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"Their reality was far more interesting than any idealized version could possibly be."
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"Optimism, where it is not just the thoughtless talk of someone with only words in his flat head, strikes me as not only absurd, but even a truly wicked way of thinking, a bitter mockery of the unspeakable sufferings of humanity."
"A goodlookin horse is like a goodlookin woman, he said. They're always more trouble than what they're worth. What a man needs is just one that will get the job done."
"Realism can break a writer's heart."
"It's not a case of the glass being half full or half empty; more that we tipped a whole half-pint into an empty pint pot. I had to see how much was there, though, and now I know."
". . . nobody in particular is to blame, that I can see, for the state in which things are . . ."
"I'm against solutions that are worse than the problem. Like old women who want their hair dyed the color of shoe polish to hide the gray."
"I still can't believe it . . . him comin' here everyday, nobody realizin'. Still, that's life: lotta stuff happens under the waterline."
"In meetings philosophy might work,on the field practicality works."
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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