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"Maybe that's why I tend to equate physical beauty with qualities with which it has absolutely nothing to do. I see a pretty mouth or a moody pair of eyes and imagine all sorts of deep affinities, private kinships. Never mind that half a dozen jerks are clustered round the same person, just because they've been duped by the same pair of eyes."
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"I tell you as well as myself: what we see with our own eyes is nothing other than a cloud concealing what we should perceive with our inner sight, while what we listen to with our ears is merely a ringing sound disturbing what we should understand with our hearts. When we see a man being taken to prion by a police officer let us not hasten to assume he is a wrong-doer. When we see a corpse, and a man standing beside it with bloodstained hands, let us not conclude that this is a victim and his assassin. When we hear one man singing and another lamenting, let us ascertain which one of the two is truly happy."

"People always equate beauty with good, but it just ain't so."

"To all apparent beauties blind, each blemish strikes an envious mind."

"I conceive that the great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them by false estimates they have made of the value of things."

"Say, there is a book written by Tolstoy sitting right there on the table. To our unique human consciousness, the reality of the papers in the book, is infinitely different from the valuable literature that they possess. For the kind of consciousness possessed by the bug which eats those papers, literature is non-existent, yet for the Human Consciousness, literature has a greater value of truth than the papers themselves."

"What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen?"

"The puzzle that is created by seeing the 'relative' is called worldly life (sansaar)! It would never be this way had one seen the 'Real'."

"The trouble ain't that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain't distributed right."

"When blackened night falls, darkness exists if one chooses to rely on sight as thy only guide."
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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