Top 500 Donna Tartt Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “I mean, this man was not Voltaire we killed. But still. It’s a shame. I feel bad about it.”

— Donna Tartt

402. “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

403. “For a moment I was disoriented, seized by panic; could a ghost embody itself through wavelengths, electronic dots, a picture tube? What are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a dead star?”

— Donna Tartt

404. “Henry, in coat and tie, waded out to where Francis stood, his trousers rolled to the knee, and old-fashioned banker in a surrealist painting.”

— Donna Tartt

405. “He played with relish, sleeves rolled up, smiling at his work, tinkling from the low ranges to the high with the tricky syncopation of a tap dancer going up a Ziegfeld staircase.”

— Donna Tartt

406. “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

407. “La belleza altera la textura de la realidad.”

— Donna Tartt

408. “And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky...”

— Donna Tartt

409. “I wish you smoked. I don’t know why you don’t. You weren’t an athlete in high school or anything, were you?” “No.” “That’s why Bun doesn’t smoke. Some clean-living type of football.”

— Donna Tartt

410. “She was a masterpiece of composure; nothing ever ruffled her or made her upset, and though she was not beautiful her calmness had the magnetic pull of beauty – a stillness so powerful that the molecules realigned themselves around her when she came into a room.”

— Donna Tartt

411. “I knew my mother’s feet, her clothes, her two-tone black and white shoes – and long after I was sure of it I made myself stand in their midst, folded deep inside myself like a sick pigeon with its eyes closed.”

— Donna Tartt

412. “Over and over, I kept thinking I’ve got to go home and then, for the millionth time, I can’t.”

— Donna Tartt

413. “I have to say I personally have never drawn such a sharp line between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ as you. For me: that line is often false. The two are never disconnected. One can’t exist without the other. As long as I am acting out of love, I feel I am doing best I know how.”

— Donna Tartt

414. “Fatal tendency to try to make interesting people good.”

— Donna Tartt

415. “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

416. “My father was mean, and our house ugly, and my mother didn’t pay much attention to me; my clothes were cheap and my haircut too short and no one at school seemed to like me that much; and since all this had been true for as long as I could remember, I felt things would doubtless continue in this depressing vein as far as I could foresee.”

— Donna Tartt

417. “Give my life, gladly! I will never love any person on the earth like Katya again – not even close. She was the one. I would die and be happy for only one day with her. But – ” pushing his sleeve back down – “you should never get a person’s name tattooed on you, because then you lose the person. I was too young to know that when I got the tattoo.”

— Donna Tartt

418. “The ice cream slows down your digestion. The coke settles your stomach and the caffeine cures your headache. Sugar gives you energy.”

— Donna Tartt

419. “And how can we lose this maddening self, lose it entirely? Love? Yes, but as old Cephalus once heard Sophocles say, the least of us know that love is a cruel and terrible master. One loses oneself for the sake of the other, but in doing so becomes enslaved and miserable to the most capricious of all the gods.”

— Donna Tartt

420. “Her death was my fault. Other people have always been a little too quick to assure me that it wasn’t; and yes, only a kid, who could have known, terrible accident, rotten luck, could have happened to anyone, it’s all perfectly true and I don’t believe a word of it.”

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

422. “At the silence, my heart went cold. Dead flowers stood rotting in the massive Chinese vases and a shut-up heaviness overweighed the room: the air almost too stale to breathe... It was a stillness I knew; this was a house closed in on itself when someone had died.”

— Donna Tartt

423. “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

424. “Who’s to say that gamblers don’t really understand it better than anyone else? Isn’t everything worthwhile a gamble? Can’t good come around sometimes through some strange back doors?”

— Donna Tartt

425. “You wan’t to know what Classics are?” said a drunk Dean of Admissions to me at a faculty party a couple of years ago. “I’ll tell you what Clasdics are. War and homos.” A sententious and vulgar statement, certainly, but like many such gnomic vulgarities, it also contains a tiny splinter of truth.”

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

427. “I think he felt the need to make a noble gesture, something to prove to us and to himself that it was in fact possible to put those high cold principles which Julian had taught us to use. Duty, piety, loyalty, sacrifice.”

