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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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Donna Tartt
Age: 60
Born: 1963
Born: December 23
Novelist
Writer
Greenwood
Mississippi
Donna Louise Tartt
Book
Loves
First
Childhood
Really
Inside
Way
Loved
Books
Internalized
Read
Aquariums
Often
Essential
Firsts
Essentials

More quotes by Donna Tartt

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If he had his wits about him Bunny would surely keep his mouth shut but now, with his subconscious mind knocked loose from its perch and flapping in the hollow corridors of his skull as erratically as a bat, there was no way to be sure of anything he might do.
Donna Tartt
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I'd rather write one good book than ten mediocre ones.
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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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 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
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One likes to think there's something in it, that old platitude amor vincit omnia. But if I've learned one thing in my short sad life, it is that that particular platitude is a lie. Love doesn't conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.
Donna Tartt
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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
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Love doesn't conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.
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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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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I really do work in solitude.
Donna Tartt
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A 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
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Sometimes it's about playing a poor hand well.
Donna Tartt
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Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us.
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
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There's an expectation these days that novels - like any other consumer product - should be made on a production line, with one dropping from the conveyor belt every couple of years.
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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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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Criticism at the wrong time, even if it's legitimate criticism, can be seriously damaging and make the writer lose faith in what he's doing. It's the timing that's all-important.
Donna Tartt
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I think it's hard to write about children and to have an idea of innocence.
Donna Tartt
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After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great
Donna Tartt