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Donna Tartt

72 quotesFiction Writer · Born Dec 23, 1963 · American · Female

Donna Tartt (born December 23, 1963) is an American writer, the author of the novels The Secret History (1992), The Little Friend (2002), and The Goldfinch (2013). Tartt won the WH Smith Literary Award for The Little Friend in 2003 and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for The Goldfinch in 2014. She was included in the list of the "100 Most Influential People" compiled by Time magazine in 2014. 2Life and career Tartt was born in Greenwood, Mississippi, in the Mississippi Delta, and raised in the nearby town of Grenada. She enrolled in the University of Mississippi in 1981, and her writing caught the attention of Willie Morris when she was a freshman. Following a recommendation from Morris, Barry Hannah, then an Ole Miss writer in residence, admitted the eighteen-year-old Tartt into his graduate course on the short story. "She was deeply literary," said Hannah. "Just a rare genius, really. A literary star." Following the suggestion of Morris and others, she transferred to Bennington College in 1982, where she was friends with fellow students Bret Easton Ellis, Jill Eisenstadt, and Jonathan Lethem. At Bennington she studied classics with Claude Frederick

All Quote of the Moment (8)Love (8)beauty (4)first lines of books (4)Art (3)Fate (3)Definitive Moments (2)Fatal Flaw (2)Idealism (2)Pain (2)Fatalism (2)too much love (2)Infatuation (2)Fear (2)Love Image As Escape (2)

From “The Goldfinch”

But it’s so heartbreaking and unnecessary how we lose things. From pure carelessness.

Losing things

Just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky— so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in,…

The Space Between The Bardo The Gulf Between Thought and Action My Philosophy

Fate is cruel but maybe not random.

Fate Destiny Master Plans

We can’t choose what we want and don’t want and that’s the hard lonely truth. Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us. We can’t escape who we are.

The Axiom Of Equality Fatalism

I’ve come to realize that the only truths that matter to me are the ones I don’t, and can’t, understand. What’s mysterious, ambiguous, inexplicable. What doesn’t fit into a story, what doesn’t have a story.

The Secret of Secrey Mystery The Magic of Not Understanding Quote of the Moment

There’s only a tiny heartbeat and solitude, bright sunny wall and a sense of no escape. Time that doesn’t move, time that couldn’t be called time. And trapped in the heart of light: the little prisoner, unflinching.

Time Nihilism No Exit

Because: if our secrets define us, as opposed to the face we show the world: then the painting was the secret that raised me above the surface of life and enabled me to know who I am. And it’s there: in my notebooks, every page, even though it’s not. Dream and magic, magic and delirium. The Unified…

The Secret of Secrecy

The pursuit of pure beauty is a trap, a fast track to bitterness and sorrow, that beauty has to be wedded to something more meaningful.

Idealism The Ideal Searching for Perfect Things

It’s a curiously uniform message: when in doubt, what to do? Every shrink, every career counselor, every Disney princess knows the answer: ‘Be yourself.’ ‘Follow your heart.’ Only here’s what I really, really want someone to explain to me. What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can’t be…

When Being Yourself Is Evil The Pulls of the Heart

A grandeur in the world, but not of the world, a grandeur that the world doesn’t understand.

The Magic of Being Misunderstood Being Otherworldly In The World The Secret of Secrey

We don’t get to choose the people we are.

Identity & Self Fatalism Identity We Are Who We Are The Axiom Of Equality

There are images that strike the heart and set it blooming like a flower, images that open up some much, much larger beauty that you can spend your whole life looking for and never find.

Photography Art beauty Aesthetics Quote of the Moment

If a painting really works down in your heart and changes the way you see, and think, and feel, you don’t think, ‘oh, I love this picture because it’s universal.’ ‘I love this painting because it speaks to all mankind.’ That’s not the reason anyone loves a piece of art. It’s a secret whisper from an…

Art Painting When You Find The Perfect Piece of Art On Discovering Your Favorite Piece of Art Artistic Ecstasy

The nail where your fate is liable to catch and snag.

Fate Art Hits You Where You Are

Who’s to say that gamblers don’t really understand it better than anyone else? Isn’t everything worthwhile a gamble? Can’t good come around sometimes through some strange back doors?

Gambling Intent and Consequences Where Good Comes From

Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that, sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent.

Blind Eye To Reality Rotten Reality Sad World

Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil.

Youth Age Young/Dying

But depression wasn’t the word. This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time.

Depression Emptiness Revulsion

Act of rebellion. Life: vacant, vain, intolerable. What loyalty did I owe it? None whatsoever. Why not beat Fate to the punch?

Suicide

The heart-shock of believing, for only a moment, that you might just have what could never be yours.

Unrequited Love Impossible Ideas

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