A Quote by Donna Tartt

When I'm writing, I am concentrating almost wholly on concrete detail: the color a room is painted, the way a drop of water rolls off a wet leaf after a rain. — © Donna Tartt
When I'm writing, I am concentrating almost wholly on concrete detail: the color a room is painted, the way a drop of water rolls off a wet leaf after a rain.
I don't know if there is actually more rain here in England, or if it was just that the rain seemed to be so deliberately annoying. Every drop hit the window with a peevish "Am I bothering you? Does this make you cold and wet? Oh, sorry.
A leaf that falls into a stream (or a leaf we intentionally drop into a stream) just where the water disappears into the ground...will come out again at the next opening, because the underground stream has faithfully carried it there, though during this journey it has been beyond the reach of any outside interference. In the same way, an idea that has been introduced into our minds (or that we ourselves have intentionally introduced) will produce its effects after longer or shorter subconscious development.
To slide into the domed reading room at ten each morning, specially in summer, off the hot street outside, was a sensation as delicious as dropping into the water off the concrete edge of the Fitzroy Baths.
Food from the platter / Water from the rain / The subject and the matter / I'm going home again / Can't sell a leaf to a tree / Nor the wind to the atmosphere / I know where I am meant to be / And I can't be satisfied here
A hundred yards away, Mike Newton was lowering Bella's limp body to the sidewalk. She slumped unresponsively against the wet concrete, her skin chalky as a corpse. I almost took the door off the car.
Life is like a rain drop on a lotus leaf. Everybody realises that you're either very lucky person or you're not.
A drop of water can't stop a fire alone. But a drop of water, plus another one, plus another one, then you have the rain, and the rain can stop the fire.
During college, when I was working full time for my father [the decorator Mark Hampton], I rented an apartment and I just couldn't take time off to paint it. So I went there one evening and stayed up all night painting the place what I thought was a lovely pale yellow. When the sun came up, I realized I'd painted the walls the color of insanity. I had to immediately mix in all my trim color to tone it down. Yellow is an electric color and wholly misleading. It becomes more yellow with the sun's yellow light on it. The moral is, even if you think your yellow is the one, go paler.
But when one masters this wretched desire, which is so hard to overcome, then one's sorrows just drop off, like a drop of water off a lotus.
The secret to scooping ice cream is all about the scooper. You have to dip it in water before and after every scoop. Then it just rolls off.
You do not have to explain every single drop of water contained in a rain barrel. You have to explain one drop-H2O. The reader will get it.
I think my leap into TV and movies and comics is in a way natural because I'm a visual storyteller. If you look at any one of my short stories or novels, they sort of unscroll cinematically. Every scene is concrete in my mind. I can walk around the room and pick things up. I can describe at length every feature on the character, though I might only supply a glimpse of this on the page. So if I'm writing color into that I'm also writing texture, I'm pushing the image more than anything else.
In art school, they teach you to struggle through the process: If you have your image down, you've painted it, and it's not looking the way you wanted it to, you can do wet on wet - you just keep moving the image around.
April Rain It is not raining rain to me, It's raining daffodils; In every dimpled drop I see Wild flowers on the hills. The clouds of gray engulf the day And overwhelm the town; It is not raining rain to me, It's raining roses down. It is not raining rain to me, But fields of clover bloom, Where any buccaneering bee May find a bed and room. A health unto the happy! A fig for him who frets!- It is not raining rain to me, It's raining violets.
Fog and smog should not be confused and are easily separated by color. Fog is about the color of the insides of an old split wet summer cottage mattress; smog is the color and consistency of a wet potato chip soaked in a motorman’s glove.
People will never understand the patience a photographer requires to make a great photograph, all they see is the end result. I can stand in front of a leaf with a dew drop, or a rain drop, and stay there for ages just waiting for the right moment. Sure, people think I'm crazy, but who cares? I see more than they do!
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