Donna Tartt Quotes

It's not about outward appearances but inward significance. A grandeur in the world, but not of the world, a grandeur that the world doesn't understand. That first glimpse of pure otherness, in whose presence you bloom out and out and out.

A self one does not want. A heart one cannot help.

But despite the gloss and sparkle of the job (champagne breakfasts, gift bags from Bergdorf's) the hours were long and there was a hollowness at the heart of it that-I knew-made her sad.

I believe having a great diversity of teachers is harmful and confusing for a young mind, in the same way I believe that it is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially

I believehaving a great diversity of teachers is harmful and confusing for a young mind, in the same way I believe that it is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially

Because - the line of beauty is the line of beauty. It doesn’t matter if it’s been through the Xerox machine a hundred times.

Beauty alters the grain of reality.

...real age, as I came to see from the genuine pieces that passed through my hands, was variable, crooked, capricious, singing here and sullen there, warm asymmetrical streaks on a rosewood cabinet from where a slant of sun had struck it while the other side was as dark as the day it was cut.

...the line of beauty is the line of beauty. It doesn't matter if it's been through the Xerox machine a hundred times.

Fate is cruel but maybe not random. Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn't mean we have to bow and gravel to it.

War? One can lose oneself in the joy of battle, in fighting for a glorious cause, but there are not many glorious causes for which to fight these days.

I remember a story I read once, a soldier, was it at Shiloh? He was talking to me but not with his whole attention. Gettysburg? a soldier so mad with shock that he started burying birds and squirrels on the battlefield. You had lot of little things killed too, in the crossfire, little animals. Many tiny graves. p128

Minie balls and repeating rifles. That was why the body count was so high. We had trench warfare in America way before WW1. p128

...as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn't touch.

First rule of restorations. Never do what you can’t undo.

Because, between ‘reality’ on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there’s a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic.

("It's crazy," she'd said, "but I'd be perfectly happy if I could sit looking at the same half dozen paintings for the rest of my life. I can't think of a better way to go insane.")

. . . it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn't touch.

[art] those images that strike the heart and set it blooming like a flower, images that open up some much, much larger beauty that you can spend your whole life looking for and never find.

The dead appear to us in dreams because that's the only way they can make us see them; what we see is only a projection, beamed from a great distance, light shining at us from a dead star...

Richard Papen: As it happened, I knew Gartrell. He was a bad painter and a vicious gossip, with a vocabulary composed almost entirely of obscenities, gutteral verbs, and the world "postmodernist.