Top 400 Tana French Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “Every time you say no to your big brother, God kills a kitten. Come on.”

— Tana French

302. “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

303. “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

304. “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

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

— Tana French

306. “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

307. “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

308. “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

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

— Tana French

310. “In my book, the media are a necessary evil: they live off the animal inside us, they bait the front pages with second-hand blood for the hyenas to snuffle up, but they come in useful enough that you want to stay on their good side.”

— Tana French

311. “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

312. “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

313. “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

314. “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

315. “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

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

— Tana French

317. “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

318. “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

319. “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

320. “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

321. “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

322. “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

323. “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

324. “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

325. “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

326. “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

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

— Tana French

328. “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

329. “He feels no urge to understand the stars better; he’s contented with them as they are.”

— Tana French

330. “In some ways grief anonymizes as powerfully as a Greek tragedy mask, but in others it pares people to the essentials.”

— Tana French

331. “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

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

— Tana French

333. “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

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

— Tana French

335. “Today has gone on long enough.”

— Tana French

336. “My breath felt like I’d been running. I didn’t like this; didn’t like how, with acres to choose from, I had come homing straight to Lexie’s hiding place as if I had no choice. Around me the house seemed to have tightened and drawn closer, leaning in over my shoulder; watching; focused.”

— Tana French

337. “The tricky shiver in the air was a reminder: everything you believe is up for grabs, every ground rule can change on a moment’s whim, and the dealer always, always wins.”

— Tana French

338. “I guess if you’re not the trusting type, drugs probably aren’t for you.”

— Tana French

339. “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

340. “Chris had cracked the four of them right across. Even after he was gone, the fault line he made had kept widening, deep under the surface, while everything up on top shone beautiful as new. We were just finishing the job he had begun.”

— Tana French

341. “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

342. “A Retir’d Friendship Here let us sit and bless our Starres Who did such happy quiet give, As that remov’d from noise of warres. In one another’s hearts we live. Why should we entertain a feare? Love cares not how the world is turn’d. If crouds of dangers should appeare, Yet friendship can be unconcern’d. We weare about us such a charme, No horrour can be our offence; For mischief’s self can doe no harme To friendship and to innocence. Katherine Philips.”

— Tana French

343. “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

344. “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

345. “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

346. “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

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

— Tana French

348. “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

349. “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

350. “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