626 Quotes by Donna Tartt

Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.

The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.

Because, here’s the truth: life is catastrophe.

She cast a charmed theatrical light about her so that to see anything through her eyes was to see it in brighter colors than ordinary.

Even if you need, and want, a second opinion, it can be dangerous to have people telling you what they think you ought to add, or cut, before you’ve even finished telling your story. One loses heart; one loses energy and interest. Or at least I do.

Taking on challenging projects is the way that one grows and extends one’s range as a writer, one’s technical command, so I consider the time well-spent.

Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us.

He was a bad painter and a vicious gossip, with a vocabulary composed almost entirely of obscenities, guttural verbs, and the word “postmodernist.

Because: if our secret defines us, as opposed to the face we show the world: then the painting was the secret that raised me above the surface of life and enabled me to know who I am. And it’s there: in my notebooks, every page, even though it’s not. Dream and magic, magic and delirium. The Unified Field Theory. A secret about a secret.