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Donna Tartt Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 100 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Donna Tartt.

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Famous Quotes By Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 1780646

And besides (I told myself) wasn't it time to Move Forward, Let Go, turn from the garden that was locked to me? Live In The Present, Focus On The Now instead of grieving for what I could never have? — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 533363

won't last, it's — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 1953749

Well, a change of scenery may be good for you," said Hobie when I went down to see him before I left. "Even if the scene isn't what you'd choose. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 414315

Twelve years after Robin's death, no one knew any more about how he had ended up hanged from a tree in his own yard than they had on the day it happened. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 495767

I see so little of you these days, Richard," he said. "I feel that you're becoming just a shadow in my life. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 1352833

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

Donna Tartt Quotes 366869

How were you supposed to explain this kind of thing? It seemed stupid to try. Even the memory was starting to seem vague and starry with unreality, like a dream where the details get fainter the harder you try to grasp them. What mattered more was the feeling, a rich sweet undertow so commanding that in class, on the school bus, lying in bed trying to think of something safe or pleasant, some environment or configuration where my chest wasn't tight with anxiety, all I had to do was sink into the blood-warm current and let myself spin away to the secret place where everything was all right. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 1062113

Hard to put things right. You don't often get that chance. Sometimes all you can do is not get caught. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 1555433

Well, is true. I did know. Because if possible to paint fakes that look like that? Las Vegas would be the most beautiful city in the history of earth! — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 1673545

Is it easy to see things in retrospect. But I was ignorant then of everything but my own happiness. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 210524

That night I wrote in my journal: Trees are schizophrenic now and beginning to lose control, enraged with the shock of their fiery new colors. Someone
was it van Gogh?
said that orange is the color of insanity. _Beauty is terror._ We want to be devoured by it, to hide ourselves in that fire which refines us. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 324226

And the flavor of Pippa's kiss
bittersweet and strange
stayed with me all the way back uptown, swaying and sleepy as I sailed home on the bus, melting with sorrow and loveliness, a starry ache that lifted me up above the windswept city like a kite: my head in the rainclouds, my heart in the sky. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 230090

And the nights, bigger than imagining: black and gusty and enormous, disordered and wild with stars. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 539316

never the way it seems - all good, all bad. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 327611

A world of ticking clocks and creaking floorboards. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 888345

I'm not blaming anything on your mom, I'm way past that. It's just that she loved you so much, I always felt like kind of an interloper with you guys. Stranger-in-my-own-house kind of thing. You two were so close - " he laughed, sadly - "there wasn't much room for three. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 1960591

I missed her so much I wanted to die: a hard, physical longing, like a craving for air underwater. Lying awake, I tried to recall all my best memories of her - to freeze her in my mind so I wouldn't forget her - but instead of birthdays and happy times I kept remembering things like how a few days before she was killed she'd stopped me halfway out the door to pick a thread off my school jacket. For some reason, it was one of the clearest memories I had of her: her knitted eyebrows, the precise gesture of her reaching out to me, everything. Several times too - drifting uneasily between dreaming and sleep - I sat up suddenly in bed at the sound of her voice speaking clearly in my head, remarks she might conceivably have made at some point but that I didn't actually remember, things like Throw me an apple, would you? and I wonder if this buttons up the front or the back? and This sofa is in a terrible state of disreputableness. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 1219203

The most satisfying of languages, Latin. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 863702

Three years is a long time." "It is to us. But in the scheme of things - not at all. I mean," said Andy reasonably, "look at some poor dumb bunny like Sabine Ingersoll or that idiot James Villiers. Forrest fucking Longstreet. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 157851

It was interesting to see the change that came over Boris when he was speaking another language - a sort of livening, or alertness, a sense of a different and more efficient person occupying his body. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 1953018

Sometimes it's about playing a poor hand well. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 169850

That's the first law of magic, Specs. Misdirection. Never forget it. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 148709

