Top 400 Tana French Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “Underneath he has on jeans and a baggy beige jumper that’s twenty quids’ worth of knitted depression. “Let’s.”

— Tana French

202. “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

203. “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

204. “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

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

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

207. “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

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

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

213. “Manners is treating people with respect.”

— Tana French

214. “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

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

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

217. “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

218. “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

219. “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

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

— Tana French

221. “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

222. “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

223. “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

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

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

226. “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

227. “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

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

— Tana French

229. “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

230. “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

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

— Tana French

232. “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

233. “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

234. “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

235. “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

236. “So you just like the country.” “I do, yeah. The city wouldn’t suit me. Hearing other people’s noise all day and all night.”

— Tana French

237. “Every kid has a right to some rebellion. I’d been angelic all through school. It evens out.”

— Tana French

238. “The window had gone a clear lit purple, dusk that looked like thunder. Fine clouds shifted, restless.”

— Tana French

239. “So far, you’ve only seen what bad luck can do to people. You’re about to take your first good look at what people can do to each other. Believe me: not the same thing.”

— Tana French

240. “The greens and golds have thinned to watercolor; the sky is one scoured sweep of pale blue.”

— Tana French

241. “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

242. “Ask any economist: broke is made of how you feel. The credit crunch didn’t happen because people woke up any poorer than they’d been the day before; it happened because people woke up scared.”

— Tana French

243. “When she was a little kid she would trot along holding his hand and tell him everything, good and bad, it all poured straight from her heart to her mouth. He can’t remember when that changed.”

— Tana French

244. “By the time he’s forty, a man’s either in the habit of being married or he’s not.”

— Tana French

245. “Rambo was, naturally, some kind of terrier-based mutt that weighed about five pounds soaking wet. The name had given him a Napoleon complex, complete with territorial issues.”

— Tana French

246. “I was doing exactly the same thing as Aislinn: getting lost so deep inside the story in my head, I couldn’t see past its walls to the outside world. I feel those walls shift and start to waver, with a rumble that shakes my bones from the inside out. I feel my face naked to the ice-flavored air that pours through the cracks and keeps coming. A great shiver is building in my back.”

— Tana French

247. “She must have thought, sometimes, of her namesake, the votary branded with her god’s most inventive and sadistic curse: to tell the truth, and never to be believed.”

— Tana French

248. “In these rooms, the world’s vast hissing tangle of shadows burns away, all its treacherous grays are honed to the stark purity of a bare blade, two-edged: cause and effect, good and evil.”

— Tana French

249. “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

250. “The wind blows itself out, and dawn comes to the window cold and still in a clear gold-green.”

— Tana French