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"Whenever you see flies or insects in a still life-a wilted petal, a black spot on the apple-the painter is giving you a secret message. He's telling you that living things don't last-it's all temporary. Death in life. That's why they're called natures mortes. Maybe you don't see it at first with all the beauty and bloom, the little speck of rot. But if you look closer-there it is."
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"People always say that digital cameras are much more stable than film cameras, but the truth is that digital cameras, or any kind of digital technology, is one of the most unstable things in the world. A film camera can last decades if you know how to look after it, but digital things can break down instantly. A violent storm, a nuclear bomb, even something as minor as a cracked screen or the releasing of newer models, can make a digital product just a block of useless metal."
"Remember that all we have is "on loan from Fortune, which can reclaim it without our permission-indeed, without even advance notice. Thus, we should love all our dear ones, but always with the thought that we have no promise that we may keep them forever-nay, no promise even that we may keep them for long."
"When you're young you do think that things last forever unfortunately they don't Lyra."
"The colors of living things begin to fade with the last breath, and the soft, springy skin and supple muscle rot within weeks. But the bones sometimes remain, faithful echoes of the shape, to bear some last faint witness to the glory of what was."
"It is unwise to make something permanent when the whole world is shifting."
"The flame that burns Twice as bright burns half as long."
"And these thingsthat keep alive on departure know that you praise them; transient,they look to us, the most transient, to be their rescue.They want us to change them completely, in our invisible hearts,into -- O endlessly -- us! Whoever, finally, we may be."
"All things fade into the storied past, and in a little while are shrouded in oblivion."
"Thanks to impermanence, everything is possible. Life itself is possible. If a grain of corn is not impermanent, it can never be transformed into a stalk of corn. If the stalk were not impermanent, it could never provide us with the ear of corn we eat."
"Just because you believe something was true in the past does not mean it will be true in the future."
Explore more quotes by Donna Tartt
"Well, I do have some maiden aunts that are not quite like the aunts in the book, but I definitely do have a couple of them, and a couple of old aunties."
"So I'm not a Southern writer in the commonly held sense of the term, like Faulkner or Eudora Welty, who took the South for their entire literary environment and subject matter."
"I'm not sure whay I've been drawn to this subject, except that murder is a subject that has always drawn people for as long as people have been telling stories."
"Children - if you think back really what it was like to be a child and what it was like to know other children - children lie all the time."
"Taking on challenging projects is the way that one grows and extends one's range as a writer, one's technical command, so I consider the time well-spent."
"I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much."
"But it's for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work."
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