— Donna Tartt

428. “Initially, I had thought with hard work I could overcome a fundamental squeamishness and distaste for my subject, that perhaps with even harder work I could simulate something like a talent for it. But this was not the case. As the months went by I remained uninterested, if not downright sickened, by my study of biology; my grades were poor.”

— Donna Tartt

429. “He doesn’t care that Bunny is dead. I could forgive him if that was why he felt this way, but it isn’t. He wouldn’t care if we killed half a dozen people. All that matters to him is keeping his own name out of it.”

— Donna Tartt

430. “Intentionally or no: I had extinguished a light at the heart of the world.”

— Donna Tartt

431. “I suppose I was only a little depressed, now the novelty of it had worn off, at the wildly alien character of the place in which I found myself: a strange land with strange customs and peoples and unpredictable weathers. I thought I was sick, though I don’t believe I really was; I was just cold all the time and unable to sleep, sometimes no more than an hour or two a night.”

— Donna Tartt

432. “And who knows-but maybe that’s what’s waiting for us at the end of the journey, a majesty unimaginable until the very moment we find ourselves walking through the doors of it, what we find ourselves gazing at in astonishment when God finally takes His hands off our eyes and says: Look!”

— Donna Tartt

433. “It’s not about outward appearances but inward significance.”

— Donna Tartt

434. “Catfish’s high spirits were inexhaustible; he was cheerful no matter what happened, and he was unable to understand that not everyone was so resilient.”

— Donna Tartt

435. “Si tenemos un alma lo bastante fuerte, podemos arrancarnos el velo y contemplar cara a cara la desnuda y terrible belleza; dejar que el dios nos consuma, nos devore, nos quiebre los huesos. Y luego nos escupa renacidos.”

— Donna Tartt

436. “And if beauty is terror, then what is desire?”

— Donna Tartt

437. “He had never seen a gunshot wound. He kept asking what if felt like? dull or sharp? an ache or a burn? My head was spinning and naturally I could give him no kind of coherent answer but I remember thinking dimly that it was sort of like the first time I got drunk, or slept with a girl; not quite what one expected, really, but once it happened it couldn’t be any other way. Neon lights: Motel 6, Dairy Queen. Colors so bright, they nearly broke my heart.”

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

439. “It was as if I’d suffered a chemical change of the spirit: as if the acid balance of my psyche had shifted and leached the life out of me in aspects impossible to repair, or reverse, like a frond of living coral hardened to bone.”

— Donna Tartt

440. “But then, six months ago, my dad hauled me with him to this shaddy town in Alaska. Seward Peninsula, just below Arctic Circle? And then, middle of May – we flew to Fairbanks on a prop plane, and then we came here.”

— Donna Tartt

441. “The business had upset him, that I knew, but I also knew that there was something about the operatic sweep of the search which could not fail to appeal to him and that he was pleased, however obscurely, with the aesthetics of the thing.”

— Donna Tartt

442. “She was breathing hard, and deep circles of red burned high on her bright cheeks; in all my life I had never seen anyone so maddeningly beautiful as she was at that moment.”

— Donna Tartt

443. “As I lay on my side, staring at a pool of white moonlight on the wooden floor, a gust of wind blew the curtains out, long and pale as ghosts. As though an invisible hand were leafing through them, the.”

— Donna Tartt

444. “No law against throwing a coat in the canal, is there?” “I would have thought so, yes.” “Well – who knows. Not very widely enforced law, if you ask me.”

— Donna Tartt

445. “I am a Californian by birth and also, I have recently discovered, by nature. The last is something I admit only now, after the fact.”

— Donna Tartt

446. “Everything was lost, I had fallen off the map: the disorientation of being in the wrong apartment, with the wrong family, was wearing me down, so I felt groggy and punch-drunk, weepy almost, like an interrogated prisoner prevented from sleeping for days. Over and over, I kept thinking I’ve got to go home and then, for the millionth time, I can’t.”

— Donna Tartt

447. “It was six o’clock in the morning, and the sun was rising over the mountains, and the birches, and the impossibly green meadows; and to me, dazed with night and no sleep and three days on the highway, it was like a country from a dream.”

— Donna Tartt

448. “Birds can sing and fish can swim and I can do this.”

— Donna Tartt

449. “After class, I wandered downstairs in a dream, my head spinning, but acutely, achingly conscious that I was alive and young on a beautiful day.”

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt