Quotes from Tana French

Ask any ice-skater or ballet dancer or show jumper, anyone who lives by beautiful moving things: nothing takes as much work as effortlessness.

The wind combs the heather and gorse with a low ceaseless rustle. Its smell has a sweetness almost too cold to catch. The sky is a fine-grained gray, and from somewhere in its heights a bird sends down a pure wild whistling.

I've got good psychopath sensors now. It's like an allergy: you get exposed once, from then on you're supersensitized." She

They were amazed by each other, stunned silent, all in the circle of cypresses and night wind. The world outside was gone, nothing. Inside that circle the air was unfurling new colors, it was changing to something that cascaded and fountained pure gold and dazzle, and every breath changed them too.

Foreshadow, plot buster or red herring... only time will tell: P69 -- Cassie waited; in the evening light through the window her eyes looked huge, opaque and watchful. I knew she was giving me a chance to say, Fuck the hair clip, let's forget we ever found it. Even now the temptation, tired and profitless though it may be, is to wonder what would have happened if I had.

Stephen shrugged. "Yeah. Well. I said I would." "Ah. Are we having issues?" "This feels sleazy." "I promise I'll respect you in the morning.

In every way that mattered, we lost and we lost big. Some people are little Chernobyls, shimmering with silent, spreading poison: get anywhere near them and every breath you take will wreck you from the inside out. Some cases--ask any cop--are malignant and incurable, devouring everything they touch.

Breakfast was the full whammy: eggs, rashers, sausages, black pudding, fried bread, fried tomatoes. This was clearly some kind of statement, but I couldn't work out whether it was See, we're doing just grand without you, or I'm still slaving my fingers to the bone for you even though you don't deserve it, or possibly We'll be even when this lot gives you a heart attack.

That house shimmered in my mind like some fairy fort that appeared for one day in a lifetime, tantalizing and charged, with those four cool figures for guardians and inside secrets too hazy to be named. My face was the one pass that would unbar the door. Whitethorn House was ready and waiting to whisk itself away to nothing, the instant I said no.

The sudden, painful flare of envy caught me by surprise. I was a loner, my last few years in school. I could have done with a friend like that.

Long story,' I said. 'Ah,' the barman said, like he understood everything there was to know about me, 'we've all got one of those,

When she was born I wanted to go out and kill someone for her, so she would know for sure, all her life, that I was ready to do it if it needed doing.

Nobody knows you like people you grew up with.

I've only myself to please. There's great freedom in that.

Etiquette is the stuff you gotta do just 'cause that's how everyone else does it. Like holding your fork in your left hand, or saying 'Bless you' if someone sneezes. Manners is treating people with respect.

Everyone was talking about talking, and the most moral person was the one who yelled at the most other people for doing the talking all wrong.

what if I never got another day in my life when I was normal again?

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. The air is rich as fruitcake, like you should do more with it than just breathe it; bite off a big mouthful, maybe, or rub handfuls of it over your face.

The clothes felt like something more: fine chain-mail armor handmade to fit me, or robes laid out ready for some fiercely secret ceremony. They made my palms tingle when I touched them.

People hurt each other. That's how it works. At least you were trying to do something good. Not everyone can say that much.

What does he have to be jealous of? No, I think the mentality has its origins in the Puritan moral framework: the emphasis on fitting into a strict hierarchical structure, the element of self-loathing, the horror of anything pleasurable or artistic or unregimented . . . But I've always wondered how that paradigm made the transition to become the boundary, not just of virtue, but of reality itself.

When we can't see a pattern, we fit pieces together until one takes shape, because we have to.

For some reason the past—any of our pasts—was solidly off-limits. They were like the creepy rabbits in Watership Down who won't answer any questions beginning with "Where.

profound trauma—and clearly this would qualify—can transform a person's entire character, you know: turn a strong person into a trembling wreck, a happy nature melancholic, a gentle one vicious. It can shatter you into a million pieces, and rearrange the remains in an utterly unrecognizable form.