Top 400 Tana French Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “If you don’t have your code, you got nothing to hold you down. You just drift, any way things blow you.”

— Tana French

302. “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

303. “That evening was one of the reasons it had never occurred to me that Rosie could be dead. The blaze of her, when she was that angry: you could have lit a match by touching it to her skin, you could have lit up Christmas trees, you could have seen her from space. For all that to have vanished into nothing, gone for good, was unthinkable.”

— Tana French

304. “It does that to you, being a detective. You look at blank space and see gears turning, motives and cunning; nothing looks innocent any more. Most times when you prove away the gears, the blank space looks lovely, peaceful. But that arm: innocent, it looked just as dangerous.”

— Tana French

305. “It’s occurred to him that he might have an undiscovered talent for letting things be.”

— Tana French

306. “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

307. “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

308. “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

309. “I crave truth. And I lie.”

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

311. “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

312. “I like incongruity.”

— Tana French

313. “When we left school, it was the early eighties. This country was on its knees. There were no jobs, none. If you couldn’t go into Daddy’s business, you emigrated or went on the dole. Even if you had the money and the points for college – and we didn’t – that just put it off for a few years.”

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

315. “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

316. “The thought of a mortgage round my neck makes me edgy.”

— Tana French

317. “I’m not putting any deadlines on myself,” Mart says with dignity, setting a heaped plate in front of Cal. “Not to suit you or anyone else. Now: get your laughing-tackle round that.”

— Tana French

318. “I’d rather see an apartment block any day, all charged up with people who go out to work every morning and keep this country buzzing and then come home to the nice little places they’ve earned, than a field doing bugger-all good to anyone except a couple of cows.”

— Tana French

319. “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” he told me reproachfully.”

— Tana French

320. “A handful of ten-year-olds with underprivileged hair and no eyebrows were slouched on a wall, scoping out the cars and thinking wire hangers.”

— Tana French

321. “It wasn’t a remarkable face in any way, but it had a clean-lined sweetness that brought up summer barbecues, golden retrievers, soccer games on new-mown grass, and I have always been caught by the pull of the unremarkable, by the easily missed, infinitely nourishing beauty of the mundane.”

— Tana French

322. “Either the color on the TV set was off or he had used too much fake tan; his face was orange, the whites of his eyes spookily bright.”

— Tana French

323. “The place makes it clear that whoever lives there has only themselves to please.”

— Tana French

324. “I think it’s just your basic teenage debris.”

— Tana French

325. “She knows that killing a person does almost-invisible things to you; it leave you arm-linked with death, your head tilted just a degree that way, so that for the rest of your life your shadows mix together.”

— Tana French

326. “Back on the job, this kind of heat was when we knew things were gonna get messy. People lose their minds, do the type of crazy stuff where you figure they must’ve been high on half a dozen things at once, till the tests come back and nope, stone-cold sober. Just hot. Whenever it stays hot for too long, I’m just waiting for things to get messy.”

— Tana French

327. “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

328. “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

329. “Cassie’s eyes. “Thank you,” she said. She didn’t get up to see us out, and I realized it was because she wasn’t sure she could do it. As I closed the door I caught a last glimpse of her through the round window, still sitting straight-backed and motionless with her hands folded in her lap: a queen in a fairy tale, left alone in her tower to mourn her lost, witch-stolen princess.”

— Tana French

330. “We’re ruled by venal little usurpers, all of us, and they make meaninglessness everywhere they go.”

— Tana French

331. “I want you at home so that any time I start getting panicky, I can stick my head in and look at you and take a few deep breaths. It’s for my sake, not yours.”

— Tana French

332. “At first he wondered if he might be too old to get accustomed to it at all, but his body has come through for him.”

— Tana French

333. “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

334. “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

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

— Tana French

336. “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

337. “Boyle is a round, pancake-faced little oddball who gives you the impression that he has a room at home packed with disturbing magazines, neatly alphabetized, but he runs a scene impeccably.”

— Tana French

338. “Everything about her is pure faultless middle-class–the accent, the clothes, the hair, the china patterns, it’s as if she ordered herself from a catalogue–but you can see the incredible effort that goes into every second of it.”

— Tana French

339. “Whatever people do, right up to killing, nature absorbs it, closes over the fissure and goes on about its own doings. He can’t tell whether this is a comforting thing or a melancholy one.”

— Tana French

340. “In Cal’s view, morals involve something more than terminology. Ben damn near lost his mind over the importance of using the proper terms for people in wheelchairs, and he clearly felt pretty proud of himself for doing that, but he didn’t mention ever doing anything useful for one single person in one single wheelchair.”

— Tana French

341. “Cal doesn’t think about Donna constantly, the way he did at first – it took months of dogged work, blasting music or reciting football lineups out loud like a loon every time she came into his head, but he got there in the end. She still crops up from time to time, though, mostly when he runs across something that would make her smile. He always loved Dona’s smile, quick and complete, sending every line of her face flying upwards.”

— Tana French

342. “If you don’t know this by now, mate, you’d better write it down and learn it by heart: the right thing is not always the same as what’s in your pretty little rule book.”

— Tana French

343. “Selena feels the hidden things thinning away to black veils you could pop with a fingertip, puddling into harmless sleep on the ground.”

— Tana French

344. “I loved Rosie’s mind. If I could have got inside there, I would happily have spent the rest of my life wandering around, just looking.”

— Tana French

345. “Trey has a bone-deep mistrust of marriage or anything resembling it. She knows that Lena sometimes stays the night at Cal’s place, but Lena also has a place of her own, which she can go back to whenever she wants, and where no one else has any say or any right of entry. To Trey, this seems like the only possible arrangement with any sense to it.”

— Tana French

346. “Dublin was built for pedestrians and carriages, not for cars; it’s full of tiny winding medieval streets, rush hour lasts from seven in the morning till eight at night, and at the first hint of bad weather the whole city goes into prompt, thorough gridlock.”

— Tana French

347. “Every time you say no to your big brother, God kills a kitten. Come on.”

— Tana French

348. “We had been so small, so recklessly sure that together we could defy all the dark uncomplicated threats of the adult world, rust straight through them like a game of Red Rover, laughing and away.”

— Tana French

349. “What I’m saying to you is, if you’re going to have a woman in the house, you want one that fills a bit of space. It’s no good having some skin-and-bones scrap fo a girl with a mousy wee voice on her and not a word out of her from one day to the next. You wouldn’t be getting your money’s worth. When you walk in the house, you want to be seeing your woman, and hearing her. You need to know she’s there, or what’s the point in having her at all?”

— Tana French

350. “I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve caught myself in the half-second before I splattered temper everywhere and stuck myself cleaning up the mess for the rest of my life.”

— Tana French