Tana French Quotes

He was like a huge smug albatross waddling around my desk, squawking vacuously and crapping all over my paperwork. ~ Tana French

I never knew, not then, not now, whether Cassie thought she had hung up, or whether she wanted to hurt me, or whether she wanted to give me one last gift, one last night listening to her breathe. ~ Tana French

Some people should never meet. ~ Tana French

The wave of pure outrage blindsided me. I shouldn't be here, I thought. This is utterly fucked up. I should have been sitting in a garden down the road, barefoot with a drink in my hand, swapping the day's work stories with Peter and Jamie. I had never thought about this before, and it almost knocked me over: all the things we should have had. We should have stayed up all night together studying and stressing out before exams, Peter and I should have argued over who got to bring Jamie to our first dance and slagged her about how she looked in her dress. We should have come weaving home together, singing and laughing and inconsiderate, after drunken college nights. We could have shared a flat, taken off Interrailing around Europe, gone arm-in-arm through dodgy fashion phases and low-rent gigs and high-drama love affairs. Two of us might have been married by now, given the other one a godchild. I had been robbed blind. ~ Tana French

I don't do that kind of negativity. If you put your energy into thinking about how much the fall would hurt, you're already halfway down. ~ Tana French

I had started trying - it for the first time, really - it to remember what had happened in that wood. I prodded tentatively around the edges of it, barely acknowledging even to myself what I was doing, like a kid picking at a scab but afraid to look. ~ Tana French

I always figured nerves were for Jane Austen characters and helium-voiced girls who never buy their round; I would no more have turned shaky in a crisis than I would have carried smelling salts around in my reticule. ~ Tana French

... out here in the real world, my man, you would be amazed how seldom murder has to break into people's lives. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it gets there because they open the door and invite it in. ~ Tana French

We've become a nation of defaulters: we buy on credit, and when the bill comes in, we're so deeply outraged that we refuse even to look at it. ~ Tana French

Irish politics are tribal, incestuous, tangled and furtive, incomprehensible even to many of the people involved. ~ Tana French

You forget what it was like. You'd swear on your life you never will, but year by year it falls away. How your temperature ran off the mercury, your heart galloped flat-out and never needed to rest, everything was pitched on the edge of shattering glass. How wanting something was like dying of thirst. How your skin was too fine to keep out any of the million things flooding by; every color boiled bright enough to scald you, any second of any day could send you soaring or rip you to bloody shreds. ~ Tana French

Now that's a concept that's always fascinated me: the real world. Only a very specific subset of people use the term, have you noticed? To me, it seems self-evident that everyone lives in the real world - we all breathe real oxygen, eat real food, the earth under our feet feels equally solid to all of us. But clearly these people have a far more tightly circumscribed definition of reality, one that I find deeply mysterious, and an almost pathologically intense need to bring others into line with that definition. ~ Tana French

I put my time and energy into bringing answers, not hugs and hot chocolate. ~ Tana French

The shot of cold air hits Becca like it's been fired straight through the glass from the huge outside, wild and magic, pungent with foxes and juniper. ~ Tana French

Ah, dammit to hell and blast and nonspecific fornication" I said, when the rivet went shooting off into the grass again. "Is everyone OK with that?"
"What's wrong with nonspecific fornication?" Abby demanded. "I don't like my fornication specific. ~ Tana French

We had no one else to learn this from- none of our parents were shining examples of relationship success- so we learned this from each other: when someone you love needs you to, you can get a hold of your five-alarm temper, get a hold of the shapeless things that scare you senseless, act like an adult instead of the Cro-Magnon teenager you are, you can do a million things you never saw coming. ~ Tana French

The sudden, painful flare of envy caught me by surprise. I was a loner, my last few years in school. I could have done with a friend like that. ~ Tana French

I suppose I've always had a yearning, in spite of the fact that I am temperamentally unsuited to the role in every possible way, to be a hero out of myth, golden and reckless, galloping bareback to meet my fate on a wild horse no other man could ride. ~ Tana French

If you're writing a scene for a character with whom you disagree in every way, you still need to show how that character is absolutely justified in his or her own mind, or the scene will come across as being about the author's views rather than about the character's. ~ Tana French

The smell of the sea swept over the wall and in through the empty window-hole, wide and wild with a million intoxicating secrets. I don't trust that smell. It hooks us somewhere deeper than reason or civilization, in the fragments of our cells that rocked in oceans before we had minds, and it pulls till we follow mindlessly as rutting animals ... It lures us to leap off high cliffs, fling ourselves on towering waves, leaves behind everyone we love and face into thousands of miles of open water for the sake of what might be on the far shore. ~ Tana French

