Carole Gene

“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

“In my own humorless state I failed to see anything except what I construed as certain tragic similarities between Gatsby and myself.”
― Donna Tartt

“Fascination with horses predated every other single thing I knew. Before I was a mother, before I was a writer, before I knew the facts of life, before I was a schoolgirl, before I learned to read, I wanted a horse.”
― Jane Smiley, A Year at the Races: Reflections on Horses, Humans, Love, Money, and Luck

“I am gifted at blending myself into any given milieu—you've never seen such a typical California teenager as I was, nor such a dissolute and callous pre-med student—but somehow despite my efforts, I am never able to blend myself in entirely and remain in some respects quite distinct from my surroundings, in the same way that a green chameleon remains a distinct entity from the leaf upon which it sits, no matter how perfectly it has approximated the the subtleties of the particular shade.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History