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Donna Tartt Quotes

Total quotes: 17
“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
“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
“Does such a thing as ‘the fatal flaw,’ that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?”
— Donna Tartt, The Secret History
Tagged: first lines of books, Fatal Flaw
“I’d had an old Brian Eno song running through my head (‘In New Delhi / And Hong Kong / They all know that it won’t be long …’), I now had to sing it to myself each trip up or down the stairs.”
— Donna Tartt, The Secret History
Tagged: Brian Eno, References to Songs In Literature and Books
“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
“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
“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
“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
“Morning light can make the most vulgar things tolerable.”
— Henry Winter, The Secret History
Tagged: The Different Personalities of Light, Morning Light, Good Morning
“Beauty is terror.”
— Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
Tagged: Fear, beauty, Philosophy, Life, one perfect sentence, 107 Of The Greatest Single Sentences In Literature, Perfect Sentences
“One’s thought patterns become different, he said, when forced into the confines of a rigid and unfamiliar tongue. Certain common ideas become inexpressible; other, previously undreamt-of ones spring to life, finding miraculous new articulation. By necessity, I suppose, it is difficult for me to explain in English exactly what I mean. I can only say that an incendium is in its nature entirely different from the feu with which a Frenchman lights his cigarette, and both are very different from the stark, inhuman pur that the Greeks knew, the pur that roared from the towers of Ilion or leapt and screamed on that desolate, windy beach, from the funeral pyre of Patroklos.”
— Richard Papen, The Secret History
Tagged: Breaking Language, Thought Patterns
“It’s funny, but thinking back on it now, I realize that this particular point in time, as I stood there blinking in the deserted hall, was the one point at which I might have chosen to do something very different from what I actually did. But of course I didn’t see this crucial moment then for what it was; I suppose we never do. Instead, I only yawned, and shook myself from the momentary daze that had come upon me, and went on my way down the stairs.”
— Richard Papen, The Secret History
Tagged: Definitive Moments, Making Decisions
“The sun came suddenly from behind a rain cloud, flooding the room with glorious light that wavered on the walls like water. Camilla’s face burst into glowing bloom. A terrible sweetness boiled up in me. Everything, for a moment—mirror, ceiling, floor—was unstable and radiant as a dream. I felt a fierce, nearly irresistible desire to seize Camilla by her bruised wrist, twist her arm behind her back until she cried out, throw her on my bed: strangle her, rape her, I don’t know what. And then the cloud passed over the sun again, and the life went out of everything.”
— Richard Papen, The Secret History
Tagged: Definitive Moments, Descriptions of Perfect Love Ecstasy
“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
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