Home > Author > Tana French

Tana French QUOTES

Tana French QUOTES

1 " I've always loved strong women, which is lucky for me because once you're over about twenty-five there is no other kind. Women blow my mind. The stuff that routinely gets done to them would make most men curl up and die, but women turn to steel and keep on coming. Any man who claims he's not into strong women is fooling himself mindless; he's into strong women who know how to pout prettily and put on baby voices, and who will end up keeping his balls in her makeup bags. "

― Tana French , Faithful Place (Dublin Murder Squad, #3)

2 " I am not good at noticing when I'm happy, except in retrospect. "

― Tana French , In the Woods (Dublin Murder Squad, #1)

3 " We had no one else to learn this from- none of our parents were shining examples of relationship success- so we learned this from each other: when someone you love needs you to, you can get a hold of your five-alarm temper, get a hold of the shapeless things that scare you senseless, act like an adult instead of the Cro-Magnon teenager you are, you can do a million things you never saw coming. "

― Tana French , Faithful Place (Dublin Murder Squad, #3)

4 " Time works so hard for us, if only we can let it. "

― Tana French , The Likeness (Dublin Murder Squad, #2)

5 " My father told me once that the most important thing every man should know is what he would die for. "

― Tana French , Faithful Place (Dublin Murder Squad, #3)

6 " Now death is uncool, old-fashioned. To my mind the defining characteristic of our era is spin, everything tailored to vanishing point by market research, brands and bands manufactured to precise specifications; we are so used to things transmuting into whatever we would like them to be that it comes as a profound outrage to encounter death, stubbornly unspinnable, only and immutably itself. "

― Tana French , In the Woods (Dublin Murder Squad, #1)

7 " We think of mortality so little these days...
I thought of the stern Victorian determination to keep death in mind, the uncompromising tombstones.
Remember, pilgrim, as you pass by,
As you are now so once was I:
As I am so will you be... "

― Tana French , In the Woods (Dublin Murder Squad, #1)

8 " To my mind the defining characteristic of our era is spin, everything tailored to vanishing point by market research, brands and bands manufactured to precise specifications; we are so used to things transmuting into whatever we would like them to be that it comes as a profound outrage to encounter death, stubbornly unspinnable, only and immutably itself. "

― Tana French , In the Woods (Dublin Murder Squad, #1)

9 " People need a moral code, to help them make decisions. 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 , In the Woods (Dublin Murder Squad, #1)

10 " I don't do that kind of negativity. If you put your energy into thinking about how much the fall would hurt, you're already halfway down. "

― Tana French , Broken Harbor (Dublin Murder Squad, #4)

11 " I had learned early to assume something dark and lethal hidden at the heart of anything I loved. When I couldn't find it, I responded, bewildered and wary, in the only way I knew how: by planting it there myself. "

― Tana French , In the Woods (Dublin Murder Squad, #1)

12 " That kind of friendship doesn't just materialize at the end of the rainbow one morning in a soft-focus Hollywood haze. For it to last this long, and at such close quarters, some serious work had gone into it. Ask any ice-skater or ballet dancer or show jumper, anyone who lives by beautiful moving things: nothing takes as much work as effortlessness. "

― Tana French , The Likeness (Dublin Murder Squad, #2)

13 " It always took my breath away,’ he said, ‘that the five of us could have found one another–against such odds, through all the layers of armored fortifications each of us had set up… Do you see now why I believe in miracles? I used to imagine time folding over, the shades of our future selves slipping back to the crucial moments to tap each of us on the shoulder and whisper: Look, there, look! That man, that woman: they’re for you; that’s your life, your future, fidgeting in that line, dripping on the carpet, shuffling in that doorway. Don’t miss it. "

― Tana French , The Likeness (Dublin Murder Squad, #2)

14 " We were still at the age when girls are years older than guy, and the guys grow up by doing their best when the girls need them to. "

― Tana French , Faithful Place (Dublin Murder Squad, #3)

15 " Human beings, as I know better than most, can get used to anything. Over time, even the unthinkable gradually wears a little niche for itself in your mind and becomes just something that happened. "

― Tana French , In the Woods (Dublin Murder Squad, #1)

16 " A bore or an uggo might manage not to get up anyone's nose, but if a girl's got brains and looks and personality, she's going to piss someone off, somewhere along the way. "

― Tana French , Faithful Place (Dublin Murder Squad, #3)

17 " Throughout history--even a hundred years ago, even fifty--it was discontent that was considered the threat to society, the defiance of natural law, the danger that had to be exterminated at all costs. Now it's contentment, "

― Tana French , The Likeness (Dublin Murder Squad, #2)

18 " I loved him, you know,' she said. 'I would have loved him as hard as he'd let me, for the rest of my life. "

― Tana French , The Likeness (Dublin Murder Squad, #2)

19 " …Obviously, I have always wished I could remember what happened in that wood. The very few people who know about the whole Knocknaree thing invariably suggest, sooner or later, that I should try hypnotic regression, but for some reason I find the idea distasteful. I’m deeply suspicious of anything with a whiff of the New Age about it—not because of the practices themselves, which as far as I can tell from a safe distance may well have a lot to them, but because of the people who get involved who always seem to be the kind who corner you at parties to explain how they discovered that they are survivors and deserve to be happy. 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 Kerouak, and start proselytizing strangers in pubs… "

― Tana French , In the Woods (Dublin Murder Squad, #1)

20 " We’ve become a nation of defaulters: we buy on credit, and when the bill comes in, we’re so deeply outraged that we refuse even to look at it. "

― Tana French , The Likeness (Dublin Murder Squad, #2)