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"Though Julian could be marvelously kind in difficult circumstances of all sorts, I sometimes got the feeling that he was less pleased by kindness itself than by the elegance of the gesture."
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"Nights were so real that days began to seem dreamlike to him."

"It is not good to make everyday decision based upon what we see and what other people are saying or thinking."

"Even if everybody is looking at the same light bulb, the unique composition of an individual will dictate how they interpret and see things. Some people will only see things with their left eye (mind/moon), while others will use only their right (heart/sun). Some people are completely void of light and repel it immediately. For instance, a beetle will chase after an opening of light, while a cockroach will scatter at a crack of it. How are we different than the insects? Nobody is purely good or purely evil. Most of us are in-between. There are moths that explore the day and butterflies that play at night. Polarity is an integral part of nature - human or not human."

"Who you are speaks so loudly I can't hear what you're saying."

"Changing your perception will alter your interpretations and therefore, your reality. If you feel like you're hitting a wall because you simply don't understand something, or another person has a different approach, keep your mind open and willing to reinterpret it with fresh eyes, more information, a change in position, or a new perspective."

"Finding beauty in the common is the sign of a gifted mind."

"We each project to others a reflection of the world which includes our choices of perception."

"An ant can't define shape of an elephant solely from its' point of view.They have to unify all views. It's a way for ant to understand elephant.In order to understand true realities, men need to do mental blending."

"Illusion is a false perception but delusion is a fixed false belief."

"Strictly speaking, it might not be a dream. It was reality, but a reality imbued with all the qualities of a dream. A different sphere of reality, where - at a special time and place - imagination had been set free."
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."


"All of a sudden, images from every crime movie I'd ever seen began to pop into my mind-the windowless room, the harsh lights and narrow hallways, images which did not seem so much theatrical or foreign as imbued with the indelible quality of memory, of experience lived."


"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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