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"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."
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"I don't know how anyone gets anything done in cities. How can you live somewhere like London or New York, when there are 81 things to do every night? Awful. Give me solitude and space any time."

"Even if the climate change is not real, its funds are real."

"Surround yourself with those conducive to you being your highest self."

"A great city is the place to escape the true drama of provincial life and find solace in fantasy."

"Why we don't feel sorry for killing thousands of mosquitoes every day? Are they useless or too many? We humans must realize it before it is too late."

"Plant life is like the canary in the cage. When it starts to die off, we know we have problems. To ignore plant die off would be like the human race committing suicide. Human extinction would surely follow."

"It is important to consider whether the sample size selected by the Environmental Genome Project will provide sufficient power to discover most alleles relevant to gene-environment interactions."

"Nature is in the process of shutting down corrupt corporations and their government minions."

"There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless."
Explore more quotes by Donna Tartt


"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."


"Richard Papen: As it happened, I knew Gartrell. He was a bad painter and a vicious gossip, with a vocabulary composed almost entirely of obscenities, gutteral verbs, and the world "postmodernist."


"We don't like to admit it, but the idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than almost anything. All truly civilized people " the ancients no less than us " have civilized themselves through the wilful repression of the old, animal self."


"And I'm hoping there's some larger truth about suffering here, or at least my understanding of it - although 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. Glint of brightness on a barely-there chain. Patch of sunlight on a yellow wall. The loneliness that separates every living creature from every other living creature. Sorrow inseparable from joy."


"It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to lose control completely? To throw off all the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves?"


"Maybe that's why I tend to equate physical beauty with qualities with which it has absolutely nothing to do. I see a pretty mouth or a moody pair of eyes and imagine all sorts of deep affinities, private kinships. Never mind that half a dozen jerks are clustered round the same person, just because they've been duped by the same pair of eyes."


"Fate is cruel but maybe not random. Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn't mean we have to bow and gravel to it."


"Out on the lawn, Bunny had just knocked Henry's ball about seventy feet outside the court. There was a ragged burst of laughter; faint, but clear, it floated back across the evening air. That laughter haunts me still."


"Sometimes you can do all the right things and not succeed. And that's a hard lesson of reality."
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