That's why we have rules to begin with, Richie: because you can't trust your mind to tell you what's right and wrong. ~ Tana French

I felt different, changing. Like today was my day, if I could just figure out how. Like danger, but my danger, sweet tricky urgent luck, tumbling through the air, heads or tails? ~ Tana French

... Obviously, I have always wished I could remember what happened in that wood. The very few people who know about the whole Knocknaree thing invariably suggest, sooner or later, that I should try hypnotic regression, but for some reason I find the idea distasteful. I'm deeply suspicious of anything with a whiff of the New Age about it - not because of the practices themselves, which as far as I can tell from a safe distance may well have a lot to them, but because of the people who get involved who always seem to be the kind who corner you at parties to explain how they discovered that they are survivors and deserve to be happy. I worry that I might come out of hypnosis with that sugar-high glaze of self-satisfied enlightenment, like a seventeen-year-old who's just discovered Kerouak, and start proselytizing strangers in pubs ... ~ Tana French

I love the unspoken dress code. ~ Tana French

My ribs opened up like windows, I'd forgotten you could breathe that deeply. ~ Tana French

A girl gives her boyfriend an alibi for the evening when we suspect him of robbing a north-side Centra and stabbing the clerk. I flirt with her at first, telling her I can see why he would want to stay home when he's got her; she is peroxided and greasy, with flat, stunted features of generations of malnutrition, and privately I am thinking that if I were her boyfriend I would be relieved to trade her even for a hairy cellmate named Razor. ~ Tana French

Both back when I was acting and now that I'm writing, I've always wanted the same thing out of my career: to be able to get up in the morning and do what I love doing. ~ Tana French

Always fuck with people's expectations, sunshine. It's good for their circulation. ~ Tana French

I am not good at noticing when I'm happy, except in retrospect. ~ Tana French

Alison's mum has had a lot of plastic surgery and she wears fake eyelashes the size of hairbrushes. She looks sort of like a person but not really, like someone explained to aliens what a person is and they did their best to make one of their own. ~ Tana French

My memories of them had rubbed thin with overuse, worn to frail color transparencies flickering on the walls of my mind ~ Tana French

The clothes felt like something more: fine chain-mail armor handmade to fit me, or robes laid out ready for some fiercely secret ceremony. They made my palms tingle when I touched them. ~ Tana French

Selena feels the hidden things thinning away to black veils you could pop with a fingertip, puddling into harmless sleep on the ground. ~ Tana French

What I saw transformed with a click like a shaken kaleidoscope. I stopped falling in love with her and started to like her immensely. ~ Tana French

If you care more about them than they do about you, they hate you for it. ~ Tana French

Don't fool yourself: we all have a cruel streak. We keep it under lock and key either because we're afraid of getting punished or because we believe this will somehow make a difference, make the world a better place. ~ Tana French

Have a good laugh at this, ... Deep down, I never for a second never thought they would find anything. ~ Tana French

When we left school, it was the early eighties. This country was on its knees. There were no jobs, none. If you couldn't go into Daddy's business, you emigrated or went on the dole. Even if you had the money and the points for college - and we didn't - that just put it off for a few years. ~ Tana French

When you're a little kid, you think people are just one thing; but then you get older, and you realize it's not that simple. Chris wasn't that simple. He was cruel and he was kind. And he didn't like realizing that. It bothered him, that he wasn't just one thing. It made him feel fragile. Like he could break into pieces any time, because he didn't know how to hold himself together. That was why he did that with those other girls, went with them and kept it secret: so he could try out being different things and see how it felt, and he'd be safe. He could be as lovely as he wanted or as horrible as he wanted, and it wouldn't count, because no one else would ever know. ~ Tana French

Sam's shoulders shifted. He thought Frank was just being smart-arsed. but Sam's never done undercover, he had no way of knowing: undercovers are different: there's nothing they won't do, to themselves or anyone else, to take their guy down. There was no point arguing on this one because he meant what he said: if his kid were killed, he would take it without a murmur. It's one of the most powerful lures of undercover, the ruthlessness, no borderlines: strong stuff, strong enough to take your breath away.It's one of the reasons I left. ~ Tana French

I had been right: freedom smelled like ozone and thunderstorms and gunpowder all at once, like snow and bonfires and cut grass, it tasted like seawater and oranges. ~ Tana French

