Quotes from Tana French

It totally was elitist,' Julia says. 'So? There's nothing wrong with elitist. Some stuff is better than other stuff; pretending it's not doesn't make you open-minded, it just makes you a dick.

That evening was one of the reasons it had never occurred to me that Rosie could be dead. The blaze of her, when she was that angry: you could have lit a match by touching it to her skin, you could have lit up Christmas trees, you could have seen her from space. For all that to have vanished into nothing, gone for good, was unthinkable.

Lixa sempre as expectativas das pessoas, companheiro. Faz bem à circulação.

Liv was never afraid of cot death or of Holly falling out of bed and hitting her head or any of the standard-issue parental boogeymen. All she worried about was that Holly might wake up, in the middle of the night, and think she was all alone.

All my signposts had gone up in one blinding, dizzying explosion [...] none of the scenery looked familiar anymore.

Some people should never meet. The fallout spreads too wide and gets into the ground for much too long.

When you stop being a kid, you lose your one chance at that too-tender-to-touch gold, that breathtaken everything and forever. Once you start growing up and getting sense, the outside world turns real, and your own private world is never everything again.

In all your life, only a few moments matter. Mostly you never get a good look at them except in hindsight, long after they've zipped past you:

It would take a while to occur to him that my rules had sweet fuck-all in common with his.

old enough to take on the world and young enough to be a dozen kinds of stupid,

Our relationship with truth is fundamental but cracked, refracting confusingly like fragmented glass.

If you, like me, are essentially a city person, then the chances are that when you imagine a wood you picture a simple thing: matching green trees in even rows, a soft carpet of dead leaves or pine needles, orderly as a child's drawing. Possibly those earnestly efficient man-made woods are in fact like that; I wouldn't know.

I had forgotten even how to want something slow, something soft, something with wide spaces and its own sure-footed swaying rhythms.

I love messy homes, homes where a woman and kids have left their mark on every inch: sticky finger marks down the walls, trinkets and nests of pastel hair-gadgets on the mantelpiece, that smell of flowery things and ironing.

Lexie Madison developed out of nothing like a Polaroid, she curled off the page and hung in the air like incense smoke, a girl with my face and a life from a half-forgotten dream.

One of the many joys of Undercover is that other squads can never quite figure out when you're on the job and when you're, say, on a genuine night out with the lads, so they tend to leave you alone, just in case.

Underneath he has on jeans and a baggy beige jumper that's twenty quids' worth of knitted depression.

The impulse to win is a valuable thing, right up until you let it make you into a loser.

I recently found a diary entry from college in which I described my classmates as 'a herd of mouth-breathing fucktard yokels who wade around in a miasma of cliché so thick you can practically smell the bacon and cabbage and cow shite and altar candles.' Even assuming I was having a bad day, I think this shows a certain lack of respect for cultural differences.

In the nights afterwards I used to wake up with my mind full of those headlights, brighter and deeper than the sun. I saw them again behind my eyelids in that dark lane, and I understood then that I could have just kept driving. I could have been like Lexie. I could have hit full speed and taken us soaring up off the road, into the vast silence at the heart of those lights and out on the other side where nothing could touch us, ever.

Music, or a voice; just some trick of the river on stones, the breeze in the hollow oak? The wood had a million voices, changing with every season and every day; you could never know them all.

Some stuff is gonna find a way to happen; once it's got started, you can't stop it no matter what you do.

The truth is the most desirable woman in the world and we are the most jealous lovers, reflexively denying anyone else the slightest glimpse of her.

We lay very still. I could feel the air around us changing, blooming and shimmering like the air over a scorching road. My heart was speeding, or hers was banging against my chest, I'm not sure. I turned Cassie in my arms and kissed her, and after a moment she kissed me back. I know I said that I always choose the anticlimactic over the irrevocable, and yes of course what I meant was that I have always been a coward, but I lied: not always, there was that night, there was that one time.