Top 100 Tana French Quotes
#1. A man needs to know when to let things lie." I
Tana French
#3. Princess. You'd have brought her the moon. Her or me, did
Tana French
#4. 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
#5. What I am telling you, before you begin my story, is this
two things: I crave truth. And I lie.
Tana French
#6. Breslin gives me his wise-teacher smile, which is kind and crinkly and would make me feel warm all over if I was dumber than a bag of hair.
Tana French
#7. 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
#8. Sometimes, when you're close to someone, you miss things. Other people can see them, but you can't.
Tana French
#9. Rule Number Three, and Four and Five and about a dozen more: you do not go with the flow in this job. You make the flow go with you.
Tana French
#10. I am, of course, romanticizing; a chronic tendency of mine.
Tana French
#11. There was a great jagged hole where they had ripped out the fireplace; the wall around it was crowded with faded graffiti explain who loved who, who was gay and who should fuck off.
Tana French
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. If you want to kill someone, have enough respect for my time to make it someone, anyone, other than the most gobsmackingly obvious person in the world. One
Tana French
#15. there are deep stubborn veins of nostalgia for the 1950s (even among people my age; in much of Ireland the fifties didn't end until 1995, when we skipped straight to Thatcher's eighties),
Tana French
#16. 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
#17. All my signposts had gone up in one blinding, dizzying explosion [ ... ] none of the scenery looked familiar anymore.
Tana French
#18. 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
#19. The front door opened smoothly to my key, the air inside stirred as I came in and it didn't feel over-intimate anymore; it felt like a slight smile and a cool brief touch on the cheek, like a welcome.
Tana French
#20. When we can't see a pattern, we fit pieces together until one takes shape, because we have to.
Tana French
#21. I said she's not thick, kid. I didn't say she was Professor fucking Moriarty.
Tana French
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. The truth is the most desirable woman in the world and we are the most jealous lovers, reflexively denying anyone else the slightest glimpse of her.
Tana French
#27. One of my da's tragedies was always the fact that he was bright enough to understand just how comprehensively he had shat all over his life.
Tana French
#28. 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
#29. Once the ruler is no longer willing to be the sacrifice for his people, he becomes not a leader but a leech,
Tana French
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. If I've learned one thing today, it's that teenage girls make Moriarty look like a babe in the woods. Detective Stephen Moran
Tana French
#35. That kind of absolute faith is one of those things that, like virginity, can only be lost once
Tana French
#36. I have no time for people who sigh about how quickly children grow up nowadays (my grandparents, after all, were working full-time by sixteen, which I think trumps any number of body piercings in the adulthood stakes),
Tana French
#37. Time works so hard for us, if only we can let it.
Tana French
#39. Human beings, as I know better than most, can get used to anything. Over time, even the unthinkable gradually wears a little niche for itself in your mind and becomes just something that happened.
Tana French
#40. 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
#41. Two of the human race's greatest myths: the possibility of permanence, and the simplicity of human nature.
Tana French
#42. It was your basic Irish summer day, irritatingly coy, all sun and skidding clouds and jackknifing breeze, ready at any second to make an effortless leap into bucketing rain or blazing sun or both.
Tana French
#43. It doesn't matter where you come from. There's nothing you can do about it, so don't waste your energy thinking about it. What matters is where you're going. And that, mate, is something you can control.
Tana French
#44. I told people I was taking a gap year, but the truth was that I wanted to do nothing, absolutely nothing, for as long as possible, maybe for the rest of my life.
Tana French
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. If you care more about them than they do about you, they hate you for it.
Tana French
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. The lines of her face, turned up to the sky, would have broken your heart.
Tana French
#53. And I didn't need telepathy, either. Ask any woman you're ever had a relationship with: I guarantee she knew she was second best. A placeholder, till the one you actually wanted came home.
Tana French
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. Underneath he has on jeans and a baggy beige jumper that's twenty quids' worth of knitted depression. "Let's
Tana French
#57. The thing about old neighborhoods: people still mind each other's business.
