Top 400 Tana French Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “The overhead light streaked.”

— Tana French

402. “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

403. “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

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

— Tana French

405. “Cal has professional experience of shitbirds like this, whose lies take up so much space that people believe them just because disbelieving all of that would be too much work.”

— Tana French

406. “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

407. “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

408. “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

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

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

411. “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

412. “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

413. “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

414. “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

415. “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

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

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

418. “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

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

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

421. “Ardnakelty is full of begrudgers who take optimism personally;.”

— Tana French

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

— Tana French

423. “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

424. “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

425. “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

426. “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

427. “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

428. “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

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

— Tana French

430. “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

431. “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