Top 400 Tana French Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

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

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

255. “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

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

— Tana French

257. “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

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. “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

260. “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

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

— Tana French

262. “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

263. “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

264. “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

265. “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

266. “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

267. “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

268. “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

269. “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

270. “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

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

— Tana French

272. “I crave truth. And I lie.”

— Tana French

273. “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

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

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

276. “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

277. “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

278. “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

279. “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

280. “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

281. “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

282. “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

283. “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

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

— Tana French

285. “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

286. “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

287. “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

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

— Tana French

289. “Women blow my mind. The stuff that routinely gets done to them would make most men curl up and die, but women turn to steel and keep on coming.”

— Tana French

290. “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

291. “Often the discrepancy works for us: people don’t know who to worry about, the little girl with the gun or the big guy apparently without, and the distraction of deciding keeps them off balance.”

— Tana French

292. “That suits me down to the ground.”

— Tana French

293. “I don’t want to give the impression that my life was blighted by what happened at Knocknaree, that I drifted through twenty years as some kind of tragic figure with a haunted past, smiling sadly at the world from behind a bittersweet veil of cigarette smoke and memories.”

— Tana French

294. “Landscape is one of the few things he knows of where the reality doesn’t let you down.”

— Tana French

295. “Murder isn’t like other squads. When it’s working right, it would take your breath away: it’s precision-cut and savage, lithe and momentous, it’s a big cat leaping full-stretch or a beauty of a rifle so smooth it practically fires itself.”

— Tana French

296. “I love beautiful; always have. I never saw why I should hate what I wish I had. Love it harder. Work your way closer. Clasp your hands around it tighter. Till you find a way to make it yours.”

— Tana French

297. “This is the truth of bombed-out ruins: hit a city hard enough and the cheap arrogant veneer will crumble faster than you can snap your fingers; it’s the old stuff, the stuff that’s endured, that might just keep enduring. I.”

— Tana French

298. “Knocknaree wood was the real thing, and it was more intricate and more secretive than I had remembered. It had its own order, its own fierce battles and alliances. I was an intruder here, now, and I had a deep prickling sense that my presence had instantly been marked and that the wood was watching me, with an equivocal collected gaze, not yet accepting or rejecting; reserving judgement.”

— Tana French

299. “All through this case, since the moment the car crested the hill and we saw Knocknaree spread out in front of us, the opaque membrane between me and that day in the wood had been slowly, relentlessly thinning; it had grown so fine that I could hear the small furtive movements on the other side, beating wings and tiny scrabbling feet like a moth battering against your cupped hands.”

— Tana French

300. “I looked out over the water, into the night that was coming in on the tide, and I felt nothing at all. The beach looked like something I had seen in an old film, once upon a time; that hotheaded boy felt like a character from some book I had read and given away in childhood. Only, somewhere far inside my spine and deep in the palms of my hands, something hummed; like a sound too low to hear, like a warning, like a cello string when a tuning fork strikes the perfect tone to call it awake.”

— Tana French