Top 400 Tana French Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

202. “They always act like they’re having an amazing time, they’re louder and high-pitched, shoving each other and screaming with laughter at nothing. But Becca knows what they’re like when they’re happy, and that’s not it. Their faces on the way home afterwards look older and strained, smeared with the scraps of leftover expressions that were pressed on too hard and won’t lift away.”

— Tana French

203. “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

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

— Tana French

205. “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

206. “I leaned my arms on the Ha’penny Bridge where people used to pay half a penny to cross the Liffey, I looked out at the Custom House and the shifting streams of lights and the steady dark roll of the river under the falling snow, and I hoped to God that somehow or other, before it was too late, we would all find our way back home.”

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

208. “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

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

— Tana French

210. “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

211. “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

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

— Tana French

213. “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

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

— Tana French

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

— 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. “Manners is treating people with respect.”

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

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

222. “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

223. “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

224. “If you know your job, you have a responsibility to pass the knowledge on.”

— Tana French

225. “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

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

— Tana French

227. “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

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

— Tana French

229. “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

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

— Tana French

231. “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

232. “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

233. “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

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

— Tana French

235. “And even if I somehow didn’t: I had killed someone, and I always would have. It was always going to be like this. There was no undoing this, no talking my way out, no fixing it or apologizing it away, no smoothing off the sharp edges or planing it down so it could be tucked away into some smaller, manageable box. Instead it would grind me away till I fit around its own immutable shape.”

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

237. “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

238. “It feels like someone’s using a tennis ball machine to fire starving pug dogs at you.”

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

240. “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

241. “For as long as I could remember, a part of me had been waiting for the day it would happen; with the cunning that comes to people whose minds have been stripped to one desire, she picked the only day we weren’t waiting for.”

— Tana French

242. “There’s no nipping women’s ideas. Cut them down one place, they grow up another. You wouldn’t know where you’d be.”

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

244. “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

245. “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

246. “If it was true. This case was jammed with lies, couldn’t grab hold of it without getting a handful.”

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

248. “It looked vaguely, frustratingly familiar, but I couldn’t tell whether this was because I actually remembered it or because I knew I should.”

— Tana French

249. “People snap the way they snap.”

— Tana French

250. “As of May 25, 2018, Susanna’s line on this page is outdated: with the repeal of the eighth amendment to the Irish constitution, pregnant women will have the legal right to give or refuse consent to medical treatment.”

— Tana French