626 Quotes by Donna Tartt

Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away.

Be still, O little one, for I am Death. Another cobra had said that, in something else by Kipling. The cobras in his stories were heartless but they spoke beautifully, like wicked kings in the Old Testament.

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.

There’s a big anti-intellectual strain in the American south, and there always has been. We’re not big on thought.

I never realized, you know, how much we rely on appearances,” he said. “It’s not that we’re so smart, it’s just that we don’t look like we did it. We might as well be a bunch of Sunday-school teachers as far as everyone else is concerned. But these guys won’t be taken in by that.

They turned up the volume of the inner monologue, magnified qualities already present to great excess, made people so much themselves that they couldn’t stand it. “And how can we lose this maddening.

You are – all your experience just kind of accumulates, and the novel takes a richness of its own simply because it has the weight of all those years that one’s put into it.

It’s a terrible thing, what we did,” said Francis abruptly. “I mean, this man was not Voltaire we killed. But still. It’s a shame. I feel bad about it.

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.