626 Quotes by Donna Tartt

Though Julian could be marvelously kind in difficult circumstances of all sorts, I sometimes got the feeling that he was less pleased by kindness itself than by the elegance of the gesture.

Death is the mother of beauty

Death is the mother of beauty""And what is beauty?""Terror""Well said. Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary, genuine beauty is always quite alarming

Out in the country it was not uncommon to discover that she had slipped away, alone, out to the lake, maybe, or down to the cellar, where once I found her sitting in the big marooned sleigh, reading, her fur coat thrown over her knees. Things would have been terrible strange and unbalanced without her. She was the Queen who finished out the suit of dark Jacks, dark King, and Joker.

Yet my longing for her was like a bad cold that had hung on for years despite my conviction that I was sure to get over it at any moment.

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 books I was swamped by slimy waters rushing in from all sides.

And beauty is terror,' said Julian, 'then what is desire? We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it?''To live,' said Camilla.'To live forever,' said Bunny, chin cupped in palm.

La belleza es terror. Temblamos ante todo lo que llamamos bello.

That surge of power and delight, of confidence, of control. That sudden sense of the richness of the world. Its infinite possibility.