Donna tartt Quotes - QuotesSweet | quotesweet.com

Author: Donna Tartt
Quotes of Author: Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt _ The Goldfinch
Why did I obsess over people like this? Was it normal to fixate on strangers in this particular vivid, fevered way? I didn't think so. It was impossible to imagine some random passer-by on the street forming quite such an interest in me. And yet it was the main reason I'd gone in those houses with Tom: I was fascinated by strangers, wanted to know what food they ate and what dishes they ate it from, what movies they watched and what music they listened to, wanted to look under their beds and in their secret drawers and night tables and inside the pockets of their coats. Often I saw interesting-looking people on the street and thought about them restlessly for days, imagining their lives, making up stories about them on the subway or the crosstown bus.
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Donna Tartt _ The Goldfinch
...my head in the rainclouds, my heart in the sky."
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Donna Tartt _ The Goldfinch
. . . it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn't touch."
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Donna Tartt _ The Secret History
Well, whatever one thinks of the Roman Church, it is a worthy and powerful foe. I could accept that sort of conversion with grace. But I shall be very disappointed indeed if we lose him to the Presbyterians.
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Donna Tartt _ The Little Friend
The possible, as it was presented in her Health textbook {a mathematical progression of dating, "career," marriage, and motherhood}, did not interest Harriet. Of all the heroes on her list, the greatest of them all was Sherlock Holmes, and he wasn't even a real person. Then there was Harry Houdini. He was the master of the impossible; more importantly, for Harriet, he was a master of escape. No prison in the world could hold him: he escaped from straitjackets, from locked trunks dropped in fast rivers and from coffins buried six feet underground. And how had he done it? He wasn't afraid. Saint Joan had galloped out with the angels on her side but Houdini had mastered fear on his own. No divine aid for him; he'd taught himself the hard way how to beat back panic, the horror of suffocation and drowning and dark. Handcuffed in a locked trunk in the bottom of a river, he squandered not a heartbeat on being afraid, never buckled to the terror of the chains and the dark and the icy water; if he became lightheaded, for even a moment, if he fumbled at the breathless labor before him– somersaulting along a river-bed, head over heels– he would never come up from the water alive. A training program. This was Houdini's secret."
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Donna Tartt _ The Secret History
There is to me about this place a smell of rot, the smell of rot that ripe fruit makes. Nowhere, ever, have the hideous mechanics of birth and copulation and death -those monstrous upheavals of life that the Greeks call miasma, defilement- been so brutal or been painted up to look so pretty; have so many people put so much faith in lies and mutability and death death death.
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Donna Tartt _ The Goldfinch
More than anything I was relieved that in my unfamiliar babbling-and-wanting-to-talk state I'd stopped myself from blurting the thing I'd never said, even though it was something we both knew well enough without me saying out loud to him in the street - which was, of course, I love you."
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Donna Tartt _ The Goldfinch
And-maybe it's ridiculous to go on in this vein, although it doesn't matter since no one's ever going to see this-but does it make any sense at all to know that it ends badly for all of us, even the happiest of us, and that we all lose everything that matters in the end-and yet to know as well, despite all this, as cruelly as the game is stacked, that it's possible to play it with a kind of joy?
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Donna Tartt _ The Secret History
The dead appear to us in dreams, said Julian, because that's the only way they can make us see them; what we see is only a projection, beamed from a great distance, light shining at us from a dead star
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Donna Tartt _ The Goldfinch
I would be less frightened of death {not just my own death but Welty's death, Andy's death, Death in general} if I thought a familiar person came to meet us at the door,"
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Donna Tartt _ The Goldfinch
We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others, that in the end, we become disguised to ourselves. -FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD"
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Donna Tartt _ The Secret History
We don't like to admit it," said Julian, "but the idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than anything. All truly civilized people - the ancients no less than us - have civilized themselves through the willful repression of the old, animal self. Are we, in this room, really very different from the Greeks and the Romans? Obsessed with duty, piety, loyalty, sacrifice? All those things which are to modern tastes so chilling?
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