top of page

"After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great,' he said. 'To escape the cognitive mode of experience, to transcend the accident to one's moment of being. There are other advantages, more difficult to speak of, things which ancient sources only hint at and which I myself only understood after the fact."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Escape quotes

"I went away in my head, into a book. That was where I went whenever real life was too hard or too inflexible."

"Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did not know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world which would make the real world of every day a source of bitter disappointment."

"Life is like a train going in circles, the train is comfortable - it has nice scenery, it provides warmth and food & for most a loving atmosphere. Most of the people stay on the train there entire lives, maybe every now and again they may peep out the door, some might even get off only to quickly realise they want back on. Then you have the rare ones who I aspire to be, those who are bored of the train - to them - the thought of living without it, is risky but the reward of tasting life outside of doors and walls excite them enough to try."
Explore more quotes by Donna Tartt


"The Little Friend is a long book. It's also completely different from my first novel: different landscape, different characters, different use of language and diction, different approach to story."


"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."


"It's hard for me to show work while I'm writing, because other people's comments will influence what happens."


"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."
bottom of page