It made me think of the nice old Marimekko-clad ladies I sometimes went to see in the Ritz Tower: gravel-voiced, turban-wearing, panther-braceleted widows looking to move to Miami, their apartments filled with smoked-glass and chromed-steel furniture that, in the seventies, they'd purchased through their decorators for the price of a good Queen Anne
but (I was responsible for telling them, reluctantly) had not held its value and could not be re-sold at even half what they'd bought it for. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 688267

Out in the country it was not uncommon to discover that she had slipped away, alone, out to the lake, maybe, or down to the cellar, where once I found her sitting in the big marooned sleigh, reading, her fur coat thrown over her knees. Things would have been terrible strange and unbalanced without her. She was the Queen who finished out the suit of dark Jacks, dark King, and Joker. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 706296

MIGHT HAVE LIKED Xandra in other circumstances - which, I guess, is sort of like saying I might have liked the kid who beat me up if he hadn't beat me up. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 1690411

It was reassuring to know that far away, whales swam untroubled in Baltic waters and monks in arcane time zones chanted ceaselessly for the salvation of the world. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 1543379

I could do what I had to. I'd done it before: gone blank, pushed forward. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 818965

In my light-headedness and fatigue, which made me feel drastically cut off from myself and as if I were observing it all at a remove, I walked past candy shops and coffee shops and shops with antique toys and Delft tiles from the 1800s, old mirrors and silver glinting in the rich, cognac-colored light, inlaid French cabinets and tables in the French court style with garlanded carvings and veneerwork that would have made Hobie gasp with admiration - in fact the entire foggy, friendly, cultivated city with its florists and bakeries and antiekhandels reminded me of Hobie, not just for its antique-crowded richness but because there was a Hobie-like wholesomeness to the place, like a children's picture book where aproned tradespeople swept the floors and tabby cats napped in sunny windows. But there was much too much to see, and — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 1570175

There was a strong sense of being alone, in wintry deadness. Nothing made sense in any direction. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 1701021

He's telling you that living things don't last - it's all temporary. Death in life. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 1892160

But while I have never considered myself a very good person, neither can I bring myself to believe that I am spectacularly bad one. Perhaps it's simply impossible to think of oneself in such a way. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 1710734

Overly sensitive to the souls of rooms and objects, the emanations — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 1714982

Camilla he tormented simply because she was a girl. In some ways she was his more vulnerable target - through no fault of her own, but simply because in Greekdom, generally speaking, women are lesser creatures, better seen than heard. This prevailing sentiment among the Argives is so pervasive that it lingers in the bones of the language itself; I can think of no better illustration of this than the fact that in Greek grammar, one of the very first axioms I learned is that men have friends, women have relatives, and animals have their own kind. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 1680731

The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to make things up. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 1676263

Sometimes, when there's been an accident and reality is too sudden and strange to comprehend, the surreal will take over. Action slows to a dreamlike glide, frame by frame; the motion of a hand, a sentence spoken, fills an eternity. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 1420867

The first duty of the novelist is to entertain. It is a moral duty. People who read your books are sick, sad, traveling, in the hospital waiting room while someone is dying. Books are written by the alone for the alone. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 1462035

As I stood with her on the platform - she impatient, tapping her foot, leaning forward to look down the tracks - it seemed more than I could bear to see her go. Francis was around the corner, buying her a book to read on the train.
'I don't want you to leave,' I said.
'I don't want to, either.'
'Then don't.'
'I have to.'
We stood looking at each other. It was raining. She looked at me with her rain-colored eyes.
Camilla, I love you,' I said. 'Let's get married. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 1639558

I suppose the shock of recognition is one of the nastiest shocks of all. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 1635018

I was as depressed as I have ever been in my life. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 1614772

And as we leave Donne and Walton on the shores of Metahemeralism, we wave a fond farewell to those famous chums of yore. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 1986928

