Sarah > Sarah's Quotes

“Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones that I did not.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“There are such things as ghosts. People everywhere have always known that. And we believe in them every bit as much as Homer did. Only now, we call them by different names. Memory. The unconscious.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“In short: I felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Love doesn't conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“All those layers of silence upon silence.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it?” “To live,” said Camilla. “To live forever,”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“I suppose the shock of recognition is one of the nastiest shocks of all.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Are you always up this early?' I asked him.
'Almost always,' he said without looking up. 'It's beautiful here, but morning light can make the most vulgar things tolerable.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from all 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 older, 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...”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“And I know I said earlier that he was perfect but he wasn’t perfect, far from it; he could be silly and vain and remote and often cruel and still we loved him, in spite of, because.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“I suppose there is a certain crucial interval in everyone’s life when character is fixed forever;”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Sometimes, when there’s been an accident and reality is too sudden and strange to comprehend, the surreal will take over. Action slows to a dreamlike glide, frame by frame; the motion of a hand, a sentence spoken, fills an eternity.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Sometimes when I saw him at a distance – fists in pockets, whistling, bobbing along with his springy old walk – I would have a strong pang of affection mixed with regret. I forgave him, a hundred times over, and never on the basis of anything more than this: a look, a gesture, a certain tilt of his head.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. That night I wrote in my journal: “Trees are schizophrenic now and beginning to lose control, enraged with the shock of their fiery new colors. Someone—was it van Gogh?—said that orange is the color of insanity. Beauty is terror. We want to be devoured by it, to hide ourselves in that fire which refines us.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“but it was excruciating to emerge from my eerie submarine existence into this harsh stampede of noise and light.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“But even that day, there on the porch, with Charles beside me and the smell of wood smoke in the air, it had the quality of a memory; there it was, before my eyes, and yet too beautiful to believe.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Before, I was paralyzed, though I didn’t really know it,” he said. “It was because I thought too much, lived too much in the mind. It was hard to make decisions. I felt immobilized.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“And always, always, that same toast. Live forever.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“I was confused by this sudden glare of attention; it was as if the characters in a favorite painting, absorbed in their own concerns, had looked up out of the canvas and spoken to me.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“I was as depressed as I have ever been in my life.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“It was like waking from a nightmare to a worse nightmare.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great. To escape the cognitive mode of experience, to transcend the accident of one's moment of being.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“my own fatal tendency to try to make interesting people good. And”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“I see so little of you these days, Richard,” he said. “I feel that you’re becoming just a shadow in my life.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“I have only to glance over my shoulder for all those years to drop away and I see it behind me again, the ravine, rising all green and black through the saplings, a picture that will never leave me.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“I slept all day, face down in the pillow, a comfortable dead-man's float only remotely disturbed by a chill undertow of reality—talk, footsteps, slamming doors—which threaded fitfully through the dark, blood-warm waters of dream.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“But while I have never considered myself a very good person, neither can I bring myself to believe that I am spectacularly bad one. Perhaps it's simply impossible to think of oneself in such a way.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History