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Donna Tartt Quotes

Total quotes: 36
“Any religious ritual is arbitrary unless one is able to see past it to a deeper meaning.”
— Henry Winter, The Secret History
Tagged: Religious Moments, Core Concepts, Ritual
“Humans are winged creatures on some level, but we’re also trapped. We can fly, but we can’t.”
— Donna Tartt, Donna Tartt: 'If I'm not working, I'm not happy'
Tagged: humanity, Our Strength And Our Weaknesses, Ambivalent Humans, Our Potential Is Limitless and Unlimited
“A terrible sweetness boiled up in me. Everything, for a moment was unstable and radiant as a dream. ”
— Richard Papen, The Secret History
Tagged: Terrible Sweetness, Radiance, Life As A Dream, Dream Like Reality, Dreaming
“Where does it ever say, anywhere, that only bad can come from bad actions? Maybe sometimes— the wrong way is the right way? You can take the wrong path and it still comes out where you want to be?”
— Boris Pavlikovsky, The Goldfinch
Tagged: Tracing The Consequences of Our Actions, Good Actions Don't Always Have Good Results, Negatives Creating Postives
“I’ve come to realize that the only truths that matter to me are the ones I don’t, and can’t, understand. What’s mysterious, ambiguous, inexplicable. What doesn’t fit into a story, what doesn’t have a story.”
— Theodore Decker, The Goldfinch
Tagged: The Secret of Secrey, Mystery, The Magic of Not Understanding, Quote of the Moment
“I was fascinated by strangers, wanted to know what food they ate and what dishes they ate it from, what movies they watched and what music they listened to, wanted to look under their beds and in their secret drawers and night tables and inside the pockets of their coats.”
— Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch: A Novel (Pulitzer Prize for Fiction)
Tagged: Human Interest, Curiosity, Strangers
“As long as I am acting out of love, I feel I am doing best I know how.”
— Boris Pavlikovsky, The Goldfinch
Tagged: Love, Ethics, Rules of Living, How To Live, How A Person Should Be, Moral Compass
“For humans— trapped in biology— there was no mercy: we lived a while, we fussed around for a bit and died, we rotted in the ground like garbage.”
— Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch: A Novel(Pulitzer Prize for Fiction)
Tagged: Biological Prisons, The Body Is A Cage
“While I was still in Amsterdam, I dreamed about my mother for the first time in years.”
— Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
Tagged: first lines of books, Amsterdam
“The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we understood the gravity of our situation.”
— Donna Tartt, The Secret History
Tagged: first lines of books
“My fatal flaw is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.”
— Donna Tartt, The Secret History
Tagged: Idyllic, Idyllic Diasters, Fatal Flaw, Picturesque
“She really was older, not the glancing-eyed girl I had fallen in love with but no less beautiful for that; beautiful now in a way that less excited my senses, than tore at my very heart.”
— Donna Tartt, The Secret History
Tagged: Aging, Deep Beauty, Looks Fade (Feelings Persist)
“I’m like an astronaut or something. I’m really, really out there for a very long time. It’s like a long sea-voyage, or a polar expedition and then you come back to land.”
— Donna Tartt, Donna Tartt: 'If I'm not working, I'm not happy'
Tagged: What It Feels Like To Write A Novel, Work Processes, How People Work, Quote of the Moment
“Aethereal harmonies, impersonal, piercing, like a radio signal from Paradise.”
— Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
Tagged: Perfect Music, Signals Inside Sound
“You’d be surprised, what small, everyday things can lift us out of despair. But nobody can do it for you. You’re the one who has to watch for the open door.”
— Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
Tagged: Step by Step, One Foot In Front of Another
“But depression wasn’t the word. This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time.”
— Theodore Decker, The Goldfinch
Tagged: Depression, Emptiness, Revulsion
“Time is something which defies spring and winter, birth and decay, the good and the bad, indifferently.”
— Donna Tartt, The Secret History
Tagged: Time, Defining Time
“All my moments which were not consumed with efforts to escape the cold were absorbed with morbid Poe-like fancies. One night, in a dream, I saw my own corpse, hair stiff with ice and eyes wide open.”
— Donna Tartt, The Secret History (Vintage Contemporaries)
