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Beauty alters the grain of reality.

Donna Tartt

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Donna Tartt
Age: 60
Born: 1963
Born: December 23
Novelist
Writer
Greenwood
Mississippi
Donna Louise Tartt
Alters
Grain
Beauty
Reality

More quotes by Donna Tartt

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I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive.
Donna Tartt
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When you feel homesick,’ he said, ‘just look up. Because the moon is the same wherever you go.
Donna Tartt
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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
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My novels aren't really generated by a single conceptual spark it's more a process of many different elements that come together unexpectedly over a long period of time.
Donna Tartt
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It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.
Donna Tartt
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Every new event—everything I did for the rest of my life—would only separate us more and more: days she was no longer a part of, an ever-growing distance between us. Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away.
Donna Tartt
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Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you.
Donna Tartt
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Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.
Donna Tartt
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All those layers of silence upon silence.
Donna Tartt
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To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole.
Donna Tartt
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Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction
Donna Tartt
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But sometimes, unexpectedly, grief pounded over me in waves that left me gasping and when the waves washed back, I found myself looking out over a brackish wreck which was illumined in a light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead.
Donna Tartt
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Even if you need, and want, a second opinion, it can be dangerous to have people telling you what they think you ought to add, or cut, before you've even finished telling your story. One loses heart one loses energy and interest. Or at least I do.
Donna Tartt
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Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only—if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn’t it? And isn’t the whole point of things—beautiful things—that they connect you to some larger beauty?
Donna Tartt
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I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.
Donna Tartt
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The Little Friend is a long book. It's also completely different from my first novel: different landscape, different characters, different use of language and diction, different approach to story.
Donna Tartt
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The books I loved in childhood - the first loves - I’ve read so often that I’ve internalized them in some really essential way: they are more inside me now than out.
Donna Tartt
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Love doesn't conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.
Donna Tartt
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And the flavor of Pippa's kiss--bittersweet and strange--stayed with me all the way back uptown, swaying and sleepy as I sailed home on the bus, melting with sorrow and loveliness, a starry ache that lifted me up above the windswept city like a kite: my head in the rainclouds, my heart in the sky.
Donna Tartt
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When I looked at the painting I felt the same convergence on a single point: a flickering sun-struck instance that existed now and forever. Only occasionally did I notice the chain on the finch's ankle, or think what a cruel life for a little living creature - fluttering briefly, forced always to land in the same hopeless place.
Donna Tartt