Top 100 Tana French Quotes
#1. 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
#2. Ireland is such a young society. The British were the ruling class up until they left about a hundred years ago, and we've been trying to work out what our class hierarchy is ever since.
Tana French
#3. Daniel's voice brushed along my cheek like dark feathers, like a long night wind coming down from some far mountain. Take what you want and pay for it, says God.
Tana French
#4. Reminded myself: the ones you don't like are a bonus. They can't fool you as easy as the ones you do.
Tana French
#5. 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
#6. Equality is paper-deep, peel it away with a fingernail.
Tana French
#7. someone else, bore its way in and feed off that mind too. Even the cute little student mincing along in her flowery dress, the shuffling old fella with his shuffling spaniel, they look Ebola-lethal. I don't know what the fuck is wrong with me. Maybe I'm getting the flu.
Tana French
#9. I had always felt that I was an observer, never a participant; that I was watching from behind a thick glass wall as people went about the business of living
and did it with such ease, with a skill that they took for granted and that I had never known.
Tana French
#10. The thing about old neighborhoods: people still mind each other's business.
Tana French
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. I'm not saying that owning a house makes life into some kind of blissful paradise; simply that it makes the difference between freedom and enslavement.
Tana French
#15. 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
#16. I came from a house full of books, so I took reading for granted. I was an outdoorsy little kid, too, so I got the best of both worlds by taking books up trees and reading there.
Tana French
#17. When you look at someone you knew when you were young, you always see the person you first met,
Tana French
#18. If I had to get there without friends, I could do it. Had been doing it. I'd never met anyone who brought me somewhere I wanted to stay, looked at me and saw someone I wanted to be for good; anyone who was worth giving up the more I wanted down the line.
Tana French
#19. Above the front door the fanlight glowed blue, delicate as wing-bones.
Tana French
#20. Even at moments like this, there is a limit to how weird I am prepared to appear.
Tana French
#21. 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
#22. I weaned myself on the nostalgia equivalent of methadone (less addictive, less obvious, less likely to make you crazy): missing what I had never had.
Tana French
#23. I said she's not thick, kid. I didn't say she was Professor fucking Moriarty.
Tana French
#24. For a moment, I felt as if the universe had turned upside down and we were falling softly into an enormous black bowl of stars, and I knew, beyond any doubt, that everything was going to be alright.
Tana French
#25. It was as if Tutankhamen or Miss Havisham had wandered into the pub one night and started bitching about the head on the pints.
Tana French
#26. 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
#27. I had learned early to assume something dark and lethal hidden at the heart of anything I loved. When I couldn't find it, I responded, bewildered and wary, in the only way I knew how: by planting it there myself.
Tana French
#28. Princess. You'd have brought her the moon. Her or me, did
Tana French
#30. The joy of the new, hip, happening, double-espresso Dublin is that you can blame any strange mood on coffee deprivation. This never worked in the era of tea, at least not at the same level of street cred.
Tana French
#31. 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
#32. I laid a hand on his cheek; it was so bright that for a second I thought it was burning me, a pure painless fire.
Tana French
#33. O'Kelly's disregard for cliche is so sweeping that it almost has its own panache. I find this entertaining or irritating or mildly comforting, depending on my mood, but at least it makes it very easy to prepare your script in advance.
Tana French
#34. The techie was still going. Now I want to know what else the dude did while he was messing around in there, right? So I do a scan for any other stuff that was deleted around the same time. And guess what pops up? The entire Outlook PST file. Nuked. At four eleven in the A.M.
Tana French
#36. You'll light your own bloody self on fire if you have to. And then you can pat yourself on the back and tell yourself you knew it all along. Congratulations.
Tana French
#37. I've only got a handful of memories, and I don't want them wearing away, textures rubbing smooth, colors fading from overexposure. When I take them out, once in a blue moon, I need them bright enough to catch my breath and sharp enough to cut.
Tana French
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. Only teenagers think boring is bad. Adults, grown men and women who've been around the block a few times, know that boring is a gift straight from God. Life has more than enough excitement up its sleeve, ready to hit you with as soon as you're not looking, without you adding to the drama.
Tana French
#41. Lexie Madison developed out of nothing like a Polaroid, she curled off the page and hung in the air like incense smoke, a girl with my face and a life from a half-forgotten dream.
Tana French
#42. Her forehead was a maze of anxious little grooves, from a lifetime of wondering about whether everyone within range was OK.
Tana French
#43. When I was acting, I got trained in creating a character as a three-dimensional person. If you're doing it right you should be able to draw an audience into the character's world and make them feel their fears.
Tana French
#44. 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
#45. Wayne," I said to Cassie, while we were getting him a Sprite and watching him pick his acne in the one-way glass. "Why didn't his parents just tattoo 'Nobody in my family has ever finished secondary school' on his forehead at birth?
Tana French
#46. 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
#47. My ribs opened up like windows, I'd forgotten you could breathe that deeply.
Tana French
#48. I'm only talking to one person here. If that's you, then you need to shut up and listen. If it's not, then you need to shut up because no one's talking to you.
Tana French
#49. the room looks like it was bought through some Decorate Your Home app where you plug in your budget and your favorite colors and the whole thing arrives in a van the next day. In
Tana French
#50. My father told me once that the most important thing every man should know is what he would die for.
Tana French
#51. 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
#52. All these private, parallel dimensions, underlying such an innocuous little estate; all these self-contained worlds layered onto the same space.
Tana French
#53. ... 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
#54. Dublin housing prices are a lot like New York ones, except that in New York, you get New York for your money.
Tana French
#55. Cassie," I said, "we've been through this. Once more, with feeling: I remember sweet shining fuck-all.
