Love Quote by Donna Tartt

Tartt is praising a kind of excess that looks, at first glance, like ornament: Dickens giving even the guy who delivers a message a grotesque habit, a verbal tic, a little private weather system. But the admiration is strategic. “Tradition” signals lineage and permission. In an era that often prizes leanness, minimalism, and the “necessary” scene, Tartt is staking a claim for maximalist generosity: the novel as a crowded street, not a minimalist gallery.

Her key verbs do the work. “Twitching” is physical, comic, faintly unsettling; it suggests the body refuses to behave politely for the plot. “Particular” is the moral and aesthetic argument: specificity is what makes fiction feel true, even when it’s stylized. “Alive” is the payoff, but it’s earned through the earlier oddness. She’s not arguing for realism so much as vitality, the sense that the world exceeds the narrator’s control.

The subtext is also a defense of craft. Walk-ons that feel real require an author who watches obsessively and chooses details with intent. Dickens’s supposedly minor figures become proof of a social vision: a society isn’t made of protagonists alone. Tartt, whose own novels luxuriate in atmosphere and secondary life, is implicitly rejecting the idea that everything in a book must serve the main arc like a dutiful employee. The minor character’s twitch is a quiet rebellion against narrative efficiency - and a reminder that what readers remember isn’t just what happened, but who brushed past whom on the way.