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"It's not as if we're running a hospital for sick children down here, let's put it that way. Where's the nobility in patching up a bunch of old tables and chairs? Corrosive to the soul, quite possibly. I've seen too many estates not to know that. Idolatry! Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only-if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn't it? And isn't the whole point of things-beautiful things-that they connect you to some larger beauty? Those first images that crack your heart wide open and you spend the rest of your life chasing, or trying to recapture, in one way or another?"
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"And I have to say, books haven't helped much with all this. Because whenever you read anything about love, whenever anyone tries to define it, there's always a state or an abstract noun, and I try to think of it like that. But actually, love is, Well, it's just you. And when you go, it's gone. Nothing abstract about it."
"Why be seduced by something as small as a front door in another country? Why fall in love with a place because it has trams and its people seldom have curtains in their homes? However absurd the intense reactions provoked by such small (and mute) foreign elements may seem, the pattern is at least familiar from our personal lives. There, too, we may find ourselves anchoring emotions of love on the way a person butters his or her bread, or recoiling at his or her taste in shoes. To condemn ourselves for these minute concerns is to ignore how rich in meaning details may be."
"Books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal."
"Of course, the self-righteous demand and expectation for love, and exactly how it should be expressed, is not the most streamlined method for producing it in another for you. That is, it does not compel or create the love itself. You're neither loving nor producing that which would compel the love toward you. You're compressed between them both and incapable of accepting either. And rightly so. Which then accelerates the accumulating suffering."
"What is attraction (akarshan) in this world? It is open fire and one should be aware of it. Attraction is the open fire. The root of illusory attachment (moha) is indeed attraction."
"Without attachment, a naked body is merely a lifeless sex-toy."
"You can't keep her.I know that. But I'm not ready to give her up just yet."
"Once an opinion is formed, there will be attachment-abhorrence. A person without opinion is also without attachment-abhorrence."
"All the so-called philosophical notion of "love without attachment or "detached love are biologically non-existent on this planet. We humans are biologically designed through millions of years of evolution to grow attachment. Love cannot survive without attachment."
"If a person were to get stuck in attachment induced entrancement for any worldly thing for just one hour, then it will last for a hundred years! Because of pleasure resulting effects and intents of engrossment, an indulging bad habit will last one day of Brahma (many many years), therefore it is not worth focusing our awareness anywhere (other than our true self, pure soul)."
Explore more quotes by Donna Tartt
"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."
"For that you should read the original. In very great poetry the music often comes through even when one doesn't know language. I loved Dante passionately before I knew a word of Italian."
"My novels aren't really generated by a single conceptual spark; it's more a process of many different elements that come together unexpectedly over a long period of time."
"It was a myth you couldn't function on opiates: shooting up was one thing but for someone like me-jumping at pigeons beating from the sidewalk, afflicted with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder practically to the point of spasticity and cerebral palsy-pills were the key to being not only competent, but high-functioning."
"He did touch people's lives, the lives of strangers, in an entirely unanticipated way. It was they who really mourned him - or what they thought was him - with a grief that was no less sharp for not being intimate with its object."
"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."
"When we are sad-at least I am like this-it can be comforting to cling to familiar objects, to the things that don't change."
"Though the darkness sometimes lifted just enough so I could construe my surroundings, familiar shapes solidifying like bedroom furniture at dawn, my relief was never more than temporary because somehow the full morning never came, things always went black before I could orient myself and there I was again with ink poured in my eyes, guttering around in the dark."
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