Tana French Quotes & Sayings

I don't think there are any rules for how you're supposed to act when someone you care about dies, sweetheart. I think you just have to figure it out as you go along. Sometimes you'll feel like crying, sometimes you won't, sometimes you'll be raging at him for dying on you. You just have to remember that all of those are OK. So is whatever else your head comes up with." "On — Tana French

There was a tiny silence, only the soft hum of the fluorescence. I thought of her in the cold ruined house, with night birds keening above her and rain gentle all around, dying of breathing — Tana French

It took my breath away, that evening. If you've ever dreamed that you walked into your best-loved book or film or TV program, then maybe you've got some idea how it felt: things coming alive around you, strange and new and utterly familiar at the same time; the catch in your heartbeat as you move through the rooms that had such a vivid untouchable life in your mind, as your feet actually touch the carpet, as you breathe the air; the odd, secret glow of warmth as these people you've been watching for so long, from so far away, open their circle and sweep you into it. — Tana French

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

Don't you ever feel that - that you just need to get away? From everything? That it's all too much? — 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

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

sussed you or you're not going to get anywhere, wind it — 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

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

This case was too full of skewed, slippery parallels, and I couldn't shake the uneasy sense that they were somehow deliberate. Every coincidence felt like a sea-worn bottle slammed down on the sand at my feet, with my name engraved neatly on the glass and inside a message in some mockingly indecipherable code. — Tana French

The thing about being a mystery writer, what marks a mystery writer out from a chick lit author or historical fiction writer, is that you always find a mystery in every situation. — Tana French

I stayed because running seemed too strange and too complicated. All I knew was how to fall back, find a patch of solid ground, and then dig my heels in and fight to start over. — Tana French

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

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

When you look at someone you knew when you were young, you always see the person you first met, — Tana French

There's optimistic, and then there's plain crazy. — 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

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

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

I listen to the things people want out of love these days and they blow my mind. I go to the pub with the boys from the squad and listen while they explain, with minute precision, exactly what shape a woman should be, what bits she should shave how, what acts she should perform on which date and what she should always or never do or say or want; I eavesdrop on women in cafes while they reel off lists of which jobs a man is allowed, which cars, which labels, which flowers and restaurants and gemstones get the stamp of approval, and I want to shout, Are you people out of your tiny minds? — Tana French

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

And God the taste of undercover on my tongue again, the brush of it down the little hairs on my arms. I'd thought I remembered what it was like, every detail, but I'd been wrong: memories are nothing, soft as gauze against the ruthless razor-fineness of that edge, beautiful and lethal, one tiny slip and it'll slice to the bone. — Tana French

This is not an easy thing to admit, but until that moment I had held out some craven speck of hope that this had all been a hideous misunderstanding. A boy who would say anything he thought you wanted to hear, a girl made vicious by trauma and grief and my rejection on top of it all; we could have misinterpreted in any one of a hundred ways. It was only in that moment, in the ease of that gratuitous lie, that I understood that Rosalind - the Rosalind I had known, the bruised, captivating, unpredictable girl with whom I had laughed in the Central and held hands on a bench - had never existed. Everything she had ever shown me had been constructed for effect, with the absorbed, calculating care that goes into an actor's costume. Underneath the myriad shimmering veils, this was something as simple and deadly as razor wire. — 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 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

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

When she was born I wanted to go out and kill someone for her, so she would know for sure, all her life, that I was ready to do it if it needed doing. — Tana French

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

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

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

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

That kind of friendship doesn't just materialize at the end of the rainbow one morning in a soft-focus Hollywood haze. For it to last this long, and at such close quarters, some serious work had gone into it. Ask any ice-skater or ballet dancer or show jumper, anyone who lives by beautiful moving things: nothing takes as much work as effortlessness. — 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

They always act like they're having an amazing time, they're louder and high-pitched, shoving each other and screaming with laughter at nothing. But Becca knows what they're like when they're happy, and that's not it. Their faces on the way home afterwards look older and strained, smeared with the scraps of leftover expressions that were pressed on too hard and won't lift away. — Tana French

