Top 400 Tana French Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “When Cal hangs up he has the same empty feeling he always gets after talking to Alyssa these days, a sense that somehow, in spite of having been on the phone for all that time, they haven’t had a conversation at all; the whole thing was made of air and tumbleweed, nothing solid there. 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

302. “His private opinion about a lot of the baby thugs and delinquents he encountered on the job was that what they really yearned after, whether they knew it or not, was a rifle and a horse and a herd of cattle to drive through dangerous terrain.”

— Tana French

303. “You can’t be hiding away up here hoping she’ll forget. Like I told you, bucko: once a woman gets an idea, it’s going nowhere.”

— Tana French

304. “It was a constant agony, consuming and debilitating as a toothache.”

— Tana French

305. “That was my baby brother. It doesn’t matter how he went out that window, I should have caught him.”

— Tana French

306. “It doesn’t matter where you come from. There’s nothing you can do about it, so don’t waste energy thinking about it. what matters is where you are going.”

— Tana French

307. “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

308. “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

309. “I’ve never got the self-flagellating middle-class belief that being poor and having a petty crime habit magically makes you more worthy, more deeply connected to some wellspring of artistic truth, even more real.”

— Tana French

310. “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

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

— Tana French

312. “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

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

— Tana French

314. “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

315. “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

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

— Tana French

317. “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

318. “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

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

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

322. “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

323. “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

324. “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

325. “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

326. “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

327. “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

328. “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

329. “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

330. “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

331. “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

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

— Tana French

333. “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

334. “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

335. “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

336. “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

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

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

339. “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

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

— Tana French

342. “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

343. “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

344. “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

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

— Tana French

346. “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

347. “The overhead light streaked.”

— Tana French

348. “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

349. “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

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

— Tana French