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

Donna Tartt Quotes 97231

Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 2198734

In short: I felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 2198373

Well, girls always love assholes," said Platt, not bothering to dispute this. "Haven't you noticed?" No, I thought bleakly, untrue. Else why didn't Pippa love me? — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 2161136

hubris on Henry's, too much Greek prose composition - whatever — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 2084277

As long as I am acting out of love, I feel I am doing best I know how. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 2082552

Of huddled anonymity like old black and white photos I'd seen of bank crashes and bread lines in the 1930s. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 2052151

We looked at each other. And it occurred to me that despite his faults, which were numerous and spectacular, the reason I'd liked Boris and felt happy around him from almost the moment I'd met him was that he was never afraid. You didn't meet many people who moved freely through the world with such a vigorous contempt for it and at the same time such oddball and unthwartable faith in what, in childhood, he had liked to call the Planet of Earth. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 2048681

At this question, I felt a sharp rush of despair - for as bad as I felt there was nothing he could do for me, and from his face, I realized he knew that, too. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 2040393

Sure how that was going to work, but once I got Boris out of the house I could figure something out. "Please, come on." "Is State Care that bad in America?" said Boris doubtfully. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 1727855

And if beauty is terror," said Julian, "then what is desire? We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it?"
"To live," said Camilla.
"To live forever," said Bunny, chin cupped in palm. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 1966731

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. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 1944254

Clearly 'worry' was the mark of a primitive and spiritually unevolved person. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 1900305

Are you going somewhere?" I said, regarding him timidly. The suit made him seem a different person, less melancholy and distracted, more capable - unlike the Hobie of my first visit, with his bedraggled aspect of an elegant but mistreated polar bear. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 1897215

And how did they drive people mad? They turned up the volume of the inner monologue, magnified qualities already present to great excess, made people so much themselves that they couldn't stand it. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 2205858

There were plenty of girls at school prettier than Harriet, and nicer. But none of them were as smart, or as brave. How could he make her love him, make her notice when he wasn't there? — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 1862520

After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great. To escape the cognitive mode of experience, to transcend the accident of one's moment of being. There are other advantages, more difficult to speak of, things which ancient sources only hint at and which I myself only understood after the fact. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 1798946

Being the only female in what was basically a boys' club must have been difficult for her. Miraculously, she didn't compensate by becoming hard or quarrelsome. She was still a girl, a slight lovely girl who lay in bed and ate chocolates, a girl whose hair smelled like hyacinth and whose scarves fluttered jauntily in the breeze. But strange and marvelous as she was, a wisp of silk in a forest of black wool, she was not the fragile creature one would have her seem. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 1797655

I think this goes more to the idea of 'relentless irony' than 'divine providence. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 1731274

Why did I obsess over people like this? Was it normal to fixate on strangers in this particular vivid, fevered way? I didn't think so. It was impossible to imagine some random passer-by on the street forming quite such an interest in me. And yet it was the main reason I'd gone in those houses with Tom: I was fascinated by strangers, wanted to know what food they ate and what dishes they ate it from, what movies they watched and what music they listened to, wanted to look under their beds and in their secret drawers and night tables and inside the pockets of their coats. Often I saw interesting-looking people on the street and thought about them restlessly for days, imagining their lives, making up stories about them on the subway or the crosstown bus. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 311658

For if the modern mind is whimsical and discursive, the classical mind is narrow, unhesitating, relentless. It is not a quality of intelligence that one encounters frequently these days. But though I can digress with the best of them, I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 674032

I see that as usual I've gone on too long and that I'm running out of room, but I do hope that you are happy and well, and it's all a little less lonely out there than you may have feared. If there's anything I can do for you back here, or if I can help you in any way, please know that I will. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 652176

