Top 500 Donna Tartt Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “But still I was lonely. It was Boris I missed, the whole impulsive mess of him: gloomy, reckless, hot-tempered, appallingly thoughtless.”

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

403. “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

404. “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

405. “Heebiejeebieville.”

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

407. “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

408. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

410. “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

411. “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

412. “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

413. “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

414. “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

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. “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

417. “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

418. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

423. “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

424. “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

425. “We had so many happy days in the country that fall that from this vantage they merge into a sweet and indistinct blur. Around Halloween the last, stubborn wildflowers died away and the wind became sharp and gusty, blowing sbowers of yellow leaves on the gray, wrinkled surface of the lake. On those chill afternoons when the sky was like lead and the clouds were racing, we stayed in the library, banking huge fires to keep warm. Bare willows clicked on the windowpanes like skeleton fingers.”

— Donna Tartt

426. “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

427. “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

428. “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

429. “If love is a thing held in common, I suppose we had that in common, too.”

— Donna Tartt

430. “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

431. “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

432. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

434. “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

435. “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

436. “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

437. “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

438. “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

439. “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

440. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

442. “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

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

— Donna Tartt

444. “For if the modern mind is whimsical and discursive, the classical mind is narrow, unhesitating, relentless. It is not a quality of intelligence that one encounters frequently these days.”

— Donna Tartt

445. “And yet it was remarkable too how his world limped on without him. Strange, I thought, as I jumped a sheet of water at the curb, how a few hours could change everything – or rather, how strange to find that the present contained such a bright shard of the living past, damaged and eroded but not destroyed.”

— Donna Tartt

446. “It was a stillness I knew; this was how a house closed in on itself when someone had died.”

— Donna Tartt

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

— Donna Tartt

448. “I don’t know where Henry was. Probably looking at the moon and reciting some poem from the T’ang Dynasty.”

— Donna Tartt

449. “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

450. “Hobie had an iron constitution. Whenever he came down with something himself, he drank a Fernet-Branca and kept going.”

— Donna Tartt