Top 400 Tana French Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Then I sit there, running the heat to try and thaw my feet after Lucy’s flat, and watch the people going past. They make me edgy. Dozens and dozens of people, they just keep coming, and every single one of their heads is crammed with stories they believe and stories they want to believe and stories someone else has made them believe, and every story is battering against the thin walls of the person’s skull, drilling and gnawing for its chance to escape and attack someone.”

— Tana French

152. “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

153. “For months she had slowly been turning into my own secret magnetic north.”

— Tana French

154. “That girl in the photo isn’t one solid person, feet set solidly in one irrevocable life; that girl is an illusive firework-burst made of light reflecting off a million different possibilities.”

— Tana French

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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.”

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

159. “You forget what it was like. You’d swear on your life you never will, but year by year it falls away. How your temperature ran off the mercury, your heart galloped flat-out and never needed to rest, everything was pitched on the edge of shattering glass. How wanting something was like dying of thirst. How your skin was too fine to keep out any of the million things flooding by; every color boiled bright enough to scald you, any second of any day could send you soaring or rip you to bloody shreds.”

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

161. “If you care more about them than they do about you, they hate you for it.”

— Tana French

162. “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

163. “Being easily freaked out comes with its own special skill set: you develop subtle tricks to work around it, make sure people don’t notice. Pretty soon, if you’re a fast learner, you can get through the day looking almost exactly like a normal human being.”

— Tana French

164. “Who who whose smell in the air of her room, whose fingerprints all over her friends’ secret places.”

— Tana French

165. “The band was no Led Zeppelin, but they had smart lyrics, a great drummer and that reckless shine that bands did have, back then, when no one had anything to lose and the fact that you didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of making it big didn’t matter, because throwing your whole heart into this band was the only thing that stopped you being just another futureless dole bunny moping in his bedsit. It gave them something: a drop of magic.”

— Tana French

166. “The shot of cold air hits Becca like it’s been fired straight through the glass from the huge outside, wild and magic, pungent with foxes and juniper.”

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

168. “Etiquette is the stuff you gotta do just ‘cause that’s how everyone else does it. Like holding your fork in your left hand, or saying ‘Bless you’ if someone sneezes. Manners is treating people with respect.”

— Tana French

169. “There’s absolutely no evidence to indicate that. There never is. Homicidal satanic cults are the detective’s version of yetis; no one has ever seen one and there is no proof that they exist, but one big blurry footprint and the media turn into a gibbering, foaming pack, so we have to act as though we take the idea at least semi-seriously.”

— Tana French

170. “I never knew and never will whether either Cassie or I was a great detective, though I suspect not, but I know this: we made a team worthy of bard-songs and history books. This was our last and greatest dance together, danced in a tiny interview room with darkness outside and rain falling soft and relentless on the roof, for no audience but the doomed and the dead.”

— Tana French

171. “You can’t take credit for what you do when your back is against the wall. That’s nothing more than instinct, falling back on what you know best. I think 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

172. “When you walk into the house, you want to be seeing your woman, and hearing her. You need to know she’s there, or what’s the point in having her at all?”

— Tana French

173. “Privately, I consider religion to be a load of bollocks, but when you have a sobbing five year old wanting to know what happened to her hamster, you develop an instant belief in anything that dissolves some of the heartbreak off her face.”

— Tana French

174. “Probably he was thinking what a boring bollocks I was. Plenty of people think the same thing- all of them are teenagers, mentally if not physically. 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 then enough excitement up its sleeve, ready to hit you as soon as you’re not looking, without you adding to the drama.”

— Tana French

175. “Landscape is one of the few things he knows of where the reality doesn’t let you down. The West of Ireland looked beautiful on the internet; from right smack in the middle of it, it looks even better. The air is rich as fruitcake, like you should do more with it than just breathe it; bite off a big mouthful, maybe, or rub handfuls of it over your face.”

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

177. “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

178. “I said I know my shot when I see it. Sometimes you don’t even have to see it. Sometimes you feel it coming, screaming down the sky towards you like a meteor.”

— Tana French

179. “Big mistake: that generation is compulsively competitive about generosity, and the biscuits meant she had to get a bag of scones out of the freezer and defrost them in the microwave and butter them and decant jam into a battered little dish, while I sat on the edge of her slippery sofa manically jiggling one knee until Cassie gave me a hairy look and I forced myself to stop. I knew I had to eat the damn things, too, or the “Ah, go on” phase could last for hours.”

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

181. “I’d been expecting someone so nondescript he was practically invisible, maybe the Cancer Man from The X Files, but this guy had rough, blunt features and wide blue eyes, and the kind of presence that leaves heat streaks on the air where he’s been.”

— Tana French

182. “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.”

— Tana French

183. “The pictures are good, Toby. They’re good. But this is the only way, no one’ll ever look twice if they come from me, I went to art school –.”

— Tana French

184. “I felt different, changing. Like today was my day, if I could just figure out how. Like danger, but my danger, sweet tricky urgent luck, tumbling through the air, heads or tails?”

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

186. “Although I knew that quite possibly this would have made no difference to anything at all, in the long run, I couldn’t help thinking of all the casualties that silence had left behind, all the wreckage in its wake.”

— Tana French

187. “You can’t take credit for what you do when your back is against the wall. That’s nothing more than instinct, falling back on what you know best.”

— Tana French

188. “I’d never met... anyone who was worth giving up the more I wanted down the line.”

— Tana French

189. “He hated the way every drug in its different way scooped the solidity right out of the world and left it quicksand-textured, cracked across and wavering at the edges. They did the same thing to people: people on drugs stopped being what you knew them to be.”

— Tana French

190. “Breslin gives me his wise-teacher smile, which is kind and crinkly and would make me feel warm all over if I was dumber than a bag of hair.”

— Tana French

191. “Her boarders are so hard and bright that these lumpy things are being blinded just by looking at her; she’s opaque, she’s impermeable, she’s a million densities and dimensions more real than any of them. They break against her and roll off like mist.”

— Tana French

192. “I pictured every inch of what she would look like now: the crow’s-feet from smiles I hadn’t seen, the softness of her belly from kids who weren’t mine, all her life that I had missed written on her body in Braille for my hands to read.”

— Tana French

193. “I work Cold Cases. When we bring witnesses in, they want to believe this doesn’t count: not really a murder investigation, not a proper one with guns and cuffs, nothing that’ll slam through your life like a tornado. Something old and soft, instead, worn fuzzy round the edges.”

— Tana French

194. “For ten years Dublin’s been changing faster than our minds can handle. The economic boom has given us too many people with helicopters and too many crushed into cockroachy flats from hell, way too many loathing their lives in fluorescent cubicles, enduring for the weekend and then starting all over again, and we’re fracturing under the weight of it.”

— Tana French

195. “The sun has started to slide down the sky.”

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

197. “My granddad was after dying the month before that, of a stroke. That took him four days. Life seems like a big thing when it takes four days for all of it to leave a man. When it’s gone in a few sec- and, it looks awful small all of a sudden. We don’t like to face up to that, but the animals know it. They’ve no notions about their dying. It’s a little thing, only, you’d get it done in no time. All it takes is one nip from a fox.”

— Tana French

198. “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. 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 end up keeping his balls in her makeup bags.”

— Tana French

199. “That’s how guys work. If you care more about them than they do about you, they hate you for it.” Julia.”

— Tana French

200. “But if you’ve seen a dead body, you know how they change the air: that huge silence, the absence strong as a black hole, time stopped and molecules frozen around the still thing that’s learned the final secret, the one he can never tell.”

— Tana French