I was never afraid of getting killed and I was never afraid of losing my nerve. My kind of courage holds up best under fire; it's different dangers, more refined and insidious ones, that shake me. ~ Tana French

give my family an inch and they'll move into your house and start redecorating. ~ Tana French

I looked at the back of Jessica's silky bent head and thought of those old stories where one twin is hurt and the other, miles away, feels the pain. I wondered if there had been a moment, during that giggly girls' night at Auntie Vera's, when she had made some small, unnoticed sound; if all the answers we wanted were locked away behind the strange dark gateways of her mind. ~ Tana French

About your easy heads my prayers
I said with syllables of clay.
What gift, I asked, shall I bring now
Before I weep and walk away?
Take, they replied, the oak and laurel.
Take our fortune of tears and live
Like a spendthrift lover. All we ask
Is the one gift you cannot give. ~ Tana French

The department shrink spent weeks trying to convince me I was deeply traumatized, but eventually he had to give up, admit I was fine (sort of regretfully; he doesn't get a lot of stabbed cops to play with, I think he was hoping I would have some kind of fancy complex) and let me go back to work. ~ Tana French

Everyone else we knew growing up is the same: image of their parents, no matter how loud they told themselves they'd be different ~ Tana French

Interesting fact from the front lines: raw grief smells like ripped leaves and splintered branches, a jagged green shriek. ~ Tana French

I wanted it the way an alcoholic must want booze: badly enough to shove aside the hard knowledge that this was a truly lousy idea. ~ Tana French

These children will not be coming of age, this or any other summer. This August will not ask them to find hidden reserves of strength and courage as they confront the complexity of the adult world and come away sadder and wiser and bonded for life. This summer has other requirement for them. ~ Tana French

If she had hurt me, I could have forgiven her without even having to think about it; but I couldn't forgive her for being hurt. ~ Tana French

Time works so hard for us, if only we can let it. ~ Tana French

Boyle is a round, pancake-faced little oddball who gives you the impression that he has a room at home packed with disturbing magazines, neatly alphabetized, but he runs a scene impeccably ~ Tana French

I reckon it was always going to happen, one way or another. She wasn't made right for this world. She'd been running away from it since she was nine. ~ Tana French

If I believed in curses, I would believe that this is mine: when it matters most, in the moments when I know with the greatest clarity exactly what needs to be done, everything I say comes out wrong. ~ Tana French

We were still at the age when girls are years older than guy, and the guys grow up by doing their best when the girls need them to. ~ Tana French

A bore or an uggo might manage not to get up anyone's nose, but if a girl's got brains and looks and personality, she's going to piss someone off, somewhere along the way. ~ Tana French

I love beautiful; always have. I never saw why I should hate what I wish I had. Love it harder. Work your way closer. Clasp your hands around it tighter. Till you find a way to make it yours. ~ Tana French

I have always loved simplicity. With you, everything's black and white, Richie had said, like an accusation; but the truth is that almost every murder case is, if not simple, capable of simplicity, and that this is not only necessary but breathtaking, that if there are miracles then this is one. In these rooms, the world's vast hissing tangle of shadows burns away, all its treacherous grays are honed to the stark purity of a bare blade, two-edged: cause and effect, good and evil. To me, these rooms are beautiful. I go into them the way a boxer goes into the ring: intent, invincible, home. ~ Tana French

This is the one thing I hope: that she never stopped. I hope when her body couldn't run any farther she left it behind like everything else that tried to hold her down, she floored the pedal and she went like wildfire, streamed down night freeways with both hands off the wheel and her head back screaming to the sky like a lynx, white lines and green lights whipping away into the dark, her tires inches off the ground and freedom crashing up her spine. ~ Tana French

What does he have to be jealous of? No, I think the mentality has its origins in the Puritan moral framework: the emphasis on fitting into a strict hierarchical structure, the element of self-loathing, the horror of anything pleasurable or artistic or unregimented ... But I've always wondered how that paradigm made the transition to become the boundary, not just of virtue, but of reality itself. ~ Tana French

But that age; remember that age? They're not the same. They don't put things together. That's why half of what they do looks full-on certifiable, to you or me or any sane adult. Things don't make sense, when you're that age; you don't make sense. You stop expecting to. ~ Tana French

She [88yo Mrs Fitzgerald] crossed herself and patted my arm. "And you're after coming all the way from England to find out who done it? Aren't you great? God bless you, young fella."
"The old heretic," I said, when we got outside. Mrs. Fitzgerald had cheered up my day immensely. "I hope I have that much zip when I'm eighty-eight ~ Tana French