Not just the normal back-and-forth. A prickle in the air, a slicing edge. I couldn't tell if it was about her, or just the day that was it, or if it was the squad. Murder is different. The beat goes faster and harder; the tightrope is higher and narrower. One foot wrong, and you're gone. — 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

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

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

The idea was flawed, of course," he said irritably. "Innately and fatally flawed. It depended on two of the human race's greatest myths: the possibility of permanence, and the simplicity of human nature. Both of which are all well and good in literature, but the purest fantasy outside the covers of a book. Our story should have stopped that night with the cold cocoa, the night we moved in: and they all lived happily ever after, the end. Inconveniently, however, real life demanded that we keep on living. — Tana French

The overhead light streaked — Tana French

Ah, background checks,' I say. 'The foundation of every beautiful romance. — Tana French

Regardless of the advertising campaigns may tell us, we can't have it all. Sacrifice is not an option, or an anachronism; it's a fact of life. We all cut off our own limbs to burn on some altar. The crucial thing is to choose an altar that's worth it and a limb you can accept losing. To go consenting to the sacrifice. — Tana French

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

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

Take what you want and pay for it, says God. You can have anything you want, as long as you accept that there is a price and you will have to pay it. — Tana French

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

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

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

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

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

It stunned me. I had never said it before. I knew that I would never say it again, not really; that you only get one shot at in a lifetime. I got mine out of nowhere on a misty autumn evening, under a street lamp shining yellow streaks on the wet pavement, with Rosie's strong pliable fingers woven through mine. — Tana French

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

I have always been caught by the pull of the unremarkable, by the easily missed, infinitely nourishing beauty of the mundane. — 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

I wasn't sure I could make it through another hour of his company without throwing my stapler at his head. — Tana French

Ma and Mrs. Daly were on speaking terms, most of the time; women prefer to hate each other at close range, where you get more bang for your buck. — Tana French

Some part of me believed, unassailably, and wordlessly and perhaps with a flick of justice, that they had sent me away because they were afraid of me. Like some monstrously deformed child who should never have lived beyond infancy, or a conjoined twin whose other half died under the knife, I had- simply by surviving-become a freak of nature. — Tana French

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

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

Music, or a voice; just some trick of the river on stones, the breeze in the hollow oak? The wood had a million voices, changing with every season and every day; you could never know them all. — Tana French

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

P.39 - "Sor-ry," said Cassie, rolling her eyes and grinning at Damien. He grinned back, bonding away. I was taking a vague, unjustifiable dislike to Damien. I could see exactly why Hunt had assigned him to give the site tours - he was a PR dream, all blue eyes and diffidence - but I have never liked adorable, helpless men. I suppose it's the same reaction Cassie has to those baby-voiced, easily impressed girls whom men always want to protect: a mixture of distaste, cynicism and envy. — Tana French

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

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

You had as good a chance as I did. I told you everything I saw, as I saw it at the time. And if that was in itself deceptive, remember, I told you that, too: I warned you, right from the beginning, that I lie. — Tana French

Murder is a high-pressure squad and a small one, only twenty permanent members and under any added strain (anyone leaving, anyone new, too much work, too little work), it tends to develop a tinge of cabin-fevery hysteria, full of complicated alliances and frantic rumors. — Tana French

I was a wrecked thing smeared over with dark finger marks and stuck with shards of nightmare, and I had no right there any more. I moved through my lost life like a ghost, trying not to touch anything with my bleeding hands, and dreamed of learning to sail in a warm place, Bermuda or Bondi, and telling people sweet soft lies about my past. — Tana French

The impulse to win is a valuable thing, right up until you let it make you into a loser. — Tana French

I spent a lot of the holidays at Charlie's home in Herefordshire, learning to drive on his — Tana French

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

Self-immolation's a nice gesture, but it doesn't usually achieve very much. — 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

I didn't believe her, of course. The lie was transparent - it something that size, someone would have mentioned it during the door-to-door
and it went straight to my heart as no sonata ever could have; because I recognized it. That's my twin brother, his name's Peter, he's seven minutes older than me ... Children - it and Rosalind was little more - it don't tell pointless lies unless the reality is too much to bear. — Tana French

The squealing little arse-gerbil. — Tana French

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

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

For as long as I could remember, a part of me had been waiting for the day it would happen; with the cunning that comes to people whose minds have been stripped to one desire, she picked the only day we weren't waiting for. — 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