Tana French
#56. Nothing in this world takes over your blood like a murder case, nothing demands you, mind and body, with such a huge and blazing and irresistible voice.
Tana French
#57. I needed to go into that bare, with nothing from my own life on my body, the way woodcutters' children in fairy tales have to leave their protections behind to enter the enchanted castle; the way votaries in old religions used to go naked to their initiation rites.
Tana French
#58. My body my mind the way I dress the way I walk the way I talk, mine all mine.
Tana French
#59. 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
#60. I've got this theory that human beings are innately religious; we have a belief system. It doesn't have to be a theist form, necessarily. But we need a belief system, some framework on which to hang our behavior.
Tana French
#61. Nobody knows you like people you grew up with.
Tana French
#62. 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
#63. 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. Kevin
Tana French
#64. 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
#65. The Place would already have started the leisurely, enjoyable process of digesting her into just one more piece of local gore-lore, half ghost story and half morality play, half urban myth and half just the way life goes. It would eat her memory whole, the same way its ground had eaten her body.
Tana French
#66. These three children own the summer. They know the wood as surely as they know the microlandscapes of their own grazed knees;put them down blindfolded in any dell or clearing and they could find their way out without putting a foot wrong.
Tana French
#67. Rory is fun when he's pissed off: like a fluffy little attack gerbil.
Tana French
#68. Vicky always did have that kind of mind: since there was basically no activity going on inside her head, conversations went in there and came back out virtually untouched.
Tana French
#69. I'm still very much in the apprentice stage of writing. I read somewhere that you need to write a million words before you know what you're doing - so I'm headed that way, but I'm nowhere near there.
Tana French
#70. Selena had been singing along, absently, gazing into nowhere. She looked at us like she was trying to work out who we were, before she got up
Tana French
#71. sussed you or you're not going to get anywhere, wind it
Tana French
#72. Murder is the thoroughbred stable. Murder is a shine and a dazzle, a smooth ripple like honed muscle, take your breath away. Murder is a brand on your arm, like an elite army unit's, like a gladiator's, saying for all your life: One of us. The finest.
Tana French
#73. 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
#74. Somewhere at the back of my head I heard a click, tiny and irrevocable. Memory magnifies it to a wrenching, echoing crack, but the truth is that it was the very smallness that made it so terrible.
Tana French
#75. You can be a rich scumbag just as easily as a poor scumbag, or you can be a decent human being either way. Money's got nothing to do with it. It's nice to have, but it's not what makes you who you are.
Tana French
#76. Irish politics are tribal, incestuous, tangled and furtive, incomprehensible even to many of the people involved.
Tana French
#77. 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
#78. You can't make a person, a human being with a first kiss and a sense of humor and a favorite sandwich, and then expect her to dissolve back into scribbled notes and whiskeyed coffee when she no longer suits your purposes. I think I always knew she would come back to find me, someday.
Tana French
#79. It does that to you, being a detective. You look at blank space and see gears turning, motives and cunning; nothing looks innocent any more. Most times when you prove away the gears, the blank space looks lovely, peaceful. But that arm: innocent, it looked just as dangerous.
Tana French
#80. Fasting is, I think, a profoundly instinctive form of appeal.
Tana French
#81. Everyone's thought that: maybe even if, maybe we still could, maybe small bits of precious things can be salvaged. No one with cop-on thinks it after the first try. But her voice, quiet and sad, shimmering the air into those pearly colors: for a second I believed it, all over again.
Tana French
#82. I hate nostalgia, it's laziness with prettier accessories ...
Tana French
#83. 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
#84. I should've known the eyes. Wide, bright blue, and something about the delicate arc of the lids: a cat's slant, a pale jeweled girl in an old painting, a secret.
Tana French
#85. I had forgotten that God, or the world, or whatever carves the rules in stone, doesn't give you time off for good behavior.
Tana French
#86. But give me more credit than that. Someone else may have dealt the hand, but I picked it up off the table, I played every card, and I had my reasons.
Tana French
#87. It meant nothing. Some people are like that: everything comes out like a lie. Not that they're brilliant liars, just that they're useless at telling the truth. You get left with no way to tell what's the real fake and what's the fake one.
Tana French
#88. People hurt each other. That's how it works. At least you were trying to do something good. Not everyone can say that much.
Tana French
#89. 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
#91. This has nothing to do with what anyone else in all the world would approve or forbid. This is all their own.
Tana French
#92. Her boarders are so hard and bright that these lumpy things are being blinded just by looking at her; she's opaque, she's impermeable, she's a million densities and dimensions more real than any of them. They break against her and roll off like mist.
Tana French
#93. If you think you're a success, you will be a success; if you think you deserve nothing but crap, you'll get nothing but crap. Your inner reality shapes your outer one, every day of your life.
Tana French
#94. 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
#95. I loved him, you know,' she said. 'I would have loved him as hard as he'd let me, for the rest of my life.
Tana French
#96. Everyone knows a wife and kids tie you down. What people miss sometimes is that mates, the proper kind, they do the same just as hard. Mates mean you've settled, made your bargain: this, wherever you are together, this is as far as you're going, ever. This is your stop; this is where you get off.
Tana French
#97. 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
#98. The economic boom has given us too many people with helicopters and too many crushed into cockroachy flats from hell, way too many loathing their lives in fluorescent cubicles, enduring for the weekend and then starting all over again, and we're fracturing under the weight of it.
Tana French
#99. Who who whose smell in the air of her room, whose fingerprints all over her friends' secret places.
Tana French
#100. Don't you ever feel that - that you just need to get away? From everything? That it's all too much?
Tana French
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
