Top 400 Tana French Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 7 of 9

301. “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

302. “I said, “Please tell me that little story wasn’t your excuse for killing two people.” There was a very long silence. Then Shay said, “How long were you listening at that door?”

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

304. “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

305. “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

306. “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

307. “Whether they start out that way or got brought to it somehow, their focus isn’t much broader than a prey animal’s.”

— Tana French

308. “The whiskey was rich and smooth and it burned trails of light right down to my fingertips.”

— Tana French

309. “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

310. “I got weary,” Cal says. “Bone-weary.” He did. Every morning got to be like waking up with the flu, knowing he had to trek miles up a mountain.”

— Tana French

311. “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

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

— Tana French

313. “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

314. “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

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

— Tana French

316. “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

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

— Tana French

318. “I could no longer picture Rosalind in my mind’s eye; the tender vision of the girl in white had been blown to pieces as if by a nuclear bomb. This was something unimaginable, something hollow as the yellowed husks that insects leave behind in dry grass, blowing with cold alien winds and a fine corrosive dust that shredded everything it touched.”

— Tana French

319. “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

320. “When I think about the Spain case, from deep inside endless nights, this is the moment I remember. Everything else, every other slip and stumble along the way, could have been redeemed. This is the one I clench tight because of how sharp it slices. Cold still air, a weak ray of sun glowing on the wall outside the window, smell of stale bread and apples.”

— Tana French

321. “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

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

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

324. “All this bio-yogurt virtue and financial self-righteousness are just filling the gap in the market. But the problem is that it’s all backwards. It’s not that you do the right thing and hope it pays off; the morally right thing is by definition the thing that gives the biggest payoff.”

— Tana French

325. “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

326. “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

327. “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

328. “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

329. “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

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

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

333. “Selena had been singing along, absently, gazing into nowhere. She looked at us like she was trying to work out who we were, before she got up.”

— Tana French

334. “I had seen her in a temper before – I tell her it’s her French grandfather’s fault, Mediterranean lack of self-control – and I knew she’d settle down now she’d taken it out on the tree.”

— Tana French

335. “Dublin goes fast, these days, fast and jam-packed and jostling, everyone terrified of being left behind and forcing themselves louder and louder to make sure they don’t disappear.”

— Tana French

336. “He liked to promise them things; he loved to see their faces light up when he said he’d bring them to the circus in Galway, or buy them a toy car that climbed up walls. He didn’t seem to feel any need to follow through on his promises; in fact, he always seemed a little bit surprised and aggrieved when they asked.”

— Tana French

337. “I wish I could show you how an interrogation can have its own beauty, shining and cruel as that of a bullfight; how in defiance of the crudest topic or the most moronic suspect it keeps inviolate its own taut, honed grace, its own irresistible and blood-stirring rhythms; how the great pairs of detectives know each other’s every thought as surely as lifelong ballet partners.”

— Tana French

338. “The overhead light streaked.”

— Tana French

339. “At the top of the basement steps, Kevin balked. “No way. I’m not going down there. Seriously, Frank.” “Every time you say no to your big brother, God kills a kitten. Come on.”

— Tana French

340. “You can have anything you want, as long as you accept that there is a price and that you will have to pay it.”

— Tana French

341. “The truth is, if you don’t exist without someone else, you don’t exist at all.”

— Tana French

342. “Cal has professional experience of shitbirds like this, whose lies take up so much space that people believe them just because disbelieving all of that would be too much work.”

— Tana French

343. “I’m not saying that owning a house makes life into some kind of blissful paradise; simply that it makes the difference between freedom and enslavement.”

— Tana French

344. “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

345. “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

346. “Eating a creature shouldn’t be a light thing.”

— Tana French

347. “One of the ways you take charge of where you’re going is by acting like you’re already there.”

— Tana French

348. “Where I’m seeing a dead end, he’s seeing a brilliant new twist to his amazing story. I wish I could take my holidays inside Steve’s head.”

— Tana French

349. “She looks sort of like a person but not really, like someone explained to aliens what a person is and they did their best to make one of their own.”

— Tana French

350. “I laid a hand on his cheek; it was so bright that for a second I thought it was burning me, a pure painless fire.”

— Tana French