Top 400 Tana French Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “Take what you want and pay for it, says God.”

— Tana French

352. “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

353. “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

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

— Tana French

355. “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

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

— Tana French

357. “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

358. “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

359. “Wild got into the air like a virus, and it’s spreading. Watch the packs of kids roaming inner-city estates, mindless and brakeless as baboons, looking for something or someone to wreck. Watch the businessmen shoving past pregnant women for a seat on the train, using their 4x4s to force smaller cars out of their way, purple-faced and outraged when the world dares to contradict them.”

— Tana French

360. “I had – simply by surviving – become a freak of nature.”

— Tana French

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

364. “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

365. “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

366. “It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it.”

— Tana French

367. “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

368. “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

369. “Daniel glanced up from his book. “No pasts,” he said. The fall of it, the finality, told me it was something he had said before.”

— Tana French

370. “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

371. “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

372. “The idea bent my brain.”

— Tana French

373. “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

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

— Tana French

375. “They’re unsettled and they’re frightened, and what they want from me isn’t the lovely presents, any more; it goes much deeper. They’re afraid that they’re not who they always thought they were, and they want me to find them reassurance.”

— Tana French

376. “I want my daughter to learn that not everything in this world is determined by how often she hears it or how much she wants it to be true or how many other people are looking. Somewhere in there, for a thing to count as real, there has got to be some actual bloody reality.”

— Tana French

377. “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

378. “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

379. “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

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

— Tana French

381. “For as long as I could remember, a part of me had been waiting for the day it would happen; with the cunning that comes to people whose minds have been stripped to one desire, she picked the only day we weren’t waiting for.”

— Tana French

382. “You asked me what I wanted. I spent a lot of time asking myself the same thing. By a year or two ago, I had come to the conclusion that I truly wanted only two things in this world: the company of my friends, and the opportunity for unfettered thought.”

— Tana French

383. “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

384. “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

385. “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

386. “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

387. “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

388. “I like incongruity.”

— Tana French

389. “Faye had always been sweet, flaky but sweet, unlikely to ask about your problems but deeply concerned about them if you reminded her they existed.”

— Tana French

390. “I spent a lot of the holidays at Charlie’s home in Herefordshire, learning to drive on his.”

— Tana French

391. “I’m going to bet on someone’s wife hooking up with the guy next door,’ I said. The villainous nuns would have made better TV-movie fodder, but they sounded like a pretty big stretch to me. ‘Just playing the odds.”

— Tana French

392. “I hope in that half hour she lived all her million lives.”

— Tana French

393. “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 int eh middle of it, it looks even better.”

— Tana French

394. “Worrying had always seemed to me like a laughable waste of time and energy; so much simpler to go happily about your business and deal with the problem when it arose, if it did, which it mostly didn’t.”

— Tana French

395. “No matter how good you are, this world is always going to be better at this game. It’s more cunning than you are, it’s faster and it’s a whole lot more ruthless. All you can do is try to keep up, know your weak spots and never stop expecting the sucker punch.”

— Tana French

396. “Frank has a childhood memory of Ma “screeching at Jackie for being such a bold girl that her da had to go to the pub because he couldn’t stand to be around her.”

— Tana French

397. “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

398. “The breeze was warm across my face, and even through the city lights I could see constellations: the Plough, Orion’s belt. The pine tree at the bottom of the garden rustled like the sea, ceaselessly. For a moment I felt as if the universe had turned upside down and we were falling softly into an enormous black bowl of stars and nocturne, and I knew, beyond any doubt, that everything was going to be all right.”

— Tana French

399. “Have a good laugh at this,... Deep down, I never for a second never thought they would find anything.”

— Tana French

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

— Tana French