Tana French
#58. 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
#60. Girlfriends aren't allowed to care if you have Stilton socks. Friends are." All the same, she gave her hands a quick, professional shake and took hold of my foot. "Plus, you might be less of a pain in the arse if you got more action.
Tana French
#61. If it was true. This case was jammed with lies, couldn't grab hold of it without getting a handful.
Tana French
#62. That long sigh again, above us. This time I saw it, moving through the branches. Like the trees were listening; like they would've been sad about us, sad for us, only they'd heard it all so many thousand times before.
Tana French
#63. Mental' isn't a reason. It comes in an awful lot of flavors, most of them are non-violent, and every single one of them has some kind of logic, whether or not it makes sense to you and me.
Tana French
#64. 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
#65. Equality is paper-deep, peel it away with a fingernail.
Tana French
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. I put my time and energy into bringing answers, not hugs and hot chocolate.
Tana French
#70. 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
#71. Interesting fact from the front lines: raw grief smells like ripped leaves and splintered branches, a jagged green shriek.
Tana French
#72. Be scared terrified petrified that everything you are is every kind of wrong. Good girl. At
Tana French
#73. Don't get discouraged if you're hammering away at a sentence or a paragraph or a chapter, and it keeps coming out wrong. You're allowed to get it wrong, as many times as you need to; you only need to get it right once.
Tana French
#74. We think of mortality so little these days ...
I thought of the stern Victorian determination to keep death in mind, the uncompromising tombstones.
Remember, pilgrim, as you pass by,
As you are now so once was I:
As I am so will you be ...
Tana French
#75. 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
#76. When you look at someone you knew when you were young, you always see the person you first met,
Tana French
#77. I spend my days watching soap operas, eating bonbons and plotting society's downfall.
Tana French
#78. 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
#79. Even at moments like this, there is a limit to how weird I am prepared to appear.
Tana French
#80. Above the front door the fanlight glowed blue, delicate as wing-bones.
Tana French
#81. 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
#82. She informed me, matter-of-factly, that she was old enough to know the difference between intriguing and fucked up. "You should go for younger women," she advised me. "They can't always tell.
Tana French
#83. She was older, no longer the wicked limber girl with the stalled Vespa, but no less beautiful to me for that: whatever elliptical beauty Cassie possesses has always lain not in the vulnerable planes of color and texture but deeper, in the polished contours of her bones.
Tana French
#84. Aidan pulled against his bonds. "They keep talking to him in a whole bunch of languages. A lot of French. Something about the Thorn of Istra. I think he's in trouble."
"Are you?" Tana asked.
"Not exactly," said Gavriel.
Holly Black
#85. Trust your instincts, Dad always says. If something feels dodgy to you, if someone feels dodgy, you go with dodgy. Don't give the benefit of the doubt because you want to be a nice person, don't wait and see in case you look stupid. Safe comes first. Second could be too late.
Tana French
#86. In my neighborhood, gossip is a competitive sport that's been raised to Olympic standard, and I never diss gossip; I revere it with all my heart.
Tana French
#87. My memories of them had rubbed thin with overuse, worn to frail color transparencies flickering on the walls of my mind
Tana French
#88. She wants to leap up and do a handstand, or get someone to race her fast and far to wreck them both: anything that will turn her body back into something that's about what it can do, not all about how it looks.
Tana French
#89. This watching through cool intent eyes and delicately adjusting one factor or another till a man's fundamental instinct for self-preservation cracks, is savagery in its most pure, most polished and most highly evolved form.
Tana French
#90. 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
#91. Smoked like it was fuel and he was going to get every last inch to the gallon.
Tana French
#92. 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
#93. We think about mortality so little, these days, except to flail hysterically at it with trendy forms of exercise and high-fiber cereals and nicotine patches.
Tana French
#94. But a girl who goes into battle beside you and keeps your back is a different thing, a thing to make you shiver.
Tana French
#95. I wanted to tell her that being loved is a talent too, that it takes as much guts and as much work as loving; that some people, for whatever reason, never learn the knack
Tana French
#96. Have a good laugh at this, ... Deep down, I never for a second never thought they would find anything.
Tana French
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
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