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"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?"
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"There is no conclusive evidence of life after death, but there is no evidence of any sort against it. Soon enough you will know, so why fret about it?"
"Among the tortures and devastations of life is this then-our friends are not able to finish their stories."
"He was going to die soon, you knew when you saw those eyes. There was no sign of life in his flesh, just the barest traces of what had once been a life. His body was like a dilapidated old house from which all furniture and fixtures have been removed and which awaited now only its final demolition."
"Are-you dying?" she asked."Just can't breathe. This air.""Poor, poor-good lord. I've forgotten your name.""Hell of a thing.""Barney!"He clutched her."No! Don't stop!" She arched her back. Her teeth chattered."I wasn't going to," he said. "Oooaugh!"He laughed."Don't please laugh at me.""Not meant unkindly."A long silence, then. Then, "Oof."
"Sleeping is terrifying.When you close your eyes and surrender your consciousness to the void, you lose yourself-voluntarily-and you're trustingly assuming you'll find yourself back out of the labyrinth again.Usually you do.But sometimes you don't.It's that uncertainty, more than anything, which kills me. That I might not wake up, and wouldn't know it.That I could be dead, dreaming I'm alive."
"I think of death only with tranquility, as an end. I refuse to let death hamper life. Death must enter life only to define it."
"Dying is a troublesome business: there is pain to be suffered, and it wrings one's heart; but death is a splendid thing-a warfare accomplished, a beginning all over again, a triumph. You can always see that in their faces."
"For he who lives more lives than one More deaths than one must die."
Explore more quotes by Donna Tartt
"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."
"Children - if you think back really what it was like to be a child and what it was like to know other children - children lie all the time."
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"I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much."
"Sometimes you can do all the right things and not succeed. And that's a hard lesson of reality."
"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."
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