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

252. “The moment I said Broken Harbor to O’Kelly, every faded scar in my mind had lit up like a beacon. I had walked the glittering lines of those scars, obedient as a farm animal, from that moment straight to this one. I had moved through this case shining like Conor Brennan had shone on that dark road, a blazing signal for predators and scavengers far and wide.”

— Tana French

253. “Children – and Rosalind was little more – don’t tell pointless lies unless the reality is too much to bear.”

— Tana French

254. “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

255. “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

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

— Tana French

257. “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

258. “I am not good at noticing when I’m happy, except in retrospect. My gift, or fatal flaw, is for nostalgia.”

— Tana French

259. “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

260. “I like incongruity.”

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

262. “I worry that I might come out of hypnosis with that sugar-high glaze of self-satisfied enlightenment, like a seventeen-year-old who’s just discovered Kerouac, and start proselytizing strangers in pubs.”

— Tana French

263. “There is a side of me that is most intensely attracted to women who annoy me.”

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

265. “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

266. “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

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

— Tana French

268. “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

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

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

271. “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

272. “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

273. “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

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

— Tana French

275. “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

276. “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

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

— Tana French

278. “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

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

— Tana French

280. “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

281. “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

282. “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

283. “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

284. “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

285. “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

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

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

289. “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

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

— Tana French

291. “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

292. “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

293. “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

294. “Holly skates like a fairy and I skate like a gorilla with neurological issues, which of course is a bonus for her because she gets to laugh at me when I smack into walls.”

— Tana French

295. “Here, the first light spreads across the fields like something holy is happening, striking sparks off a million dewdrops and turning the spiderwebs on the hedge to rainbows; mist curls off the grass, and the first calls of birds and sheep seem to arc effortless miles.”

— Tana French

296. “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

297. “I crave truth. And I lie.”

— Tana French

298. “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

299. “Even at moments like this, there is a limit to how weird I am prepared to appear.”

— Tana French

300. “My breath felt like I’d been running. I didn’t like this; didn’t like how, with acres to choose from, I had come homing straight to Lexie’s hiding place as if I had no choice. Around me the house seemed to have tightened and drawn closer, leaning in over my shoulder; watching; focused.”

— Tana French