Like, okay. Everyone in history thought they were the ones who finally knew everything. In their naissance, right, they were positive they knew exactly how the universe worked. Til the next set of guys came along and proved they were missing like a hundred important things. and then that set of guys were sure they had it all down, til another set came along and showed them parts they were missing." He glances at Julia, checking if she's laughing at him, which she isn't, and if she's listening, which she is, completely. "So." he says, "it's pretty unlikely, mathematically, that we are living in the one single era that has everything figured out. Which means there's a decent possibility that the reason we can't explain how ghosts and stuff could exist is because we haven't figured it out yet, not because they don't. And it is pretty arrogant of us to think it definitely has to be the other way around. — 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

Maybe she, like me, would have loved the tiny details and inconveniences even more dearly than the wonders, because they are the things that prove you belong. — Tana French

no matter how hard I try to stamp it down, part of me is picturing Sophie's guy cracking the password and coming up with both hands full of pics of Aislinn riding Cueball Lanigan, with Breslin counting cash in the background. "Let — Tana French

What I warn you to remember is that I am a detective. Our relationship with truth is fundamental but cracked, refracting confusingly like fragmented glass. It is the core of our careers, the endgame of every move we make, and we pursue it with strategies painstakingly constructed of lies and concealment and every variation on deception. — 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

She hears all the voices from when she was little, soothing, strengthening: Don't be scared, not of monsters, not of witches, not of big dogs. And now, snapping loud from every direction: Be scared, you have to be scared, ordering like this is your one absolute duty. Be scared you're fat, be scared your boobs are too big and be scared they're too small. Be scared to walk on your own, specially anywhere quiet enough that you can hear yourself think. Be scared of wearing the wrong stuff, saying the wrong thing, having a stupid laugh, being uncool. Be scared of guys not fancying you; be scared of guys, they're animals, rabid, can't stop themselves. Be scared of girls, they're all vicious, they'll cut you down before you can cut them. Be scared of strangers. Be scared you won't do well enough in your exams, be scared of getting in trouble. Be scared terrified petrified that everything you are is every kind of wrong. Good girl. — Tana French

In my book, the media are a necessary evil: they live off the animal inside us, they bait the front pages with second-hand blood for the hyenas to snuffle up, but they come in useful enough that you want to stay on their good side. — Tana French

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

The girls I dream of are the gentle ones, wistful by high windows or singing sweet old songs at a piano, long hair drifting, tender as apple blossom. But a girl who goes into battle beside you and keeps your back is a different thing, a thing to make you shiver. Think of the first time you slept with someone, or the first time you fell in love: that blinding explosion that left you cracking to the fingertips with electricity, initiated and transformed. I tell you that was nothing, nothing at all, beside the power of putting your lives, simply and daily, into each other's hands. — Tana French

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

It's ironic, isn't it? A hundred psychology students, and not one of us recognized a classic psychopath. You know the strange thing? I wished I had done everything he claimed I had. If I had, then it would all have made sense: I would have been getting what I deserved. But I hadn't done any of it, and yet that made absolutely no difference to what happened. There was no such thing as cause and — Tana French

The music has turned into a distant hysterical pounding and shrieking, like someone has a tiny Rihanna locked in a box. — 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

It totally was elitist,' Julia says. 'So? There's nothing wrong with elitist. Some stuff is better than other stuff; pretending it's not doesn't make you open-minded, it just makes you a dick. — 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

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

I think when you're kids, you're less . . . defined? Then you get older and you start deciding what kind of person you want to be, and it doesn't always match up with what your friends are turning into. — Tana French

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

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

If you're good at this job, and I am, then every step in a murder case moves you in one direction: towards order. We get thrown shards of senseless wreckage, and we piece them together until we can lift the picture out of the darkness and hold it up to the white light of day, solid, complete, clear. Under all the paperwork and the politics, this is the job; this is its cool shining heart that I love with every fiber of mine. This case was different. It was running backwards, dragging us with it on some ferocious ebb tide. Every step washed us deeper in black chaos, wrapped us tighter in tendrils of crazy and pulled us downwards. — Tana French