Donna Tartt Quotes

“In short: I felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Are you always up this early?' I asked him.
'Almost always,' he said without looking up. 'It's beautiful here, but morning light can make the most vulgar things tolerable.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“But one mustn't underestimate the primal appeal—to lose one's self, lose it utterly. And in losing it be born to the principle of continuous life, outside the prison of mortality and time.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“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. Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us. Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that's why we're so anxious to lose them...”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty -unless she is wed to something more meaningful -is always superficial”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“There's no 'rational grounds' for anything I care about.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“I believe having a great diversity of teachers is harmful and confusing for a young mind, in the same way I believe that it is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially”
― Donna Tartt

“It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from 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. Even more terrible, as we grow old, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Though Julian could be marvelously kind in difficult circumstances of all sorts, I sometimes got the feeling that he was less pleased by kindness itself than by the elegance of the gesture.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“But walking through it all was one thing; walking away, unfortunately, has proved to be quite another, and though once I thought I had left that ravine forever on an April afternoon long ago, now I am not so sure. Now the 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 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, The Secret History

“We had not spoken about the incident in my room several nights before and, in the drowsy silence of the car, I felt the need to make things plain.
“You know, Francis,” I said.
“What?”
It seemed the best thing was just to come right out and say it. “You know,” I said, “I’m really not attracted to you. I mean, not that—”
“Isn’t that interesting,” he said coolly. “I’m really not attracted to you, either.”
“But—”
“You were there.”
We drove the rest of the way to school in a not very comfortable silence.”
― Donna Tartt

“Though not untidy, exactly, it verged on being so. Books were stacked on every available surface; the tables were cluttered papers, ashtrays, bottles of whiskey, boxes of chocolates; umbrellas and galoshes made passage difficult in the narrow hall… Camilla’s night table was littered with empty teacups, leaky pens, dead marigolds in a water glass, and at the foot of her bed was a half-played game of solitaire… everywhere I looked was some fresh oddity: an old stereopticon, arrowheads in a dusty glass case, a staghorn fern, a bird’s skeleton…”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“...And besides, is death really so terrible a thing? It seems terrible to you, because you are young, but who is to say he is not better off now than you are? Or - if death is a journey to another place - that you will not see him again?”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Well, it's not called a mystery for nothing," said Henry sourly. "Take my word for it. But one mustn't underestimate the primal appeal to lose one's self, lose it utterly. And in losing it be born to the principle of continuous life, outside the prison of mortality and time. That was attractive to me from the first, even when I knew nothing about the topic and approached it less as potential mystes than anthropologist. Ancient commentators are very circumspect about the whole thing. It was possible, with a great deal of work, to figure out some of the sacred rituals-the hymns, the sacred objects, what to wear and do and say. More difficult was the mystery itself: how did one propel oneself into such a state, what was the catalyst?" His voice was dreamy, amused. "We tried everything. Drink, drugs, prayer, even small doses of poison.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“And I feel I have something very serious and urgent to say to
you, my non-existent reader, and I feel I should say it as urgently
as if I were standing in the room with you. That life—whatever
else it is—is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That
Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we
have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we’re not always
so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway:
wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping
eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise
from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is
a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“Richard Papen: As it happened, I knew Gartrell. He was a bad painter and a vicious gossip, with a vocabulary composed almost entirely of obscenities, gutteral verbs, and the world "postmodernist.”
― Donna Tartt

“I have only to glance over my shoulder for all those years to drop away and I see it behind me again, the ravine, rising all green and black through the saplings, a picture that will never leave me.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“«Perché quella piccola voce ostinata nella nostra testa ci tormenta così?» disse , guardandoci. «Forse perché ci ricorda che siamo vivi, che siamo mortali, che abbiamo anime autonome - che, dopotutto, siamo troppo pavidi per cedere, ma che pure ci procurano un grave malessere? È una cosa terribile imparare da bambini che si è un essere separato dal resto del mondo, che niente e nessuno soffre i nostri medesimi solori di scottature alla lingua o di sbucciature alle ginocchia: che ognuno è solo con i propri acciacchi e le proprie pene, Ancor più terribile, invecchiando, scoprire che nessuna persona - non importa quanto vicina - potrà mai capirci davvero. I nostri io sono ciò che ci rende più infelici, ed è per questo che bramiamo perderli, non credere?»”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“well that's the wonderful thing about books, that's the thing that books can do that no other art form can do: when we read a great book we do internalize it, it becomes part of us; when we read a great book we put it down and we're different people.”
― Donna Tartt

“La bellezza è raramente dolce o consolatoria. Quasi l'opposto. La vera bellezza è sempre un po' inquietante.”
― Donna Tartt, Dio di illusioni

“What do you think about America?"
"Everyone always smiles so big! Well—most people. Maybe not so much you. I think it looks stupid.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“Sometimes when there's been an accident and reality is too sudden and strange to comprehend, the surreal will take over”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“you can live many lives by reading books.”
― Donna Tartt

“All of a sudden, images from every crime movie I'd ever seen began to pop into my mind—the windowless room, the harsh lights and narrow hallways, images which did not seem so much theatrical or foreign as imbued with the indelible quality of memory, of experience lived.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Things would have turned out better is she had lived. As it was, she died when I was kid;and thought everything that happened to me since then is thoroughly my own fault, still when I lost her I lost sight of any landmark that might have led me someplace happier, to some more populated or congenial life.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“Her death the dividing mark: Before and After.”
― Donna Tartt

“Psychology is a terrible a word.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“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, was consumed by a more general sense of dread, of imprisonment I within the dreary round of school and home: circumstances which, to me at least, presented sound empirical argument for gloom. 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. In short: I felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“<> continuò Julian, <>”
― Donna Tartt, Dio di illusioni

“E per quanto mi piacerebbe credere che ci sia un verità dietro l'illusione, mi sono convinto che non c'è alcuna verità dietro l'illusione. Perché, tra la "relatà" da un lato, e il punto in cui la mente va a sbattere contro la realtà, esiste uno spazio sottile, uno spicchio d'arcobaleno da cui origina la bellezza, il punto in cui due superfici molto diverse tra loro si mescolano e si confondono per procurare ciò che la vita non ci dà: e questo è lo spazio in cui tutta l'arte prende forma, e tutta la magia.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch