Amber

“I met her my first year of college, and was initially attracted to her because she seemed an intelligent, brooding malcontent like myself; but after about a month, during which time she’d firmly glued herself to me, I began to realize, with some little horror, that she was nothing more than a lowbrow, pop-psychology version of Sylvia Plath.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“The more cultivated a person is, the more intelligent, the more repressed, then the more he needs some method of channeling the primitive impulses he’s worked so hard to subdue. Otherwise those powerful old forces will mass and strengthen until they are violent enough to break free, more violent for the delay, often strong enough to sweep the will away entirely.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“It does not do to be frightened of things about which you know nothing,” he said. “You are like children. Afraid of the dark.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“I suppose there is a certain crucial interval in everyone’s life when character is fixed forever;”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History