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Book: The Goldfinch
Quotes of Book: The Goldfinch
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  1. 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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  2. Donna Tartt _ The Goldfinch

    ...my head in the rainclouds, my heart in the sky."
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  3. Donna Tartt _ The Goldfinch

    . . . it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn't touch."
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  4. 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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  5. 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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  6. 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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  7. 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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  8. Donna Tartt _ The Goldfinch

    For humans-trapped in biology-there was no mercy: we lived a while, we fussed around for a bit and died, we rotted in the ground like garbage. Time destroyed us all soon enough. But to destroy, or lose, a deathless thing-to break bonds stronger than the temporal-was a metaphysical uncoupling all its own, a startling new flavor of despair."
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  9. Donna Tartt _ The Goldfinch

    ONE SUNDAY MORNING, I climbed up to the light from a weighty and complicated dream, nothing of it left but a ringing in my ears and the ache of something slipped from my grasp and fallen into a crevasse where I would not see it again. Yet somehow-in the midst of this profound sinking, snapped threads, fragments lost and untrackable-a sentence stood out, ticking across the darkness like a news crawler at the bottom of a TV screen:"
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  10. Donna Tartt _ The Goldfinch

    Mine, mine. Fear, idolatry, hoarding. The delight and terror of the fetishist.
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  11. Donna Tartt _ The Goldfinch

    beauty alters the grain of reality. And I keep thinking too of the more conventional wisdom: namely, that the pursuit of pure beauty is a trap, a fast track to bitterness and sorrow, that beauty has to be wedded to something more meaningful.Only what is that thing? Why am I made the way I am? Why do I care about all the wrong things, and nothing at all for the right ones? Or, to tip it another way: how can I see so clearly that everything I love or care about is illusion, and yet-for me, anyway-all that's worth living for lies in that charm?
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  12. Donna Tartt _ The Goldfinch

    Well the Dutch invented the microscope," she said. "They were jewellers, grinders of lenses. The want it all as detailed as possible because even the tiniest things mean something. Whenever you see flies or insects in a still life- a wilted petal, a black spot on the apple- the painter is giving you a secret message. He's telling you that living things don't last- it's all temporary. Death in life. That's why they're called natures mortes. Maybe you don't see it at first with all the beauty and bloom, the little speck of rot. But if you look closer- there it is."
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