Top 400 Tana French Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “All that St. Kilda’s gloss, that walk through old oak doors like you belong, effortless: I wanted that. I wanted to lick it off my banged-up fists along with my enemy’s blood. This.”

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

305. “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

306. “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

307. “A man needs to know when to let things lie.” I.”

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

309. “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

310. “He feels that nineteen-year-olds, almost all of them, don’t have their feet on the ground. They’re turning loose from their families and they haven’t found anything else to moor themselves to; they blow like tumbleweed. They’re unknowns, to the people that used to know them inside out and to themselves.”

— Tana French

311. “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

312. “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

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

— Tana French

314. “Now that’s a concept that’s always fascinated me: the real world. Only a very specific subset of people use the term, have you noticed? To me, it seems self-evident that everyone lives in the real world – we all breathe real oxygen, eat real food, the earth under our feet feels equally solid to all of us.”

— Tana French

315. “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

316. “The overhead light streaked.”

— Tana French

317. “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

318. “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

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

— Tana French

320. “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

321. “Plenty of people take me for a pompous git way too fond of the sound of his own voice, which is absolutely fine with me. Go ahead and dismiss me; go right ahead and drop your guard.”

— Tana French

322. “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

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

— Tana French

324. “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

325. “Despite not having touched a drop of booze yesterday, he has the same feeling he associates with hangovers, a heavy, prickly disinclination towards everything around him. He wants today over and done with.”

— Tana French

326. “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

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

— Tana French

328. “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

329. “This watching through cool intent eyes and delicately adjusting one factor or another till a man’s fundamental instinct for self-preservation cracks, is savagery in its most pure, most polished and most highly evolved form.”

— Tana French

330. “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

331. “The place felt like a weapon expertly crafted to strip you of all humanity, hollow you to a shell creature that would do anything it was told for the slim chance of someday getting out into the living world again.”

— Tana French

332. “At first I barely recognized it as a person; stripped of substance by the bright sunfall through the leaves, flutter of white T-shirt, confusing gold swirl of hair, white brushstroke face and dense dark smudges of eyes, it had something illusory about it, as if my mind had conjured it from patches of light and shadow and at any moment it might break up and be gone.”

— Tana French

333. “I had come to think of my memories as solid, shining little tings, to be hunted out and treasured, and it was deeply unsettling to think that they might be fool’s gold, tricky and fog-shaped and not at all what they seemed.”

— Tana French

334. “Cal’s eyes are still getting used to looking this far, after all those years of city blocks. 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 in the middle of it, it looks even better.”

— Tana French

335. “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

336. “No matter how good you are, this world is always going to be better at this game.”

— Tana French

337. “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

338. “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

339. “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

340. “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

341. “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

342. “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

343. “If you don’t have your code, you got nothing to hold you down. You just drift, any way things blow you.”

— Tana French

344. “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

345. “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

346. “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

347. “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

348. “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

349. “I tell you that was nothing, nothing at all, beside the power of putting your lives, simply and daily, into each other’s hands.”

— Tana French

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

— Tana French