Top 500 Donna Tartt Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “A sunstruck instant that existed now and forever.”

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

353. “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

354. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

356. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

359. “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

360. “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

361. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

364. “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

365. “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

366. “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

367. “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

368. “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

369. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

371. “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

372. “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

373. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

376. “Wrap it in newspapers and pack it at the very bottom of the trunk, my dear. With the other curiosities.”

— Donna Tartt

377. “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

378. “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

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

— 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. “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

382. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

384. “The shock of first seeing a birch tree at night, rising up in the dark as cool and slim as a ghost. And the nights, bigger than imagining: black and gusty and enormous, disordered and wild with stars.”

— Donna Tartt

385. “It was one of the reasons I loved him: for that flattering light in which he saw me, for the person I was when I was with him, for what it was he allowed me to be.”

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

387. “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

388. “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

389. “That’s odd,′ said Henry. ‘The first thing I thought of when I tasted that coffee was you.”

— Donna Tartt

390. “A character like his disintegrates under analysis. It can only be defined by the anecdote, the chance encounter or the sentence overheard.”

— Donna Tartt

391. “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

392. “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

393. “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

394. “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

395. “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

396. “And if beauty is terror,” said Julian, “then what is desire? We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it?” “To live,” said Camilla. “To live forever,” said Bunny, chin cupped in palm.”

— Donna Tartt

397. “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

398. “Death is the mother of Beauty. And what is Beauty? Terror.”

— Donna Tartt

399. “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

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

— Donna Tartt