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"And, lying on my bed in some biscuit-colored hotel room in Nice, with a balcony facing the Promenade des Anglais, I watch the clouds reflected on sliding panes and marvel even how my sadness can make me happy . . ."
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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


"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."


"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."


"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."


"You'd be surprised, Theo." she said, leaning back in her shawl-shaped chair, "what small, everyday things can lift us out of despair. But nobody can do it for you. You're the one who has to watch for the open door."


"Why does that obstinate little voice in our heads torment us so?' he said, looking round the table. 'Could it be because it reminds us that we are alive, of our mortality, of our individual souls - which, after all, we are too afraid to surrender but yet make us feel more miserable than any other thing? But isn't it also pain that often makes us most aware of self?"


"I like the idea of living in a city - any city, especially a strange one - like the thought of traffic and crowds, of working in a bookstore, waiting tables in a coffee shop, who knew what kind of odd, solitary life I might slip into? Meals alone, waling the dogs in the evenings; and nobody knowing who I was."
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