Top 400 Tana French Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “I had forgotten even how to want something slow, something soft, something with wide spaces and its own sure-footed swaying rhythms.”

— Tana French

102. “Here’s a little tip for you. If you don’t like being called a murderer, don’t kill people.”

— Tana French

103. “I didn’t know you even could get arrested in Amsterdam.”

— Tana French

104. “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

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

— Tana French

106. “Everyone knows a wife and kids tie you down. What people miss sometimes is that mates, the proper kind, they do the same just as hard. Mates mean you’ve settled, made your bargain: this, wherever you are together, this is as far as you’re going, ever. This is your stop; this is where you get off.”

— Tana French

107. “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

108. “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

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

— Tana French

110. “Frightened people are obedient–not just physically, but intellectually and emotionally.”

— Tana French

111. “Some people should never meet.”

— Tana French

112. “I thought I could never write a proper book; I’d never done it before. But I thought I could write a sequence. Then I had a chapter. The next thing I knew I was turning acting down.”

— Tana French

113. “Nobody knows you like people you grew up with.”

— Tana French

114. “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. Any man who claims he’s not into strong women is fooling himself mindless: he’s into strong women who know how to pout prettily and put on baby voices, and who will.”

— Tana French

115. “Now death is uncool, old-fashioned. To my mind the defining characteristic of our era is spin, everything tailored to vanishing point by market research, brands and bands manufactured to precise specifications; we are so used to things transmuting into whatever we would like them to be that it comes as a profound outrage to encounter death, stubbornly unspinnable, only and immutably itself.”

— Tana French

116. “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

117. “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.”

— Tana French

118. “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

119. “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

120. “Our entire society’s based on discontent: people wanting more and more and more, being constantly dissatisfied with their homes, their bodies, their decor, their clothes, everything. Taking it for granted that that’s the whole point of life, never to be satisfied. 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.”

— Tana French

121. “They’ve had it spelled out a dozen times, in cringey classes, in cringey parent talks: when to tell an adult. The idea never comes near any of their minds. This thing opening in front of them is nothing to do with those careful speeches. This mix of roaring rage and a shame that stains every cell, this crawling understanding that now their bodies belong to other people’s eyes and hands, not to them: this is something new.”

— Tana French

122. “It’s massively unfair, love. I wish there was something I could say to make it better, but there isn’t. Sometimes things are just really, really bad, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.”

— Tana French

123. “I know I said that I always choose the anticlimactic over the irrevocable, and yes of course what I meant was that I have always been a coward, but I lied: not always, there was that night, there was that one time.”

— Tana French

124. “The air of the squad room hurt everywhere it touched me. Lexie in dim gold light on the screen was a dark lake I could high-dive into, she was a thin-ice river I could skate away on, she was a long-distance flight leaving now.”

— Tana French

125. “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.”

— Tana French

126. “Our relationship with truth is fundamental but cracked, refracting confusingly like fragmented glass.”

— Tana French

127. “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

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

— Tana French

129. “These children will not be coming of age, this or any other summer. This August will not ask them to find hidden reserves of strength and courage as they confront the complexity of the adult world and come away sadder and wiser and bonded for life. This summer has other requirement for them.”

— Tana French

130. “If a guy’s whole head is in reality, then reality is the only route we can take to get to him. If he’s letting his mind prance off down dozens of twisty hypothetical fairy tales, every one of those is a crack we can use to prize him open.”

— Tana French

131. “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

132. “In the nights afterwards I used to wake up with my mind full of those headlights, brighter and deeper than the sun. I saw them again behind my eyelids in that dark lane, and I understood then that I could have just kept driving. I could have been like Lexie. I could have hit full speed and taken us soaring up off the road, into the vast silence at the heart of those lights and out on the other side where nothing could touch us, ever.”

— Tana French

133. “Do you see now why I believe in miracles? I used to imagine time folding over, the shades of our future selves slipping back to the crucial moments to tap each of us on the shoulder and whisper: Look, there, look! That man, that woman: they’re for you; that’s your life, your future, fidgeting in the line, dripping on the carpet, shuffling in that doorway. Don’t miss it.”

— Tana French

134. “The thing about old neighborhoods: people still mind each other’s business.”

— Tana French

135. “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

136. “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.”

— Tana French

137. “All those years of endless excruciating therapy sessions, of staying vigilant over every move and word and thought; I had been sure I was mended, all the breaks healed, all the blood washed away. I knew I had earned my way to safety. I had believed, beyond any doubt, that that meant I was safe.”

— Tana French

138. “This guy couldn’t order a sandwich without tying himself in knots about the possible consequences of mayonnaise.”

— Tana French

139. “I’m amazed this guy manages to get out of bed in the morning without working himself into a panic attack over the chance that he might trip on the bath mat and stab himself through the eye socket with his toothbrush and be left with a permanent twitch that’ll ruin his chances of landing an airplane safely if the pilot has a heart attack and doom hundreds to a fiery death.”

— Tana French

140. “The wind combs the heather and gorse with a low ceaseless rustle. Its smell has a sweetness almost too cold to catch. The sky is a fine-grained gray, and from somewhere in its heights a bird sends down a pure wild whistling.”

— Tana French

141. “I found out early that you can throw yourself away, missing what you’ve lost.”

— Tana French

142. “Then all the sharp intricate peaks on the monitor smoothed out to clean straight lines and my father made a terrible growling sound, but even without any of that I would have known, because the air around us had split open and whirled and re-formed itself and there was one less person in the room.”

— Tana French

143. “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: the moment when you decided whether to talk to that girl, slow down on that blind bend, stop and find that condom. I was lucky, I guess you could call it. I got to see one of mine face-to-face, and recognize it for what it was.”

— Tana French

144. “I’ve only got a handful of memories, and I don’t want them wearing away, textures rubbing smooth, colors fading from overexposure. When I take them out, once in a blue moon, I need them bright enough to catch my breath and sharp enough to cut.”

— Tana French

145. “They were amazed by each other, stunned silent, all in the circle of cypresses and night wind. The world outside was gone, nothing. Inside that circle the air was unfurling new colors, it was changing to something that cascaded and fountained pure gold and dazzle, and every breath changed them too.”

— Tana French

146. “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

147. “There’s optimistic, and then there’s plain crazy.”

— Tana French

148. “His accent needs subtitles.”

— Tana French

149. “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

150. “Breakfast was the full whammy: eggs, rashers, sausages, black pudding, fried bread, fried tomatoes. This was clearly some kind of statement, but I couldn’t work out whether it was See, we’re doing just grand without you, or I’m still slaving my fingers to the bone for you even though you don’t deserve it, or possibly We’ll be even when this lot gives you a heart attack.”

— Tana French