Tagged: what anxiety feels like, anxiety in literature, Fear, Winter, cold
“You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life”
— Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
Tagged: beauty, fascination, Art, Life, Meaning
“Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you.”
— Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
Tagged: Love, How Love Feels, Loving Too Much, Love Hurts
“If I’m not working, I’m not happy. That’s it. That’s the prerequisite for me for happiness.”
— Donna Tartt, Donna Tartt: 'If I'm not working, I'm not happy'
Tagged: Workaholic, What Makes Donna Tart Happy
“Understand, by saying God, I am merely using God as reference to long-term pattern we can’t decipher. Huge, slow-moving weather system rolling in on us from afar, blowing us randomly.”
— Boris Pavlikovsky, The Goldfinch
Tagged: Definitions of God, Fate, How Gods Move, Quote of the Moment, Theological Patterns
“The heart-shock of believing, for only a moment, that you might just have what could never be yours.”
— Theodore Decker, The Goldfinch
Tagged: Unrequited Love, Impossible Ideas
“Act of rebellion. Life: vacant, vain, intolerable. What loyalty did I owe it? None whatsoever. Why not beat Fate to the punch?”
— Theodore Decker, The Goldfinch
Tagged: Suicide
“A grandeur in the world, but not of the world, a grandeur that the world doesn’t understand.”
— Theodore Decker, The Goldfinch
Tagged: The Magic of Being Misunderstood, Being Otherworldly In The World, The Secret of Secrey
“The texture of that morning is clearer than the present.”
— Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
Tagged: The Texture of Time, Memory Textures, Memory
“His eyes were the worried blue of boyishness.”
— Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
Tagged: Blue Eyes
“The secret colored everything, like the afterglow of a dream.”
— Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
Tagged: Secret, Afterglow
“Whenever she smiled at me Heaven blew in.”
— Theodore Decker, The Goldfinch
Tagged: Love, Infatuation, Quote of the Moment
“Had anyone ever felt so lonely?”
— Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
Tagged: Alone, Sad
“The nail where your fate is liable to catch and snag.”
— James “Hobie” Hobart, The Goldfinch
Tagged: Fate, Art Hits You Where You Are
“If a painting really works down in your heart and changes the way you see, and think, and feel, you don’t think, ‘oh, I love this picture because it’s universal.’ ‘I love this painting because it speaks to all mankind.’ That’s not the reason anyone loves a piece of art. It’s a secret whisper from an alleyway. Psst, you. Hey kid. Yes you.”
— James “Hobie” Hobart, The Goldfinch
Tagged: Art, Painting, When You Find The Perfect Piece of Art, On Discovering Your Favorite Piece of Art, Artistic Ecstasy
“Because: if our secrets define 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.”
— Theodore Decker, The Goldfinch
Tagged: The Secret of Secrecy
“I was deluded, and I knew it... For the truth of it was: Pippa and I saw each other maybe twice a year; we e-mailed and texted, though with no great regularity; when she was in town we loaned each other books and went to the movies; we were friends; nothing more. My hopes for a relationship with her were wholly unreal, whereas my ongoing misery, and frustration, were an all-too-horrible reality.”
— Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
Tagged: Unrequited Love, Friends, Crush, Love, romance, Longing
“Do you remember when we studied what Plato calls telestic madness? Bakcheia? Dionysiac frenzy?’

‘Yes,’ I said, rather impatiently. It was just like Henry to bring up something like this right now.

‘Well, we decided to try to have one.’ For a moment I thought I hadn’t understood him.

‘What?’ I said.

‘I said we decided to try to have a bacchanal.’

‘Come on.’

‘We did.’

I looked at him. ‘You must be joking.’

‘No.’

‘That’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever heard.’

He shrugged.”
— Donna Tartt, The Secret History
Tagged: Funny To Nerds, Dionysus, Bacchanal, Weird Things To Say, Plato
“It’s a curiously uniform message: when in doubt, what to do? Every shrink, every career counselor, every Disney princess knows the answer: ‘Be yourself.’ ‘Follow your heart.’ Only here’s what I really, really want someone to explain to me. 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?”
— Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
Tagged: When Being Yourself Is Evil, The Pulls of the Heart
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