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

Donna Tartt Quotes 639951

I continue to be immensely moved by the impermanence of hotels: not in any mundane Travel-and-Leisure way but with a fervor bordering on the transcendent. Some time in October, right around Day of the Dead actually, I stayed in a Mexican seaside hotel where the halls flowed with blown curtains and all the rooms were named after flowers. The Azalea Room, the Camellia Room, the Oleander Room. Opulence and splendor, breezy corridors that swept into something like eternity and each room with its different colored door. Peony, Wisteria, Rose, Passion Flower. And who knows
but maybe that's what's waiting for us at the end of the journey, a majesty unimaginable until the very moment we find ourselves walking through the doors of it, what we find ourselves gazing at in astonishment when God finally takes His hands off our eyes and says: Look! — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 582556

When we are sad ... it can be comforting to cling to familiar objects, to things that don't change. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 550920

Over 2,000 reptiles await you. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 548851

I often thought how peculiar my life must look to someone reading those letters, far away. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 489884

I was wide awake, and yet part of me was so glassed-off and numb I was practically in a coma. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 480093

I honestly can't remember much else about those years except a certain mood that permeated most of them, a melancholy feeling that I associate with watching 'The Wonderful World of Disney' on Sunday nights. Sunday was a sad day - early to bed, school the next morning, I was constantly worried my homework was wrong - but as I watched the fireworks go off in the night sky, over the floodlit castles of Disneyland, I was consumed by a more general sense of dread, of imprisonment within the dreary round of school and home: circumstances which, to me at least, presented sound empirical argument for gloom. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 344728

I would be less frightened of death (not just my own death but Welty's death, Andy's death, Death in general) if I thought a familiar person came to meet us at the door, — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 718285

But Beauty - unless she is wed to something more meaningful - is always superficial. It — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 279146

Welty's instruction; that I'd had a concussion. That I hadn't — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 233357

To try to make some meaning out of all this seems — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 224728

. 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? Because, I mean - mending old things, preserving them, looking after them - on some level there's no rational grounds for it - "
"There's no 'rational grounds' for anything I care about — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 179106

when what she needed was something concrete, some small final memory to slip its hand in hers and accompany her - sightless now, stumbling - through this sudden desert of existence which stretched before her from the present moment until the end of life. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 166139

and Mathilde still had — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 165066

Children love secret club houses. They love secrecy even when there's no need for secrecy. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 135911

The problem (as I'd learned, repeatedly) was that thirty-six hours in, with your body in full revolt, and the remainder of your un-opiated life stretching out bleakly ahead of you like a prison corridor, you needed some fairly compelling reason to keep moving forward into darkness, rather than falling straight back into the gorgeous feather mattress you'd so foolishly abandoned. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 131616

There are such things as ghosts. People everywhere have always known that. And we believe in them every bit as much as Homer did. Only now, we call them by different names. Memory. The unconscious. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 120608

The assignment was a two-page essay, in Greek, on any epigram of Callimachus that we chose. I'd done only a page and I started to hurry through the rest in impatient and slightly dishonest fashion, writing out the English and translating word by word. It was something Julian asked us not to do. The value of Greek prose composition, he said, was not that it gave one any particular facility in the language that could not be gained as easily by other methods but that if done properly, off the top of one's head, it taught one to think in Greek. One's thought patterns become different, he said, when forced into the confines of a rigid and unfamiliar tongue. Certain common ideas become inexpressible; other, previously undreamt-of ones spring to life, finding miraculous new articulation. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 897015

THINGS WOULD HAVE TURNED out better if she had lived. As it was, she died when I was a kid; and though everything that's happened to me since then is thoroughly my own fault, still when I lost her I lost sight of any landmark that might have led me someplace happier, to some more populated or congenial life. Her death the dividing mark: Before and After. 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

Donna Tartt Quotes 1245380

I had said goodbye to her once before, but it took everything I had to say goodbye to her then, again, for the last time, like poor Orpheus turning for a last backward glance at the ghost of his only love and in the same heartbeat losing her forever: hinc illae lacrimae, hence those tears. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 1234511

