Book Quotes by Donna Tartt

Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.

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.

It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.

There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty - unless she is wed to something more meaningful - is always superficial.

When you feel homesick, just look up. Because the moon is the same wherever you go.

Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you.

I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.

Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.

Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us.

That life - whatever else it is - is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, 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.