Top 500 Donna Tartt Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “Wrap it in newspapers and pack it at the very bottom of the trunk, my dear. With the other curiosities.”

— Donna Tartt

352. “All night long you say offensive things about Arabs,” he screamed. “You don’t know what Arab is.” He beat on his chest with his fist. “I know it, in my heart.”

— Donna Tartt

353. “In order for a long piece of work to engage a novelist over an extended period of time, it has to deal with questions that you find very important, that you’re trying to work out.”

— Donna Tartt

354. “And as the light flickered over it in bands, I had the queasy sense of my own life, in comparison, as a patternless and transient burst of energy, a fizz of biological static just as random as the street lamps flashing past.”

— Donna Tartt

355. “My novels aren’t really generated by a single conceptual spark; it’s more a process of many different elements that come together unexpectedly over a long period of time.”

— Donna Tartt

356. “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

357. “Viewed from a distance, his character projected an impression of solidity and wholeness which was in fact as insubstantial as a hologram; up close, he was all motes and light, you could pass your hand right through him. If you stepped back far enough, however, the illusion would click in again and there he would be, bigger than life, squinting at you from behind his little glasses and raking back a dank lock of hair with one hand.”

— Donna Tartt

358. “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

359. “But poor Andy – even before he was skipped ahead a grade – had always been a chronically picked-upon kid: scrawny, twitchy, lactose-intolerant, with skin so pale it was almost transparent, and a penchant for throwing out words like ‘noxious’ and ‘chthonic’ in casual conversation.”

— Donna Tartt

360. “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

361. “I mean, this man was not Voltaire we killed. But still. It’s a shame. I feel bad about it.”

— Donna Tartt

362. “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

363. “Now searchers have departed, and life has grown quiet around me, I have come to realize that while for years I might have imagined myself to be somewhere else, in reality I have been there all the time: up at the the top by the muddy wheel-ruts in the new grass, where the sky is dark over the shivering apple blossoms and the first chill of the snow that will fall that night is already in the air.”

— 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. “Even if life is great – keep it to yourself. You don’t want to tempt the devil.”

— Donna Tartt

367. “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

368. “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

369. “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

370. “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

371. “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

372. “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

373. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

375. “Nihil sub sole novum.”

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

377. “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

378. “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

379. “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

380. “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

381. “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

382. “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

383. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

385. “Sleeping or waking, the world was a slippery game: fluid stage sets, drift and echo, reflected light. And all of it sifting like salt between her numbed fingers.”

— Donna Tartt

386. “But – just when I’ve managed to harden my heart, he’ll turn around and be so sweet. I always fall for it. I don’t know why.”

— Donna Tartt

387. “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

388. “I followed after her with a sort of dazed sense of lost time, delighted by her preoccupation, how oblivious she seemed of the minutes flying.”

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

390. “A November stillness was settling like a deadly oxymoron on the April landscape.”

— Donna Tartt

391. “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

392. “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

393. “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

394. “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

395. “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

396. “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

397. “The painting had made me feel less mortal, less ordinary. It was support and vindication; it was sustenance and sum. It was the keystone that had held the whole cathedral up.”

— Donna Tartt

398. “Because I love Henry.” “Henry’s dead.” “I can’t help it. I still love him.”

— Donna Tartt

399. “Heebiejeebieville.”

— Donna Tartt

400. “Manche Dinge sind so schrecklich, dass man sie nicht sogleich begreifen kann.”

— Donna Tartt