— Donna Tartt