Top 400 Tana French Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

55. “Over time, the ghosts of things that happened start to turn distant; once they’ve cut you a couple of million times, their edges blunt on your scar tissue, they wear thin. The ones that slice like razors forever are the ghosts of things that never got the chance to happen.”

— Tana French

56. “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

57. “The button developed a life of its own, swollen with symbolism, a single chance at salvation pulsing redly in the corner and if I blew it too soon or left it too late then I was lost.”

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

59. “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

60. “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

61. “My ribs opened up like windows, I’d forgotten you could breathe that deeply.”

— Tana French

62. “I’ve always loved strong women, which is lucky for me because once you’re over about twenty-five there is no other kind. Women blow my mind. The stuff that routinely gets done to them would make most men curl up and die, but women turn to steel and keep on coming.”

— Tana French

63. “But we’re so desperate, aren’t we, to believe that bad luck only happens to people who deserve it.”

— Tana French

64. “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

65. “I’ve always loved strong women, which is lucky for me because once you’re over about twenty-five there is no other kind.”

— Tana French

66. “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

67. “And some go the other way, the most lethal way of all: when the pressure gets to be too much, it’s not their nerve that breaks, it’s their fear. They lose the capacity to be afraid, even when they should be. These can’t ever go home again. They’re like those First World War airmen, the finest ones, shining in their recklessness and invincible, who got home and found that home had no place for what they were. Some people are undercovers all the way to the bone; the job has taken them whole.”

— Tana French

68. “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

69. “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

70. “I watched her on the stand in that unfamiliar suit and thought of the soft hairs at the back of her neck, warm and smelling of the sun, and it seemed an impossible thing to me, it seemed the vastest and saddest miracle of my life: I touched her hair, once.”

— Tana French

71. “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

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

— Tana French

73. “If you’re perfectly happy with what you’ve got–specially if what you’ve got isn’t even all that spectacular–then you’re dangerous. You’re breaking all the rules, you’re undermining the sacred economy, you’re challenging every assumption that society’s built on.”

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

75. “You know what it was like? It was like being in a blizzard. You can’t see what’s right in front of your face, you can’t hear anything except this white-noise roar that never lets up, you don’t have a clue where you are or where you’re heading, and it keeps just coming at you from every direction, just coming and coming and coming. All you can do is keep on taking the next step – not because it’ll actually get you anywhere, just so that you don’t lie down and die. That was what it was like.”

— Tana French

76. “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

77. “I’ve been trying not to say it out loud because I don’t want to jinx it. Like a dumb kid; like one of those moaners who believe the universe has it in for them and everything is just looking for an excuse to turn to shite.”

— Tana French

78. “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

79. “You can knock down a genuine belief, if you load up with enough facts that contradict it; but a belief that’s built on nothing except who the person wants to be, nothing can crumble that.”

— Tana French

80. “Ah, background checks,′ I say. ‘The foundation of every beautiful romance.”

— Tana French

81. “The sky, dappled in subtle gradations of gray, goes on forever; so do the fields, coded in shades of green by their different uses, divided up by sprawling hedges, dry-stone walls and the odd narrow back road.”

— Tana French

82. “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

83. “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

84. “When you stop being a kid, you lose your one chance at that too-tender-to-touch gold, that breathtaken everything and forever. Once you start growing up and getting sense, the outside world turns real, and your own private world is never everything again.”

— Tana French

85. “The moonlight whitened the lawn into a wide fitful sea, with the house tall and still in the middle, exposed on every side; besieged.”

— Tana French

86. “I like writing about big turning points, where professional and personal lives coalesce, where the boundaries are coming down, and you’re faced with a set of choices which will change life forever.”

— Tana French

87. “I can’t explain the alchemy that transmuted one evening into the equivalent of years held lightly in common. The only way I can put it is that we recognized, too surely even for surprise, that we shared the same currency.”

— Tana French

88. “It makes the situation bloom with a seductive, ephemeral intimacy, like they’re the last people left awake at a house party, caught up in a conversation that won’t count tomorrow morning.”

— Tana French

89. “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

90. “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

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

— Tana French

92. “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

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

— Tana French

94. “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

95. “It’s taken me this long to start thinking about what luck can be, how smoothly and deliciously deceptive, how relentlessly twisted and knotted in on its own hidden places, and how lethal.”

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

97. “I live inside my own skin. Anything that happens outside it doesn’t change who I am. This isn’t something I’m proud of; as far as I’m concerned, it’s a bare minimum baseline requirement for calling yourself an adult human being, somewhere around the level of knowing how to do your own washing or change a toilet roll. All those idiots on the websites, begging for other people to pull their sagging puppet-strings, turn them real: they make me want to spit.”

— Tana French

98. “What-if-maybe crap is for weak people. It belongs to the ones who don’t have the strength to make actual situations go their way, so they have to hide away in daydreams where they can play at controlling what comes next. And that makes them even weaker.”

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

100. “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