Top 500 Donna Tartt Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “Understand, by saying ‘God,’ I am merely using ‘God’ as reference to long-term pattern we can’t decipher.”

— Donna Tartt

352. “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

353. “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

354. “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

355. “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

356. “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

357. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

359. “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

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

364. “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

365. “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

366. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

369. “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

370. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

372. “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

373. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

376. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

378. “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

379. “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

380. “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

381. “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

382. “I don’t expect you to understand but it’s rough to be in love with the wrong person.”

— Donna Tartt

383. “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

384. “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

385. “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

386. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

388. “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

389. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

391. “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

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. “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

394. “To me, the hallmark of the modern mind is that it loves to wander from its subject.”

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

397. “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

398. “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

399. “Patch of sunlight on a yellow wall. The loneliness that separates every living creature from every other living creature. Sorrow inseparable from joy.”

— Donna Tartt

400. “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