Donna Tartt Quotes

We can only connect the dots we collect, which makes everything you write about you... your connections are the thread that you weave into the cloth that becomes the story that only you can tell.

Until now, he has never told the full story of his life, in his own voice.

My autobiography was simply the story of my life.

All of us are made up of the stories that we listen to, the ones we disagree with and the ones that we agree with.

I'm glad I have a story to tell. It's unique, it's mine, and I'm blessed to have it.

People are the story they tell themselves.

I think that everything in this life is a story you know; our own narrative, our own history, it's all a story.

The autobiographical self is built on the basis of past memories and memories of the plans that we have made; it's the lived past and the anticipated future.

I think we're always in the process of writing and rewriting the story of our lives, forming our experiences into a narrative that makes sense. Much of that work involves demythologizing family myths and cultural myths - getting free of what we have been told about ourselves.

I'll pay you a million dollars if you tell your life story for true.

A human being is nothing but a story with skin around it.

Your life story is a novel; and people, though they love novels wound between two yellow paper covers, are oddly suspicious of those which come to them in living vellum.

I long To hear the story of your life, which must Take the ear strangely.

You can't regret a whole period in your life. . . . It's part of who you are, one of your stories.

Money comes, money goes. But your story stays with you the rest of your life.

I think at the age of 50, everyone should write their own autobiography.

Others are writing my biography, and let it rest as they elect to make it. I have lived my life, well and ill, always less well than I wanted it to be but it is, as it is, and as it has been; so small a thing, to have had so much about it!

But how could you live and have no story to tell?

To me and my kind life itself is a story and we have to tell it in stories - that is the way it falls.

It still might be a shock. To realize you are just one story walking among millions.

What else are our lives but a story we tell ourselves to find some sense in the pain ofliving?

How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but — mainly — to ourselves.

Living "in" a story, being part of a narrative, is much more satisfying than living without one. I don't always know what narrative it is, because I'm living my life and not always reflecting on it, but as I edit these pages I am aware that I have an urge to see my sometimes random wandering as having a plot, a purpose guided by some underlying story.

I came here with something in me that I inherited from my folks. So I'm going to do something called life and times.

I have begun writing what I have said I'd never write, a memoir ("I am not my own subject," I used to say with icy superiority).