Top 400 Tana French Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “I had – simply by surviving – become a freak of nature.”

— Tana French

254. “It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it.”

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

256. “Corruption is taken for granted, even grudgingly admired: the guerrilla cunning of the colonised is still ingrained into us, and tax evasion and shady deals are seen as forms of the same spirit of rebellion that hid horses and seed potatoes from the British.”

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

258. “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

259. “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

260. “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

261. “Take what you want and pay for it, says God.”

— Tana French

262. “Wild got into the air like a virus, and it’s spreading. Watch the packs of kids roaming inner-city estates, mindless and brakeless as baboons, looking for something or someone to wreck. Watch the businessmen shoving past pregnant women for a seat on the train, using their 4x4s to force smaller cars out of their way, purple-faced and outraged when the world dares to contradict them.”

— Tana French

263. “But children are pragmatic, they come alive and kicking out of a whole lot worse than orphanhood.”

— Tana French

264. “A Retir’d Friendship Here let us sit and bless our Starres Who did such happy quiet give, As that remov’d from noise of warres. In one another’s hearts we live. Why should we entertain a feare? Love cares not how the world is turn’d. If crouds of dangers should appeare, Yet friendship can be unconcern’d. We weare about us such a charme, No horrour can be our offence; For mischief’s self can doe no harme To friendship and to innocence. Katherine Philips.”

— Tana French

265. “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

266. “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

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

— Tana French

268. “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

269. “In the hazy afternoon light through the windows he looked beautiful and dissolute, shirt open at the collar and streaks of golden hair falling into his eyes, like some Regency buck after a long night’s dancing.”

— Tana French

270. “I just knew nothing in the world, not the Mona Lisa walking through the Grand Canyon with the Holy Grail in one hand and a winning Lotto ticket in the other, was ever going to be that beautiful. Kevin.”

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

272. “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

273. “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

274. “I wouldn’t say the carpet matches the curtains there,” someone else says.”

— Tana French

275. “You know something?” Frank said, after a moment. “You’ve got a bad habit of taking too much credit for the stuff other people do around you.”

— Tana French

276. “It’s a wilderness out there; the normal rules don’t apply. Decent, polite people who don’t raise their voices from one year’s end to the next buy a modem and turn into Mel Gibson on tequila slammers.”

— Tana French

277. “But because the whole point of the vow was for none of them to have to feel like this. The point was for one place in their lives to be impregnable. For just one kind of love to be stronger than any outside thing; to be safe.”

— Tana French

278. “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

279. “I don’t mind giving you a hand where you actually need it, but I’m not going to be left handling the real business while you chase it off on some nonsense you’ve got into your head.”

— Tana French

280. “What I wanted was someone I belonged with, beyond any doubt or denial; someone where every glance was a guarantee, solid proof that we were stuck to each other for life.”

— Tana French

281. “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

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

— Tana French

283. “Faye had always been sweet, flaky but sweet, unlikely to ask about your problems but deeply concerned about them if you reminded her they existed.”

— Tana French

284. “Wayne,” I said to Cassie, while we were getting him a Sprite and watching him pick his acne in the one-way glass. “Why didn’t his parents just tattoo ‘Nobody in my family has ever finished secondary school’ on his forehead at birth?”

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

286. “The Place would already have started the leisurely, enjoyable process of digesting her into just one more piece of local gore-lore, half ghost story and half morality play, half urban myth and half just the way life goes. It would eat her memory whole, the same way its ground had eaten her body.”

— Tana French

287. “I coped, in the grand tradition of children everywhere, by retreating into my imagination.”

— Tana French

288. “I want my daughter to learn that not everything in this world is determined by how often she hears it or how much she wants it to be true or how many other people are looking. Somewhere in there, for a thing to count as real, there has got to be some actual bloody reality.”

— Tana French

289. “Daniel glanced up from his book. “No pasts,” he said. The fall of it, the finality, told me it was something he had said before.”

— Tana French

290. “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

291. “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

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

— Tana French

293. “Now that’s a concept that’s always fascinated me: the real world. Only a very specific subset of people use the term, have you noticed? To me, it seems self-evident that everyone lives in the real world – we all breathe real oxygen, eat real food, the earth under our feet feels equally solid to all of us.”

— Tana French

294. “If you need a few tips on coping, ask me now.”

— Tana French

295. “I think you’ve got something there,” said Daniel. “Not jealousy, after all: fear. It’s a fascinating state of affairs. Throughout history – even a hundred years ago, even fifty – it was discontent that was considered the threat to society, the defiance of natural law, the danger that had to be exterminated at all costs. Now it’s contentment. What a strange reversal.”

— Tana French

296. “The corners of Cooper’s mouth tucked in, which is as close as he gets to a smile. He said, “Do come in.”

— Tana French

297. “Losing one’s parents causes an immense shift in perspective. It brought home to me the value of their presence within my life, on a much broader scale than I had ever understood it before: the value of being rooted within a greater story than one’s own. I became acutely aware, for the first time, just what I had deprived you of. As soon as I reached that realization, I began looking for you.”

— Tana French

298. “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

299. “The breeze was warm across my face, and even through the city lights I could see constellations: the Plough, Orion’s belt. The pine tree at the bottom of the garden rustled like the sea, ceaselessly. For a moment I felt as if the universe had turned upside down and we were falling softly into an enormous black bowl of stars and nocturne, and I knew, beyond any doubt, that everything was going to be all right.”

— Tana French

300. “Kevin was a child. He never grew up. Thirty-seven years old and he still figured everything in the world was going to go the way he thought it should; it never hit him that the world might work its own way, whether that suited him or not.”

— Tana French