Donna Tartt Quotes

He looked very tired, a regard which manifested itself not in dark circles, or pallor, but a dreamy and bright-cheeked sadness.

It was a myth you couldn't function on opiates: shooting up was one thing but for someone like me-jumping at pigeons beating from the sidewalk, afflicted with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder practicall...

About Author

Donna Louise Tartt (born December 23, 1963) is an American novelist. She wrote the novels The Secret History (1992), The Little Friend (2002), and The Goldfinch (2013), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was adapted into a 2019 film of the same name. She was included in Time magazine's 2014 "100 Most Influential People" list.

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...

From the sound of it, had I stayed in California I might have ended up in a cult or at the very least practicing some weird dietary restriction.

The shame that tormented me was all the more corrosive for having no very clear origin: I didn't know why I felt so tainted, and worthless, and wrong-only that I did, and whenever I looked up from my...

What if — is more complicated than that? What if maybe opposite is true as well? Because, if bad can sometimes come from good actions—? where does it ever say, anywhere, that only bad can come from ba...

If he really wanted to be happy in the world, Horst? To have any kind of joyful or happy life? He should pay twenty grand to go back to his rapid detox place and then come here and smoke Buddha Haze a...

It's not about outward appearances but inward significance. A grandeur in the world, but not of the world, a grandeur that the world doesn't understand. That first glimpse of pure otherness, in whose...

Intentionally or no: I had extinguished a light at the heart of the world.

From the window, above the clatter of pots and the slamming of cabinets, Francis was singing, as though it was the happiest song in the world: 'We are the little black sheep who have gone astray . . ....

From his genial cursing, his infrequent shaving, the relaxed way he talked around the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, it was almost as if he were playing a character: some cool guy from a fiftie...

Not to look back or feel sad about things, that home is wherever I am.

It was a clear, black morning, encrusted with stars.

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.

Mais, vrai, J'ai trop pleure! Les aubes sont navrantes. What a sad and beautiful line that is. I'd always hoped that someday I'd be able to use it.

Birds can sing and fish can swim and I can do this.

It was heart-shaking. Glorious. Torches, dizziness, singing. Wolves howling around us and a bull bellowing in the dark. The river ran white. It was like a film in fast motion, the moon waxing and wani...

It made me think of the nice old Marimekko-clad ladies I sometimes went to see in the Ritz Tower: gravel-voiced, turban-wearing, panther-braceleted widows looking to move to Miami, their apartments fi...

And yet, whenever he started with the questions I froze stiff, as if I'd been pushed onstage in a play where I didn't know the lines.

Maybe the one had to be lost for the others to be found?