"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)

"Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming."
— Donna Tartt (The Secret History)

"Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs."
— Donna Tartt (The Secret History)

"Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it."
— Donna Tartt (The Secret History)

"Could it be because it reminds u that we are alive, of our mortality, of our individual souls- which, after all, we are too afraid to surrender but yet make us feel more miserable than any other thing? But isn't it also pain that often makes us most aware of self? It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one's burned tongues and skinned knees, that one's aches and pains are all one’s own. Even more terrible, as we grow old, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us. Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that's why we're so anxious to lose them, don't you think?"
— Donna Tartt (The Secret History)

"If I had grown up in that house I couldn't have loved it more, couldn't have been more familiar with the creak of the swing, or the pattern of the clematis vines on the trellis, or the velvety swell of land as it faded to gray on the horizon . . . . The very colors of the place had seeped into my blood."
— Donna Tartt (The Secret History)

"I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell."
— Donna Tartt (The Secret History)

"Even if it meant that she had failed, she was glad. And if what she'd wanted had been impossible from the start, still there was a certain lonely comfort in the fact that she'd known it was impossible and had gone ahead and done it anyway."
— Donna Tartt (The Little Friend)

"I suppose the shock of recognition is one of the nastiest shocks of all."
— Donna Tartt (The Secret History)

"The first duty of the novelist is to entertain. It is a moral duty. People who read your books are sick, sad, traveling, in the hospital waiting room while someone is dying. Books are written by the alone for the alone"
— Donna Tartt

"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.""
— Donna Tartt

"For if the modern mind is whimsical and discursive, the classical mind is narrow, unhesitating, relentless. It is not a quality of intelligence that one encounters frequently these days. But though I can digress with the best of them, I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive. "
— Donna Tartt (The Secret History)

"There were plenty of girls at school prettier than Harriet, and nicer. But none of them were as smart, or as brave. How could he make her love him, make her notice when he wasn't there?"
— Donna Tartt

"But Robin: their dear little Robs. More than ten years later, his death remained an agony; there was no glossing any detail; its horror was not subject to repair or permutation by any of the narrative devices that the Cleves knew. And—since this willful amnesia had kept Robin's death from being translated into that sweet old family vernacular which smoothed even the bitterest mysteries into comfortable, comprehensible form—the memory of that day's events had a chaotic, fragmented quality, bright mirrorshards of nightmare which flared at the smell of wisteria, the creaking of a clothes-line, a certain stormy cast of spring light."
— Donna Tartt (The Little Friend)

"... I realized that the childish impression I had always had of my father, as Just Lawgiver, was entirely wrong. We were utterly dependent on this man, who was not only deluded and ignorant, but incompetent in every way. What was more, I knew that my mother was incapable of standing up to him. It was like walking into the cockpit of an airplane and finding the pilot and co-pilot passed out drunk in their seats. And standing outside the Lyceum, I was struck with a black, incredulous horror, which in fact was not at all unlike the horror I had felt at twelve, sitting on a bar stool in our sunny little kitchen in Plano. Who is in control here? I thought, dismayed. Who is flying this plane?"
— Donna Tartt (The Secret History)

"Twelve years after Robin's death, no one knew any more about how he had ended up hanged from a tree in his own yard than they had on the day it happened."
— Donna Tartt

"...[English] fails me utterly when I attempt to describe what I love about Greek, that language innocent of all quirks and cranks; a language obsessed with action, and with the joy of seeing action multiply from action, action marching relentlessly ahead and with yet more actions filing in from either side to fall into neat step at the rear, in a long straight rank of cause and effect toward what will be inevitable, the only possible end."
— Donna Tartt (The Secret History)

"There were plenty of girls at school prettier than Harriet, and nicer. But none of them were as smart, or as brave. (...) How could he make her love him, make het notice when he wasn't there?"
— Donna Tartt