quotes by Donna Tartt

"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)

"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)

"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 that 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)

"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 (The Little Friend)

"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)