top of page

"Grown children (an oxymoron, I realize) veer instinctively to extremes: the young scholar is much more a pedant than his older counterpart. And I, being young myself, took these pronouncements of Henry's very seriously. I doubt if Milton himself could have impressed me more."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Youth quotes

"The country has 80 crore youth. They are below 35 years of age. If youth have the skill, they can change the destiny of this country. And we are laying stress on this."

"I love writing about the summer between high school and college. It's the last gasp of really being a teen."

"Sometimes she walks through the village in herlittle red dressall absorbed in restraining herself,and yet, despite herself, she seems to moveaccording to the rhythm of her life to come.She runs a bit, hesitates, stops,half-turns around...and, all while dreaming, shakes her headfor or against.Then she dances a few stepsthat she invents and forgets,no doubt finding out that lifemoves on too fast.It's not so much that she steps outof the small body enclosing her,but that all she carries in herselffrolics and ferments.It's this dress that she'll rememberlater in a sweet surrender;when her whole life is full of risks,the little red dress will always seem right."

"Do not lose the enthusiasm of your youth."

"You will make all kinds of mistakes, but as long as you are generous and true and also fierce you cannot hurt the world or even seriously distress her. She was meant to be wooed and won by youth."

"You cannot afford to gamble your youth only for fun."

"A poet might die at twenty-one, a revolutionary or a rock star at twenty four. But after that you assume everything's going to be all right. you've made it past Dead Man's Curve and you're out of the tunnel, cruising straight for your destination down a six lane highway whether you want it or not."

"Boys should abstain from all use of wine until their eighteenth year for it is wrong to add fire to fire."
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."


"But when she was annoyed with me, she had a cold way of saying "Apparently in answer to almost anything I said, making me feel stupid. "Um, I can't find the can opener. "Apparently. "There's going to be a lunar eclipse tonight. "Apparently. "Look, sparks are coming out of the wall socket. "Apparently."


"To really be centered and to really work well and to think about the kinds of things that I need to think about, I need to spend large amounts of time alone."


"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."


"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."


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


"The shame that tormented me was all the more corrosive for having no very clear origin: I didn't know why I felt so tainted, and worthless, and wrong-only that I did, and whenever I looked up from my books I was swamped by slimy waters rushing in from all sides."


"Whenever you see flies or insects in a still life-a wilted petal, a black spot on the apple-the painter is giving you a secret message. He's telling you that living things don't last-it's all temporary. Death in life. That's why they're called natures mortes. Maybe you don't see it at first with all the beauty and bloom, the little speck of rot. But if you look closer-there it is."


"The storytelling gift is innate: one has it or one doesn't. But style is at least partly a learned thing: one refines it by looking and listening and reading and practice - by work."
bottom of page