Top 400 Tana French Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

353. “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

354. “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

355. “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

356. “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

357. “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

358. “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

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

— Tana French

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

364. “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

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

— Tana French

366. “Cal is peeling carrots like they threatened his family.”

— Tana French

367. “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

368. “Today has gone on long enough.”

— Tana French

369. “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

370. “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

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

— Tana French

372. “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

373. “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

374. “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

375. “The idea bent my brain.”

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

377. “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

378. “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

379. “Mrs. Duggan is settled deep into her armchair, overflowing onto the arms. She’s wearing a purple dress and battered fleece slippers; her hair, dyed a shiny black, is pulled back in a tight bun. She has the air of something geological, like the house was built around her because no one was willing to move her.”

— Tana French

380. “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

381. “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

382. “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

383. “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

384. “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

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

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

387. “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

388. “Rip, who is a creature of sense, has taken one sniff of Johnny and decided that nibbling his own ass for fleas is a better use of his time.”

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

390. “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

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

— Tana French

392. “The music has turned into a distant hysterical pounding and shrieking, like someone has a tiny Rihanna locked in a box.”

— Tana French

393. “But you’ve seen plenty of her, from your.”

— Tana French

394. “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

395. “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

396. “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

397. “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

398. “He liked to promise them things; he loved to see their faces light up when he said he’d bring them to the circus in Galway, or buy them a toy car that climbed up walls. He didn’t seem to feel any need to follow through on his promises; in fact, he always seemed a little bit surprised and aggrieved when they asked.”

— Tana French

399. “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

400. “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