Donna Tartt
Donna Tartt
Donna Tarttis an American writer and author of the novels The Secret History, The Little Friend, and The Goldfinch. Tartt won the WH Smith Literary Award for The Little Friend in 2003 and the Pulitzer Prizefor The Goldfinch in 2014 and she was named in the TIME 100: The 100 Most Influential People in 2014...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth23 December 1963
CityGreenwood, MS
CountryUnited States of America
grief intimate objects
...with a grief no less sharp for not being intimate with its object.
done enough scales
Anything is grand if it's done on a large enough scale.
lying smell people
There is to me about this place a smell of rot, the smell of rot that ripe fruit makes. Nowhere, ever, have the hideous mechanics of birth and copulation and death -those monstrous upheavals of life that the Greeks call miasma, defilement- been so brutal or been painted up to look so pretty; have so many people put so much faith in lies and mutability and death death death.
lasts moments said
Are you happy here?" I said at last. He considered this for a moment. "Not particularly," he said. "But you're not very happy where you are, either.
being-yourself littles appeals
After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great
reality grain
Beauty alters the grain of reality,
sight might landmarks
…still when I lost her, I lost sight of any landmark that might have led me someplace happier, to some more populated or congenial life…
rain writing color
When I'm writing, I am concentrating almost wholly on concrete detail: the color a room is painted, the way a drop of water rolls off a wet leaf after a rain.
blood color land
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.
people trouble feels
The trouble is when people read about authors, they don't feel compelled to read the authors' work.
ideas literature students
The novel is about five students of classics who are studying with a classics professor, and they take the ideas of the things that they're learning from him a bit too seriously, with terrible consequences.
wall loneliness yellow
What's mysterious, ambiguous, inexplicable. What doesn't fit into a story, what doesn't have a story. Glint of brightness on a barely-there chain. Patch of sunlight on a yellow wall. The loneliness that separates every living creature from every other living creature. Sorrow inseparable from joy.
eerie long perspective
I began to see new buildings, too, which were connected by futuristic walkways lit from beneath. Long, cool perspectives of modern architecture, rising phosphorescent and eerie from the rubble.
knowing never-quit gone
Clearly something had gone wrong, badly, only I wasn't quite sure what—apart from knowing that I was responsible somehow, in the generalized miasma of shame and unworthiness and being-a-burden that never quite left me.