626 Quotes by Donna Tartt

I suppose there is a certain crucial interval in everyone's life when character is fixed forever.

At home, my mother had known how to suffocate my dad's anger by growing silent, a low, unwavering flame of contempt that sucked all the oxygen out of the room and made everything he said and did seem ridiculous.

And your point is―?""My point is like, democracy is excuse for any fucking thing. Violence ...greed ...stupidity... anything is ok if Americans do it. Right? Am I right?""You really can't shut up, can you?

What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can’t be trusted—? What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight towards a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster?

That Mossberg," Boris said to me, accepting the bottle passed over the front seat. "Evil dirty thing. Sawed off--? sprays pellets here to Hamburg. Aim it way the fuck away from everyone and still you will hit half the people in the room.

What about school then? Favorite subjects?”“History, I guess. English too,” I said when he didn’t answer. “But English is going to be really boring for the next six weeks―we stopped doing literature and went back to the grammar book and now we’re diagramming sentences.

I sometimes get the feeling that he was less pleased by kindness itself than by the elegance of the gesture.

Maybe that's why I tend to equate physical beauty with qualities with which it has absolutely nothing to do. I see a pretty mouth or a moody pair of eyes and imagine all sorts of deep affinities, private kinships. Never mind that half a dozen jerks are clustered round the same person, just because they've been duped by the same pair of eyes.

You had to hand it to her: she was as cool as dammit.