When we are sad—at least I am like this—it can be comforting to cling to familiar objects, to the things that don't change.

— Donna Tartt

When we are sad...it can be comforting to cling to familiar objects, to things that don't change.

— Donna Tartt

Who knew it was in my power to make anyone so happy? Or that I could ever be so happy myself? My moods were a slingshot; after being locked-down and anesthetized for years my heart was zinging and slamming itself around like a bee under a glass, everything bright, sharp, confusing, wrong - but it was a clean pain as opposed to the dull misery that had plagued me for years under the drugs like a rotten tooth, the sick dirty ache of something spoiled. The clarity was exhilarating; it was as if I'd removed a pair of smudged-up glasses that fuzzed everything I saw. All summer long I had been practically delirious: tingling, daffy, energized, running on gin and shrimp cocktail and the invigorating shock of tennis balls. And all I could think was Kinsey, Kinsey, Kinsey!

— Donna Tartt

Who knew, or cared, the names of the Turks who blew the roof off the Parthenon? The mullahs who had ordered the destruction of the Buddhas at Damian? Yet living or dead: their acts stood. It was the worst kind of immortality. Intentionally or no: I had extinguished a light at the heart of the world.

— Donna Tartt

Why am I made the way I am? Why do I care about all the wrong things, and nothing at all for the right ones? Or, to tip it another way: how can I see clearly that everything I love or care about is illusion, and yet – for me, anyway – all that’s worth living for lies in that charm 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 want what's good for us or what's good for other people. We don't get to choose the people we are.

— Donna Tartt

Why am I made the way I am? Why do I care about all the wrong things, and nothing at all for the right ones? Or, to tip it another way: how can I see so clearly that everything I love or care about is illusion, and yet--for me, anyway--all that's worth living for lies in that charm?

— Donna Tartt

Why does that obstinate little voice in our heads torment us so?' he said, looking round the table. 'Could it be because it reminds us 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?

— Donna Tartt

...with a grief no less sharp for not being intimate with its object.

— Donna Tartt

Yet my longing for her was like a bad cold that had hung on for years despite my conviction that I was sure to get over it at any moment.

— Donna Tartt

You could study the connections for years and never work it out-it was all about things coming together, things falling apart, time warp, my mother standing out in front of the museum when time flickered and the light went funny, uncertainties hovering on the edge of a vast brightness. The stray chance that might, or might not, change everything.

— Donna Tartt