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"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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Exlpore more Solitude quotes
"I knew this feeling, the 2 a.m. loneliness that I'd practically invented."
"That illusion of a world so shaped that it echoes every groan, of human beings so tied together by common needs and fears that a twitch at one wrist jerks another, where however strange your experience other people have had it too, where however far you travel in your own mind someone has been there before you - - is all an illusion. We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others. Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way. There is a virgin forest in each; a snowfield where even the print of birds' feet is unknown. Here we go alone, and like it better so. Always to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood would be intolerable."
"One of the greatest necessities in America is to discover creative solitude."
"I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone enough."
"You become a house where the wind blows straight through, because no one bothers the crack in the window or lock on the door, and you're the house where people come and go as they please, because you're simply too unimpressed to care. You let people in who you really shouldn't let in, and you let them walk around for a while, use your bed and use your books, and await the day when they simply get bored and leave. You're still not bothered, though you knew they shouldn't have been let in in the first place, but still you just sit there, apathetic like a beggar in the desert."
"I've learnt that solitude is sometimes a path that leads to peace."
"Nothing, to my way of thinking, is a better proof of a well ordered mind than a man's ability to stop just where he is and pass some time in his own company."
"It is not that we love to be alone, but that we love to soar, and when we do soar, the company grows thinner and thinner until there is none at all. We are not the less to aim at the summits though the multitude does not ascend them."
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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Children have very sharp powers of observation - probably sharper than adults - yet at the same time their emotional reactions are murky and much more primitive."
"Is it better to throw yourself head first and laughing into the holy rage calling your name?"
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