Two of the human race's greatest myths: the possibility of permanence, and the simplicity of human nature. ~ Tana French

Every detective has a certain kind of case that he or she finds almost unbearable, against which the usual shield of practiced professional detachment turns brittle and untrustworthy. Cassie, though nobody else knows this, has nightmares when she works rape-murders; I, displaying a singular lack of originality, have serious trouble with murdered children; and, apparently, family killings gave Sam the heebie-jeebies. This case could turn out to be perfect for all three of us. ~ Tana French

In the hazy afternoon light through the windows he looked beautiful and dissolute, shirt open at the collar and streaks of golden hair falling into his eyes, like some Regency buck after a long night's dancing. ~ Tana French

Knocknaree wood was the real thing, and it was more intricate and more secretive than I had remembered. It had its own order, its own fierce battles and alliances. I was an intruder here, now, and I had a deep prickling sense that my presence had instantly been marked and that the wood was watching me, with an equivocal collected gaze, not yet accepting or rejecting; reserving judgement. ~ Tana French

I watched her on the stand in that unfamiliar suit and thought of the soft hairs at the back of her neck, warm and smelling of the sun, and it seemed an impossible thing to me, it seemed the vastest and saddest miracle of my life: I touched her hair, once. ~ Tana French

Most people are only too delighted to wreck each other's heads. And for the tiny minority who do their pathetic best not to, this world is going to go right ahead and make sure they do it anyway. ~ Tana French

There was something intoxicating about this. I kept wanting to laugh, just at the lavish giddy freedom of it: relatives and countries and possibilities spread out in front of me and I could pick whatever I wanted, I could grow up in a palace in Bhutan with seventeen brothers and sisters and a personal chauffeur if I felt like it. ~ Tana French

In some ways grief anonymizes as powerfully as a Greek tragedy mask. ~ Tana French

Privately, I consider religion to be a load of bollocks, but when you have a sobbing five year old wanting to know what happened to her hamster, you develop an instant belief in anything that dissolves some of the heartbreak off her face. ~ Tana French

The closest I'd ever got to seeing a naked woman before was black and white cleavage, and then Rosie tossed her clothes in a corner just like they were getting in the way and spun around in the dim light of Number 16, palms up, luminous, laughing, almost close enough to touch. The thought still knocks the wind out of me. I was too young even to know what I wanted to do about her, I just knew nothing in the World, not the Mona Lisa walking through the Grand Canyon with the Holy Grail in one hand and a winning lotto ticket in the other, was ever going to be that beautiful. ~ Tana French

There was a time when I believed I was the redeemed one, the boy borne safely home on the ebb of whatever freak tide carried Peter and Jamie away. Not any more. In ways too dark and crucial to be called metaphorical, I never left that wood. ~ Tana French

I'm not the type to look back over my shoulder, or at least I try hard not to be. Gone is gone; pretending anything else is a waste of time. ~ Tana French

I said I know my shot when I see it. Sometimes you don't even have to see it. Sometimes you feel it coming, screaming down the sky towards you like a meteor. ~ Tana French

What's been coming to Becca, since all this began, is this: real isn't what they try to tell you. Time isn't. Grown-ups hammer down all these markers, bells schedules coffee-breaks, to stake down time so you'll start believing it's something small and mean, something that scrapes flake after flake off of everything you love till there's nothing left; to stake you down so you won't lift off and fly away, somersaulting through whirlpools of months, skimming through eddies of glittering seconds, pouring handfuls of hours over your upturned face. ~ Tana French

Or maybe, and I like to hope it was this one, because the truth is more intricate and less attainable than I used to understand, a bright illusive place reached by twisting back roads as often as by straight avenues, and this was the closest I could come. ~ Tana French

Rory is fun when he's pissed off: like a fluffy little attack gerbil. ~ Tana French

Plenty of people think the same thing. All of them are teenagers, mentally if not physically. Only teenagers think boring is bad. Adults, gown men and women who've been around the block a few times, know that boring is a gift straight from God. ~ Tana French

Voices tossed up and down the long flights of stairs, sourceless and intertwining like crickets' chorus, gentle as fingers on my hair. Night, they said, good night, sleep well. Welcome back, Lexie. Yes, welcome back. Good night. Sweet dreams. ~ Tana French

sussed you or you're not going to get anywhere, wind it ~ Tana French

Some stuff is gonna find a way to happen; once it's got started, you can't stop it no matter what you do. ~ Tana French

My father once told me that the most important thing every man should know is what he would die for. If you don't know that, he said, what are you worth? Nothing. You're not a man at all. ~ Tana French

Frank told me once
and I don't know whether he's right or not, and I didn't tell Sam this either
that all the best undercovers have a dark thread woven into them, somewhere. ~ Tana French

How's Alison getting on?'

