Top 400 Tana French Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “If it was true. This case was jammed with lies, couldn’t grab hold of it without getting a handful.”

— Tana French

252. “People snap the way they snap.”

— Tana French

253. “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

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

— Tana French

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 “As of May 25, 2018, Susanna’s line on this page is outdated: with the repeal of the eighth amendment to the Irish constitution, pregnant women will have the legal right to give or refuse consent to medical treatment.”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

256. “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

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

— Tana French

258. “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

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

— 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. “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

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

— Tana French

263. “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

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

— Tana French

265. “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

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. “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

268. “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

269. “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

270. “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

271. “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

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

— Tana French

273. “I crave truth. And I lie.”

— Tana French

274. “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

275. “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

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

— Tana French

277. “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

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

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

280. “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

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. “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

284. “I’m going to bet on someone’s wife hooking up with the guy next door,’ I said. The villainous nuns would have made better TV-movie fodder, but they sounded like a pretty big stretch to me. ‘Just playing the odds.”

— Tana French

285. “I hope in that half hour she lived all her million lives.”

— Tana French

286. “Landscape is one of the few things he knows of where the reality doesn’t let you down. The West of Ireland looked beautiful on the internet; from right smack int eh middle of it, it looks even better.”

— Tana French

287. “Worrying had always seemed to me like a laughable waste of time and energy; so much simpler to go happily about your business and deal with the problem when it arose, if it did, which it mostly didn’t.”

— Tana French

288. “No matter how good you are, this world is always going to be better at this game. It’s more cunning than you are, it’s faster and it’s a whole lot more ruthless. All you can do is try to keep up, know your weak spots and never stop expecting the sucker punch.”

— Tana French

289. “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

290. “Then the pints will get further apart, and then one of us will get into a relationship and won’t be around as much; the texts will start with Hey, too long no see, and all of a sudden we’ll realize it’s been a year since we met up. And.”

— Tana French

291. “I like incongruity.”

— Tana French

292. “I spent a lot of the holidays at Charlie’s home in Herefordshire, learning to drive on his.”

— Tana French

293. “The music has turned into a distant hysterical pounding and shrieking, like someone has a tiny Rihanna locked in a box.”

— Tana French

294. “But you’ve seen plenty of her, from your.”

— Tana French

295. “There had been love there. It had looked solid and simple as bread; real. And it felt real to live in, a warm element through which we moved easily and which we breathed in with every breath.”

— Tana French

296. “Frank has a childhood memory of Ma “screeching at Jackie for being such a bold girl that her da had to go to the pub because he couldn’t stand to be around her.”

— Tana French

297. “I was twelve, after all, an age at which kids are bewildered and amorphous, transforming overnight, no matter how stable their lives are;.”

— Tana French

298. “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

299. “Have a good laugh at this,... Deep down, I never for a second never thought they would find anything.”

— Tana French

300. “You do what your woman or your kid needs, even when it feels a lot harder than dying.”

— Tana French