Those guys who wore a wedding ring that didn't really look like a wedding ring - or maybe it wasn't a wedding ring at all and he was just super-proud of his Celtic — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 1199024

Because - all the way driving here, driving all night, Christmas lights on the motorway and I'm not ashamed to tell you, I got choked up - because I was thinking, couldn't help it, about the Bible story - ? you know, where the steward steals the widow's mite, but then the steward flees to far country and invests the mite wisely and brings back thousandfold cash to widow he stole from? And with joy she forgave him, and they killed the fatted calf, and made merry?" "I think that's maybe not all the same story." "Well - Bible school, Poland, it was a long time ago. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 1192010

It's so heartbreaking and unnecessary how we lose things. From pure carelessness. Fires, wars. The Parthenon, used as a munitions storehouse. I guess that anything we manage to save from history is a miracle. p28 — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 1174339

He looked very tired, a regard which manifested itself not in dark circles, or pallor, but a dreamy and bright-cheeked sadness. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 1166759

A sunstruck instant that existed now and forever. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 1166160

I hate Gucci,' said Francis.
'Do you?' said Henry, glancing up from his reverie. 'Really? I think it's rather grand.'
'Come on, Henry.'
'Well, it's so expensive, but it's so ugly too, isn't it? I think they make it ugly on purpose. And yet people buy it out of sheer perversity.'
'I don't see what you think is grand about that.'
'Anything is grand if it's done on a large enough scale,' said Henry. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 976088

Who was it that said that coincidence was just God's way of remaining anonymous? — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 941761

They were a pair of white mice, I thought - only Kitsey was a spun-sugar, fairy-princess mouse whereas Andy was more the kind of luckless, anemic, pet-shop mouse you might feed to your boa constrictor. "Get — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 1279070

And if what they say is true
if every great painting is really a self-portrait
what, if anything, is Fabritius saying about himself? — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 888724

Matters progressed. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 879643

I see you are philosopher by nature. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 863038

He was a planet without an atmosphere. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 860807

In New York, everything reminded me of my mother - every taxi, every street corner, every cloud that passed over the sun - but out in this hot mineral emptiness, it was as if she had never existed; I could not even imagine her spirit looking down on me. All trace of her seemed burned away in the thin desert air. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 848937

But I couldn't. It was real; I knew it, even in the dark. Raised yellow streak of paint on the wing and feathers scratched in with the butt of the brush. One chip on the upper left edge that hadn't been there before, tiny mar less than two millimeters, but otherwise: perfect. I was different, but it wasn't. And as the light flickered over it in bands, I had the queasy sense of my own life, in comparison, as a patternless and transient burst of energy, a fizz of biological static just as random as the street lamps flashing past. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 829731

There had been a trapped thought about to emerge, something essential and unspeakable, released by the mention of those blank-faced soldiers. Now it was all gone but the image: dead boys with limbs akimbo, staring into the sky. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 822966

Once, over dinner, Henry was quite startled to learn from me than men had walked on the moon. "No," he said, putting down his fork.
"It's true," chorused the rest, who had somehow managed to pick this up along the way.
"I don't believe it."
"I saw it," said Bunny. "It was on television."
"How did they get there? When did this happen?" — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 737397

It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from all the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one's burned tongues and skinned knees, that one's aches and pains are all one's own. Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us. Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that's why we're so anxious to lose them ... — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes 734595

if you didn't take picture from museum, and Sascha didn't steal it back, and I didn't think of claiming reward - well, wouldn't all those dozens of other paintings remain missing too? Forever maybe? Wrapped in brown paper? Still shut in that apartment? No one to look at them? Lonely and lost to the world? Maybe the one had to be lost for the others to be found?" "I think this goes more to the idea of 'relentless irony' than 'divine providence.' " "Yes - but why give it a name? Can't they both be the same thing? — Donna Tartt