Conway snorted. 'Tucked up in the sick room like she's dying in some season finale. Little fadey voice on her and all. She's having a great old time. ~ Tana French

Who who whose smell in the air of her room, whose fingerprints all over her friends' secret places. ~ Tana French

I know what the right woman, at the right moment, can do to a man- not that Tessie seemed to have got away scot-free herself. Some people should never meet. The fallout spreads too wide and gets into the ground for much too long. ~ Tana French

They are forever, a brief and mortal forever, a forever that will grow into their bones and be held inside them after it ends, intact, indestructible. ~ Tana French

She doesn't approve of either sentimentality or graveyard humor at crime scenes. She says they waste time that should be spent working on the damn case, but the implication is that coping strategies are for wimps. ~ Tana French

Now it seems obvious, of course, that even a strong person has weak spots and that I had hit Cassie's full force, with all the precision of a jeweler fragmenting a stone along a flaw. She must have thought, sometimes, of her namesake, the votary branded with her god's most inventive and sadistic curse: to tell the truth, and never to be believed. ~ Tana French

If you rewrite a paragraph fifty times and forty-nine of them are terrible, that's fine; you only need to get it right once. ~ Tana French

My body my mind the way I dress the way I walk the way I talk, mine all mine. ~ Tana French

So what are you thinking?" I asked.
I meant about the case, obviously, but Cassie was in a giddy mood
she generates more energy than most people, and she'd been sitting indoors most of the day.
"Will you listen to him? A woman asking a guy what he's thinking is the ultimate crime, she's clingy and needy and he runs a mile, but when it's the other
"
"Behave yourself," I said, pulling her hood over her face.
"Help! I'm being oppressed!" she yelled through it. "Call the Equality Commission." The stroller girl gave us a sour look.
"You're overexcited," I told Cassie. "Calm down or I'll take you home with no ice cream. ~ Tana French

I can't explain the alchemy that transmuted one evening into the equivalent of years held lightly in common. The only way I can put it is that we recognized, too surely even for surprise, that we shared the same currency. ~ Tana French

When we can't see a pattern, we fit pieces together until one takes shape, because we have to. ~ Tana French

My hand was on the door handle when for a split second out of nowhere I was terrified, blue-blazing terrified, fear dropping straight through me like a jagged black stone falling fast. I'd felt this before, in the limbo instants before I moved out of my aunt's house, lost my virginity, took my oath as a police officer: those instants when the irrevocable thing you wanted so much suddenly turns real and solid, inches away and speeding at you, a bottomless river rising and no way back once it's crossed. I had to catch myself back from crying out like a little kid drowning in terror, I don't want to do this any more. ~ Tana French

Picture a summer stolen whole from some coming-of-age film set in the small-town 1950s. This is none of Ireland's subtle seasons mixed for a connoisseur's palate, watercolor nuances within a pinch-sized range of cloud and soft rain; this is summer full-throated and extravagant in a hot pure silkscreen blue. This summer explodes on your tongue tasting of chewed blades of long grass, your own clean sweat, Marie biscuits with butter squirting through the holes and shaken bottles of red lemonade picnicked in tree houses. It tingles on your skin with BMX wind in your face, ladybug feet up your arm; it packs every breath full of mown grass and billowing wash lines; it chimes and fountains with birdcalls, bees, leaves and football-bounces and skipping-chants, One! two! three! This summer will never end. It starts every day with a shower of Mr. Whippy notes and your best friend's knock at the door, finishes it with long slow twilight and mothers silhouetted in doorways calling you to come in, through the bats shrilling among the black lace trees. This is Everysummer decked in all its best glory. ~ Tana French

This is the truth of bombed-out ruins: hit a city hard enough and the cheap arrogant veneer will crumble faster than you can snap your fingers; it's the old stuff, the stuff that's endured, that might just keep enduring. I ~ Tana French

To my mind the defining characteristic of our era is spin, everything tailored to vanishing point by market research, brands and bands manufactured to precise specifications; we are so used to things transmuting into whatever we would like them to be that it comes as a profound outrage to encounter death, stubbornly unspinnable, only and immutably itself. The ~ Tana French