Top 400 Tana French Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “If you know your job, you have a responsibility to pass the knowledge on.”

— Tana French

202. “Here’s one of the more disturbing things about working Murder: how little you think about the person who’s been killed. There are some who move into your mind – children, battered pensioners, girls who went clubbing in their sparkly hopeful best and ended the night in bog drains – but mostly the victim is only your starting point; the gold at the end of the rainbow is the killer.”

— Tana French

203. “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

204. “The mountains on the horizon look like someone took a pocketknife and sliced neat curves out of the star-thick sky, leaving empty blackness. Here and there, spread out, are the yellow rectangles of windows, tiny and valiant.”

— Tana French

205. “At the dark heart of the horror was the knowledge that it was inescapable. The thing I couldn’t bear wasn’t burglars or blows to the head, wasn’t anything I could beat or evade or set up defenses against; it was myself, whatever that had become.”

— Tana French

206. “When she was born I wanted to go out and kill someone for her, so she would know for sure, all her life, that I was ready to do it if it needed doing.”

— Tana French

207. “A wisp of wind shivers the seed-heads on the grass.”

— Tana French

208. “Today Henry would be running a banana republic with serious border issues and a dodgy nuclear-weapons program.”

— Tana French

209. “Despite not having touched a drop of booze yesterday, he has the same feeling he associates with hangovers, a heavy, prickly disinclination towards everything around him. He wants today over and done with.”

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

211. “Underneath he has on jeans and a baggy beige jumper that’s twenty quids’ worth of knitted depression. “Let’s.”

— Tana French

212. “I’ve only myself to please. There’s great freedom in that.”

— Tana French

213. “They say boys wreck your house and girls wreck your head, and it’s the truth.”

— Tana French

214. “It rains day and night, mildly but uncompromisingly, so Cal takes the desk inside and goes back to his wallpaper. He enjoys this rain. It has no aggression to it; its steady rhythm and the scents it brings in through the windows gentle the house’s shabbiness, giving it a homey feel. He’s learned to see the landscape changing under it, greens turning richer and wildflowers rising. It feels like an ally, rather than the annoyance it is in the city.”

— Tana French

215. “Self-immolation’s a nice gesture, but it doesn’t usually achieve very much.”

— Tana French

216. “One of the many joys of Undercover is that other squads can never quite figure out when you’re on the job and when you’re, say, on a genuine night out with the lads, so they tend to leave you alone, just in case.”

— Tana French

217. “He wants to punch something, but he knows that would do nothing but bust his knuckles. Having that much sense makes him feel old.”

— Tana French

218. “Everyone was talking about talking, and the most moral person was the one who yelled at the most other people for doing the talking all wrong.”

— Tana French

219. “It comes to him with the clarity of a sound, a neat small chink like metal hitting stone.”

— Tana French

220. “Her belief is built purely out of hope, piled on top of nothing, solid as smoke. Her worry, on the other hand, is dense and sharp-cornered as a lump of rock.”

— Tana French

221. “Once you’re stuck with something, all you can do is make the best of it.”

— Tana French

222. “I am a poor wayfaring stranger Traveling through this world alone But there’s no sickness, toil or danger In that bright world to which I go. I’m going there to see my loved ones I’m going there, no more to roam I’m only going over Jordan I’m only going over home.”

— Tana French

223. “My mind is done for the night, shorted out; there’s nothing left but a dial tone.”

— Tana French

224. “The thing is that many of their most passionate moral stances, as far as Cal can see, have to do with what words you should and shouldn’t use for people, based on what problems they have, what race they are, or who they like to sleep with. While Cal agrees that you should call people whatever they prefer to be called, he considers this to be a question of basic manners, not of morals.”

— Tana French

225. “Liv was never afraid of cot death or of Holly falling out of bed and hitting her head or any of the standard-issue parental boogeymen. All she worried about was that Holly might wake up, in the middle of the night, and think she was all alone.”

— Tana French

226. “She had had the sense and the guts to let go of her ruined old self and walk away so simply, start over again, start fresh and clean as morning.”

— Tana French

227. “There’s no password more powerful than your past.”

— Tana French

228. “Manners is treating people with respect.”

— Tana French

229. “I thought of Mark’s reckless eyes – The only things I believe in are out on that there dig – and then of revolutionaries waving ragged, gallant banners, of refugees swimming swift nighttime currents; of all those who hold life so light, or the stakes so dear, that they can walk steady and open-eyed to meet the thing that will take or transform their lives and whose high cold criteria are far beyond our understanding.”

— Tana French

230. “Few deaths can match the refined agony of being the one left behind.”

— Tana French

231. “They’re unsettled and they’re frightened, and what they want from me isn’t the lovely presents, any more; it goes much deeper. They’re afraid that they’re not who they always thought they were, and they want me to find them reassurance.”

— Tana French

232. “You asked me what I wanted. I spent a lot of time asking myself the same thing. By a year or two ago, I had come to the conclusion that I truly wanted only two things in this world: the company of my friends, and the opportunity for unfettered thought.”

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

235. “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

236. “Cal reached the point a long time ago where those words make him tired for all of humanity. All the innocents say that, and believe it to the bone, right up until the moment when they can’t any more. My husband would never do that to our children, my baby ain’t no thief. Cal feels like he ought to stand on a street corner handing out warnings, little pieces of paper that just say: Anyone could do anything.”

— Tana French

237. “Most people have no reason to know how memory can turn rogue and feral, becoming a force of its own and one to be reckoned with.”

— Tana French

238. “People snap the way they snap.”

— Tana French

239. “Leave her to sleep, sliding away forever down her secret underground river, while breathing seasons spun dandelion seeds and moon phases and snowflakes above her head.”

— Tana French

240. “In my book, the media are a necessary evil: they live off the animal inside us, they bait the front pages with second-hand blood for the hyenas to snuffle up, but they come in useful enough that you want to stay on their good side.”

— Tana French

241. “He strikes me as a psychopath, and they lie easier than they tell the truth.”

— Tana French

242. “But we’re so desperate, aren’t we, to believe that bad luck only happens to people who deserve it. People genuinely can’t take it in that someone could die of cancer without bloody well smoking.”

— Tana French

243. “I love messy homes, homes where a woman and kids have left their mark on every inch: sticky finger marks down the walls, trinkets and nests of pastel hair-gadgets on the mantelpiece, that smell of flowery things and ironing.”

— Tana French

244. “The kid hasn’t mastered the art of small talk. Every question comes out sounding like part of an interrogation.”

— Tana French

245. “Sun melting over it, slow as butter on toast.”

— Tana French

246. “I’m not sure what exactly I did for those two years. A lot of the time, I think, nothing. I know this is one of the unthinkable taboos of our society, but I had discovered in myself a talent for a wonderful, unrepentant laziness, the kind most people never know after childhood.”

— Tana French

247. “Plenty of people take me for a pompous git way too fond of the sound of his own voice, which is absolutely fine with me. Go ahead and dismiss me; go right ahead and drop your guard.”

— Tana French

248. “There’s no bad mood that fresh air and exercise can’t mend.”

— Tana French

249. “If you’re not rich, you’re a lesser being who shouldn’t have the gall to expect a living wage from the decent people who are.”

— Tana French

250. “He can’t shake the feeling that some emergency is heading towards him, someone is in danger, and he needs to keep all his wits about him to have a chance of fixing things.”

— Tana French