Top 400 Tana French Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “Today has gone on long enough.”

— Tana French

352. “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

353. “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

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

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

356. “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

357. “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

358. “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

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

— Tana French

360. “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

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

— Tana French

362. “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

363. “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

364. “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

365. “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

366. “Various therapists and psychiatrists have diagnosed various things along the way, but what it comes down to is that Dina is no good at life. It takes a knack that she’s never quite got hold of.”

— Tana French

367. “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

368. “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

369. “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

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

— Tana French

371. “There is a side of me that is most intensely attracted to women who annoy me.”

— Tana French

372. “Take what you want and pay for it, says God.”

— Tana French

373. “The wych elm’s whole crown was gone, only the trunk left, thick stubs of branches poking out obscenely. It should have looked pathetic, but instead it had a new, condensed force: some great malformed creature, musclebound and nameless, huddled in the darkness waiting for a sign.”

— Tana French

374. “She wasn’t that smart after all. Susanna, of all people, should have realized how those great upheavals can crack bedrock, shift tectonic plates, transform the landscape beyond recognition.”

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

376. “It was such a pathetic little story, a snip of nothing, the kind teenage girls fight over and forget every day. It had led us to this week and this room.”

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

378. “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

379. “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

380. “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

381. “She was doing a PhD in English literature,’ I pointed out. ‘I know zip about English literature, Frank. I got an A in my Leaving Cert, but that’s it. I don’t speak the jargon.”

— Tana French

382. “He had taken up woodworking, there was sawdust on his soft worn trousers; his wife had wrapped a scarf around his neck and kissed his cheek as he went out.”

— Tana French

383. “Cal wouldn’t have known how to explain that it wasn’t that he couldn’t handle the job any more. It was that one or the other of them, him or the job, couldn’t be trusted.”

— Tana French

384. “Frank,” I said, “this is officially the looniest idea I’ve ever heard in my life. You are off your bloody trolley. You are up the wall and tickling the bricks. You are – ” “What’s loony about it?” Frank demanded, injured.”

— Tana French

385. “They’re all used up by scrabbling to keep their footing; they don’t have room to aim for anything bigger or farther than staying one jump ahead of bad things and snatching the occasional treat along the way. He.”

— Tana French

386. “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

387. “I just knew nothing in the world, not the Mona Lisa walking through the Grand Canyon with the Holy Grail in one hand and a winning Lotto ticket in the other, was ever going to be that beautiful. Kevin.”

— Tana French

388. “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

389. “The idea bent my brain.”

— Tana French

390. “It was the sheer blazing courage of it that hit me first: the passion of trust it would take, to put your future where your mouth was, no half measures, scoop up all your tomorrows and put them so deliberately, so simply, in the hands of the people you loved best.”

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

392. “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

393. “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

394. “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

395. “Children – and Rosalind was little more – don’t tell pointless lies unless the reality is too much to bear.”

— Tana French

396. “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

397. “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

398. “The final step into feral is murder. We stand between that and you. We say, when no one else will, There are rules here. There are limits. There are boundaries that don’t move.”

— Tana French

399. “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

400. “Then the pints will get further apart, and then one of us will get into a relationship and won’t be around as much; the texts will start with Hey, too long no see, and all of a sudden we’ll realize it’s been a year since we met up. And.”

— Tana French