Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
"Over and over I played her favorite Arvo Pärt, as a way of being with her; and she had only to mention recently read novel for me to grab it up hungrily, to be inside her thoughts, a sort of telepathy"
63 Quotes
"Over and over I played her favorite Arvo Pärt, as a way of being with her; and she had only to mention recently read novel for me to grab it up hungrily, to be inside her thoughts, a sort of telepathy"
Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
"I wanted her to know just how much I loved her while also letting her know that she bore not one particle of blame for not loving me back. But I wouldn’t say that. It was rosepetals I wanted to throw, not a poison dart."
Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
"For humans—trapped in biology—there was no mercy: we lived a while, we fussed around for a bit and died, we rotted in the ground like garbage."
Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
". . . it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn't touch."
Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
"It's not as if we're running a hospital for sick children down here, let's put it that way. Where's the nobility in patching up a bunch of old tables and chairs? Corrosive to the soul, quite possibly. I've seen too many estates not to know that. Idolatry! Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only—if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn't it? And isn't the whole point of things—beautiful things—that they connect you to some larger beauty? Those first images that crack your heart wide open and you spend the rest of your life chasing, or trying to recapture, in one way or another?"
Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
"They were playing old Bob Dylan, more than perfect for narrow Village streets close to Christmas and the snow whirling down in big feathery flakes, the kind of winter where you want to be walking down a city street with your arm around a girl like on the old record cover"
Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
"And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky - so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime."
Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
"Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us."
Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
"Maybe good luck was like bad luck in that it took a while to sink in."
Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
"And her laugh was enough to make you want to kick over what you were doing and follow her down the street."
Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
"Though I would have died rather than told anyone, I was worried my exuberant drug use had damaged my brain and my nervous system and maybe even my soul in some irreparable and perhaps not readily apparent way."
Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
"I think this goes more to the idea of 'relentless irony' than 'divine providence."
Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
"...real age, as I came to see from the genuine pieces that passed through my hands, was variable, crooked, capricious, singing here and sullen there, warm asymmetrical streaks on a rosewood cabinet from where a slant of sun had struck it while the other side was as dark as the day it was cut."
Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
"And though it's a bleak thing to admit all these years later, still I've never met anyone who made me feel loved the way she did. Everything came alive in her company; she cast a charmed theatrical light about her so that to see anything through her eyes was to see it in brighter colors than ordinary."
Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
"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."
Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
"Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells awaited them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital."
Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
"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."
Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
"What if — is more complicated than that? What if maybe opposite is true as well? Because, if bad can sometimes come from good actions—? where does it ever say, anywhere, that only bad can come from bad actions? Maybe sometimes — the wrong way is the right way? You can take the wrong path and it still comes out where you want to be? Or, spin it another way, sometimes you can do everything wrong and it still turns out to be right?"
Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
✉️
Get more quotes like Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch's — every morning.
Join thousands of wisdom seekers getting daily quotes from 300,000+ curated sources.
Free forever. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
🎉 Check your inbox to confirm your subscription!