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"But walking through it all was one thing; walking away, unfortunately, has proved to be quite another, and though once I thought I had left that ravine forever on an April afternoon long ago, now I am not so sure. Now the searchers have departed, and life has grown quiet around me, I have come to realize that while for years I might have imagined myself to be somewhere else, in reality I have been there all the time: up at the top by the muddy wheel-ruts in the new grass, where the sky is dark over the shivering apple blossoms and the first chill of the snow that will fall that night is already in the air."
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"When you leave a port, ask yourself two questions: What mark you have made on that port and what have you learned from that port?"

"The laws is not meant to destroy us. But our disobedience leads to our own destruction."

"Whether you are aware of it or not, your life is still disappearing. It's pouring out, it keeps diminishing."

"You never know what people have endured to get where they are."

"Why do you compare yourself to others? Can you carry weight of others on your shoulders?"

"Everyone should think about why certain undesirable situations occur in life."

"Knowing my soul is my lifetime-study."

"What you are seeking is yourself."

"Life is head and shoulders above all other things we regard as precious in this world."

"The world is full of vanities."
Explore more quotes by Donna Tartt


"But it's for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work."


"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."


"I believe, in a funny way, the job of the novelist is to be out there on the fringes and speaking for an experience that has not really been spoken for."


"Who knew, or cared, the names of the Turks who blew the roof off the Parthenon? the mullahs who had ordered the destruction of the Buddhas at Bamiyan? Yet living or dead: their acts stood. It was the worst kind of immortality. Intentionally or no: I had extinguished a light at the heart of the world."


"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."


"Grown children (an oxymoron, I realize) veer instinctively to extremes: the young scholar is much more a pedant than his older counterpart. And I, being young myself, took these pronouncements of Henry's very seriously. I doubt if Milton himself could have impressed me more."


"Real age, as I came to see from the genuine pieces that passed through my hands, was variable, crooked, capricious, singing here and sullen there, warm asymmetrical streaks on a rosewood cabinet from where a slant of sun had struck it while the other side was as dark as the day it was cut."
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