Skip to content

Life Quotes by Donna Tartt

47 Life quotes by Donna Tartt

All Life quotes Donna Tartt’s page

A chemical change of the spirit leaves the narrator feeling drained, as Tartt describes. She points out that everything fades, yet beautiful moments can connect us to a larger truth. Obsessively watching the same paintings may seem comforting, but it also risks slipping into madness.

Rate this collection: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ No ratings yet

In short: I felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way.

Image

“He’s telling you that living things don’t last—it’s all temporary. Death in life.”

Image

Everything takes me longer than I expect. It's the sad truth about life

Image

Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction

Image

But romantic vision can also lead one away from certain very hard, ugly truths about life that are important to know.

Image

“I’d be perfectly happy if I could sit looking at the same half dozen paintings for the rest of my life. I…

Image

“What you want is to live and be happy in the world is a woman (or man) who has her (his) own…

Image

Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?

Image

“crazy,” she’d said, “but I’d be perfectly happy if I could sit looking at the same half dozen paintings for the rest…

Image

I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other.…

Image

“How had I fetched up into this strange new life, where drunk foreigners shouted around me in the night, and all my…

Image

“(...) and how precious was life that two such friends, in so big world, should find each other again after so great separation?”

Image

“It was as if I’d suffered a chemical change of the spirit: as if the acid balance of my psyche had shifted…

Image

“when what she needed was something concrete, some small final memory to slip its hand in hers and accompany her—sightless now, stumbling—through…

Image

“between ‘reality’ on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there’s a middle zone, a rainbow edge where…

Image

“I don’t care what anyone says or how often or winningly they say it: no one will ever, ever be able to…

Image

What's mysterious, ambiguous, inexplicable. What doesn't fit into a story, what doesn't have a story. Glint of brightness on a barely-there chain.…

Image

“Because I don’t care what anyone says or how often or winningly they say it: no one will ever, ever be able…

Image

“Because it is dangerous to ignore the existence of the irrational. The more cultivated a person is, the more intelligent, the more…

Image

When I looked at the painting I felt the same convergence on a single point: a flickering sun-struck instance that existed now…

Image

“...the thought of returning to any kind of normal routine seemed disloyal, wrong. It kept being a shock every time I remembered…

Image

That life - whatever else it is - is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death)…

Image

“It seemed my whole life was composed of these disjointed fractions of time, hanging around in one public place and then another,…

Image

“And I'm hoping there's some larger truth about suffering here, or at least my understanding of it - although I've come to…

Image

“Because it is dangerous to ignore the existence of the irrational. The more cultivated a person is, the more intelligent, the more…

Image

“Whenever you see flies or insects in a still life—a wilted petal, a black spot on the apple—the painter is giving you…

Image

“It's not as if we're running a hospital for sick children down here, let's put it that way. Where's the nobility in…

Image

“Well the Dutch invented the microscope," she said. "They were jewellers, grinders of lenses. The want it all as detailed as possible…

Image

“Because I don’t care what anyone says or how often or winningly they say it: no one will ever, ever be able…

Image

“Whatever teaches us to talk to ourselves is important: whatever teaches us to sing ourselves out of despair. But the painting has…

Image

“And, increasingly, I find myself fixing on that refusal to pull back. Because I don’t care what anyone says or how often…

Image

“And, increasingly, I find myself fixing on that refusal to pull back. Because I don’t care what anyone says or how often…

Image

“Where’s the nobility in patching up a bunch of old tables and chairs? Corrosive to the soul, quite possibly. I’ve seen too…

Image

“Well—I have to say I personally have never drawn such a sharp line between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ as you. For me: that…

Image

“with real greatness, there’s a jolt at the end of the wire. It doesn’t matter how often you grab hold of the…

Image

One likes to think there's something in it, that old platitude amor vincit omnia. But if I've learned one thing in my…

Image

“Five minutes before Julian arrived, they might be slouched in the living room -- curtains drawn, dinner simmering on chafing dishes in…

Image

“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…

Image

“The problem (as I’d learned, repeatedly) was that thirty-six hours in, with your body in full revolt, and the remainder of your…

Image

“Here is my experience. Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you. What…

Image

Other authors on Life

More by Donna Tartt

I hope we're all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?

And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them…

And the flavor of Pippa's kiss--bittersweet and strange--stayed with me all the way back uptown, swaying and sleepy as I sailed home on the…

“The world won't come to me...so I must go to it.”

There's an expectation these days that novels - like any other consumer product - should be made on a production line, with one dropping…

“A month or two before, I would have been appalled at the idea of any murder at all. But that Sunday afternoon, as I…

Well, I think storytellers have always found murder a fascinating device.

Always remember, the person we’re really working for is the person who’s restoring the piece a hundred years from now. He’s the one we…

“The silence between us was happy and strange, connected by the cord and the icy voices thinly echoing. “You don’t have to talk,” she…

“It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from all the world, that no one and…

“You didn’t meet many people who moved freely through the world with such a vigorous contempt for it and at the same time such…

“maybe that’s what’s waiting for us at the end of the journey, a majesty unimaginable until the very moment we find ourselves walking through…

“lights and moods and seasons was to see it a thousand different ways and to keep it shut in the dark—a thing made of…

A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don’t get to choose our own hearts. We can’t make ourselves…

“Upon meeting Julian Morrow, one has the impression that he is a man of extraordinary sympathy and warmth. But what you call his 'Asiatic…