Top 400 Tana French Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “My father told me once that the most important thing every man should know is what he would die for.”

— Tana French

2. “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

3. “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

4. “Sarte was right, Hell is other people.”

— Tana French

5. “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

6. “I am not good at noticing when I’m happy, except in retrospect.”

— Tana French

7. “This girl: she bent reality around her like a lens bending light, she pleated it into so many flickering layers that you could never tell which one you were looking at, the longer you stared the dizzier you got.”

— Tana French

8. “I hate nostalgia, it’s laziness with prettier accessories...”

— Tana French

9. “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

10. “Don’t you ever feel that – that you just need to get away? From everything? That it’s all too much?”

— Tana French

11. “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

12. “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

13. “This country’s passion for property is built into the blood, a current as huge and primal as desire. Centuries of being turned out on the roadside at a landlord’s whim, helpless, teach your bones that everything in life hangs on owning your home.”

— Tana French

14. “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

15. “I used to think I sewed us together at the edges with my own hands, pulled the stitches tight and I could unpick them any time I wanted. Now I think it always ran deeper than that and farther, underground; out of sight and way beyond my control.”

— Tana French

16. “All’s you can do is your best,” he says. “Sometimes it doesn’t work out the way you intend it to. You just gotta keep doing it anyway.”

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

18. “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

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

— Tana French

20. “Sometimes, when you’re close to someone, you miss things. Other people can see them, but you can’t.”

— Tana French

21. “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

22. “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

23. “In all your life, only a few moments matter. Mostly you never get a good look at them except in hindsight, long after they’ve zipped past you:.”

— Tana French

24. “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.”

— Tana French

25. “People you knew when you were teenagers, the ones who saw your stupidest haircut and the most embarrassing things you’ve done in your life, and they still cared about you after all that: they’re not replaceable, you know?”

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

27. “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

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

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

30. “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

31. “Some people are little Chernobyls, shimmering with silent, spreading poison: get anywhere near them and every breath you take will wreck you from the inside out.”

— Tana French

32. “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

33. “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

Featured in: Reading Quotes

34. “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

35. “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

36. “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

37. “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

38. “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

39. “The thing is, I suppose,” he said, “that one gets into the habit of being oneself. It takes some great upheaval to crack that shell and force us to discover what else might be underneath.”

— Tana French

40. “When we can’t see a pattern, we fit pieces together until one takes shape, because we have to.”

— Tana French

41. “If you let other people decide what you think about something like that, if you just follow along because it’s trendy, then who are you? When the flock changes direction tomorrow, what, you just throw away everything you think and start over, because other people said so? Then what are you, underneath? You’re nothing. You’re no one.”

— Tana French

42. “You don’t have to like your family, you don’t even have to spend time with them, to know them right down to the bone.”

— Tana French

43. “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

44. “Some people should never meet. The fallout spreads too wide and gets into the ground for much too long.”

— Tana French

45. “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

46. “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

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

— Tana French

48. “These three children own the summer. They know the wood as surely as they know the micro landscapes 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. This is their territory, and they rule it wild and lordly as young animals; they scramble through its trees and hide-and-seek in its hollows all the endless day long, and all night in their dreams.”

— Tana French

49. “Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be.”

— Tana French

50. “Just about everything in this life is treacherous, ready to twist and shape-shift at any second; it seemed to me that the whole world would be a different place if you had someone you were certain of, certain to the bone, or if you could be that to someone else.”

— Tana French