Donna Tartt Quotes

One doesn't recognize the really important moments in one's life until it's too late.

I think I don't regret a single 'excess' of my responsive youth - I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn't embrace.

It's defeatist to harp on what might have been, and yet, it's hard to resist considering what might have been.

"It's OK," Puck says. She has a quick way of hiding her disappointment. If you're not looking for it, she's put it away somewhere before you know it was there. "You're busy." "No," I tell her. "No, I'll think about it. I'm not sure if I can get away." I don't know wheat I'm thinking. I cannot find the time to get away. I'm not a good dinner companion. But it's hard to think of that. Instead I'm wishing that I'd spoken sooner, before I'd seen her disappointment.

There are not many regrets that I have. There are a few things that I wish I'd changed in my life, but they are not so dramatic that I'd go out of my way to change them. But I go back and think about my life so far periodically in my head.

But we make such mistakes all the time, all through our lives. Wisdom, I suppose, is seeing this and acting upon it before it is too late. But it is often too late, isn't it? - and those things that we should have said are unsaid, and remain unsaid for ever.

Nobody will use other people's experience, nor have any of his own till it is too late to use it.

You know, many a man realizes late in life that if when he was a boy he had known what he knows now, instead of being what he is he might be what he won't; but how few boys stop to think that if they knew what they don't know instead of being what they will be, they wouldn't be?

We all find ourselves involved in projects or activities that confound us-when or why did I say I would do this? What was I thinking? I needed a poem for myself that said-pause longer. Think again.

We should have taken our chances back then, when we were young and beautiful and didn't even know it.

I wandered through the streets thinking of all the things I might have said and might have done had I been other than I was.

...stupidity is one of the two things we see most clearly in retrospect. The other is missed chances.

Regrets are illuminations come too late.

It looks a lot better from up here than it does down there, dont it? Yes. It does. There's a lot of things look better at a distance. Yeah? I think so. I guess there are. The life you've lived, for one. Yeah. Maybe what of it you aint lived yet, too.

When you're in the center of something, on a ride, I don't think you realize what it is until it's over.

We didn't really have to take everything so seriously, did we?

I am not good at noticing when I'm happy, except in retrospect. My gift, or fatal flaw, is for nostalgia. I have sometimes been accused of demanding perfection, of rejecting heart's desires as soon as I get close enough that the mysterious impressionistic gloss disperses into plain solid dots, but the truth is less simplistic than that. I know very well that perfection is made up of frayed, off-struck mundanities. I suppose you could say my real weakness is a kind of long-sightedness: usually it is only at a distance, and much too late, that I can see the pattern.

Clip your year-end column and put it away for 10 years. See if you don’t feel like an idiot when you reread it.

Some people spend the whole of their lives sitting waiting for one train, only to find that they never even made it to the station.

I opened my mouth, almost said something. Almost. The rest of my life might have turned out differently if I had. But I didn’t.

I confess some part of me thought, If only I'd stuck around, this is the sort of catastrophe I might have created.

Knowing what I now know I would never have done anything so fatuous; but then I never would have known what I know now had I not.

He doesn’t know to want for more because nothing in his life has been as much as this...on that night he thinks that no one has ever had so much and only later will he know he should have asked for more.

Hindsight is illuminating but not always what we want to see.

By the time a man is wise enough to watch his step, he's too old to go anywhere.