Tana French

Quotes by Tana French

• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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,

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• Like, okay. Everyone in history thought they were the ones who finally knew everything. In their naissance, right, they were positive they knew exactly how the universe worked. Til the next set of guys came along and proved they were missing like a hundred important things. and then that set of guys were sure they had it all down, til another set came along and showed them parts they were missing. He glances at Julia, checking if she's laughing at him, which she isn't, and if she's listening, which she is, completely. So. he says, it's pretty unlikely, mathematically, that we are living in the one single era that has everything figured out. Which means there's a decent possibility that the reason we can't explain how ghosts and stuff could exist is because we haven't figured it out yet, not because they don't. And it is pretty arrogant of us to think it definitely has to be the other way around.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• She [88yo Mrs Fitzgerald] crossed herself and patted my arm. And you're after coming all the way from England to find out who done it? Aren't you great? God bless you, young fella. The old heretic, I said, when we got outside. Mrs. Fitzgerald had cheered up my day immensely. I hope I have that much zip when I'm eighty-eight

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• So what are you thinking? I asked. I meant about the case, obviously, but Cassie was in a giddy mood--she generates more energy than most people, and she'd been sitting indoors most of the day. Will you listen to him? A woman asking a guy what he's thinking is the ultimate crime, she's clingy and needy and he runs a mile, but when it's the other-- Behave yourself, I said, pulling her hood over her face. Help! I'm being oppressed! she yelled through it. Call the Equality Commission. The stroller girl gave us a sour look. You're overexcited, I told Cassie. Calm down or I'll take you home with no ice cream.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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...

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• 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.

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

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

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• 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.

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• What I am telling you, before you begin my story, is this -- two things: I crave truth. And I lie.

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