Top 500 Donna Tartt Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 9 of 10

401. “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

402. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

404. “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

405. “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

406. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

408. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

410. “Why did I obsess over people like this? Was it normal to fixate on strangers in this particular vivid, fevered way? I didn’t think so. It was impossible to imagine some random passer-by on the street forming quite such an interest in me.”

— Donna Tartt

411. “My love was muddied-up below the waterline with my mother, with my mother’s death, with losing my mother and not being able to get her back. All that blind, infantile hunger to save and be saved, to repeat the past and make it different, had somehow attached itself, ravenously, to her. There was an instability in it, a sickness.”

— Donna Tartt

412. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

414. “Nothing’, he said. ‘Except that my life, for the most part, has been very stale and colorless. Dead, I mean. The world has always been an empty place to me. I was incapable of enjoying even the simplest things. I felt dead in everything I did.’ He brushed the dirt from his hands. ‘But then it changed,’ he said. ‘The night I killed that man.”

— Donna Tartt

415. “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

416. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

421. “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

422. “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

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. “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

425. “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

426. “Together, they were like one of those superhero alliances in the comic books, invincible, an unconquerable confederation of boredom and confusion.”

— Donna Tartt

427. “It has always been hard for me to talk about Julian without romanticizing him. In many ways, I loved him the most of all; and it is with him that I am most tempted to embroider, to flatter, to basically reinvent.”

— Donna Tartt

428. “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

429. “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

430. “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

431. “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

432. “I’d stopped myself from blurting the thing on the edge of my tongue, the thing I’d never said, even though it was something we both knew well enough without me saying it out loud to him in the street- which was, of course, I love you.”

— Donna Tartt

433. “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

434. “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

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. “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

437. “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

438. “Consequently their relationship with their dead brother was of the most intimate sort, his strong, bright, immutable character shining changelessly against the vagueness and vacillation of their own characters, and the characters of people that they knew; and they grew up believing that this was due to some rare, angelic incandescence of nature on Robin’s part, and not at all to the fact that he was dead.”

— Donna Tartt

439. “You know, sometimes there’s a light at the table, like a visible halo, and you’re it, you know? You’re the light?”

— Donna Tartt

440. “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

441. “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

442. “I had nothing to offer her. I was illness, instability, everything she wanted to get away from.”

— Donna Tartt

443. “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

444. “Whatever teaches us to talk to ourselves is important: whatever teaches us to sing ourselves out of despair. But the painting has also taught me that we can speak to each other across time.”

— Donna Tartt

445. “When I disagreed – strenuously – and asked what was wrong with focusing one’s entire attention on only two things, if those two things were Art and Beauty, Laforgue replied: “There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty – unless she is wed to something more meaningful – is always superficial.”

— Donna Tartt

446. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

448. “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

449. “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

450. “The chronological sorting of memories is an interesting business.”

— Donna Tartt