626 Quotes by Donna Tartt

But while I have never considered myself a very good person, neither can I bring myself to believe that I am spectacularly bad one. Perhaps it’s simply impossible to think of oneself in such a way.

Beauty is terror.

When I’m writing, I am concentrating almost wholly on concrete detail: the color a room is painted, the way a drop of water rolls off a wet leaf after a rain.

Even if you don’t like Poe – he invented the detective story. And science fiction. In essence, he invented a huge part of the twentieth century.

Anything is grand if it’s done on a large enough scale.

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.

Nihil sub sole novum, I thought as I walked back down the hall to my room. Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.

Because it is dangerous to ignore the existence of the irrational. The more cultivated a person is, the more intelligent, the more repressed, then the more he needs some method of channeling the primitive impulses he’s worked so hard to subdue. Otherwise those powerful old forces will mass and strengthen until they are violent enough to break free, more violent for the delay, often strong enough to sweep the will away entirely.

For weeks, I’d been frozen, sealed-off; now, in the shower, I would turn up the water as hard as it would go and howl, silently. Everything was raw and painful and confusing and wrong and yet it was as if I’d been dragged from freezing water through a break in the ice, into sun and blazing cold.