Tana French quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Tana French

Tana French Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Tana French on Wise Famous Quotes.

Fasting is, I think, a profoundly instinctive form of appeal.

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

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

Equality is paper-deep, peel it away with a fingernail.

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

The lines of her face, turned up to the sky, would have broken your heart.

Some people should never meet.

The corners of Cooper's mouth tucked in, which is as close as he gets to a smile. He said, "Do come in.

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

This has nothing to do with what anyone else in all the world would approve or forbid. This is all their own.

What I am telling you, before you begin my story, is this
two things: I crave truth. And I lie.

Her forehead was a maze of anxious little grooves, from a lifetime of wondering about whether everyone within range was OK.

I said she's not thick, kid. I didn't say she was Professor fucking Moriarty.

I hate nostalgia, it's laziness with prettier accessories ...

The thing about old neighborhoods: people still mind each other's business.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

We see this a lot, people desperate to keep talking because when they stop we will leave and they will be left alone with what has happened.

I spend my days watching soap operas, eating bonbons and plotting society's downfall.

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.

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

But a girl who goes into battle beside you and keeps your back is a different thing, a thing to make you shiver.

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

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.

Above the front door the fanlight glowed blue, delicate as wing-bones.

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

The squealing little arse-gerbil.

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.

If I've learned one thing today, it's that teenage girls make Moriarty look like a babe in the woods. Detective Stephen Moran

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.

Cassie," I said, "we've been through this. Once more, with feeling: I remember sweet shining fuck-all.

A man needs to know when to let things lie." I

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

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

That kind of absolute faith is one of those things that, like virginity, can only be lost once

a cipher, composed entirely of the jumbled reflections of what he thinks other people want to see.

A breath of sound across the landing, almost imperceptible, like a shadow moving against blackness; then nothing.

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

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.

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

Dublin housing prices are a lot like New York ones, except that in New York, you get New York for your money.

It was as if Tutankhamen or Miss Havisham had wandered into the pub one night and started bitching about the head on the pints.

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.

I had forgotten that God, or the world, or whatever carves the rules in stone, doesn't give you time off for good behavior.

I was twelve, after all, an age at which kids are bewildered and amorphous, transforming overnight, no matter how stable their lives are;

Underneath he has on jeans and a baggy beige jumper that's twenty quids' worth of knitted depression. "Let's

People hurt each other. That's how it works. At least you were trying to do something good. Not everyone can say that much.

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

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

Sometimes, when you're close to someone, you miss things. Other people can see them, but you can't.

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

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

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

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.

Smoked like it was fuel and he was going to get every last inch to the gallon.

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.

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

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

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

I love writing. I feel ridiculously lucky that this is what I get to do all day.

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.

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.

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.

Here's a little tip for you. If you don't like being called a murderer, don't kill people.

All my signposts had gone up in one blinding, dizzying explosion [ ... ] none of the scenery looked familiar anymore.

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

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

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.

The overhead light streaked

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

When you're too close to people, when you spend too much time with them and love them too dearly, sometimes you can't see them

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

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

I love the unspoken dress code.

With acting, you have to depend on somebody else to decide if you are allowed to work. You can spend weeks and months when you are not acting at all.

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

If it was true. This case was jammed with lies, couldn't grab hold of it without getting a handful.

Be scared terrified petrified that everything you are is every kind of wrong. Good girl. At

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

All these private, parallel dimensions, underlying such an innocuous little estate; all these self-contained worlds layered onto the same space.

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

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

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.

I've got good psychopath sensors now. It's like an allergy: you get exposed once, from then on you're supersensitized." She

I am, of course, romanticizing; a chronic tendency of mine.

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.

Nobody knows you like people you grew up with.

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.

Every sunny familiar spot in our shared landscape had become a dark minefield, fraught with treacherous nuances and implications.

Even at moments like this, there is a limit to how weird I am prepared to appear.

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.

I filed him in my mental database under Useless Prick, for future reference.

Once the ruler is no longer willing to be the sacrifice for his people, he becomes not a leader but a leech,

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

Reminded myself: the ones you don't like are a bonus. They can't fool you as easy as the ones you do.