Quotes from Tana French

This country's passion for property is built into the blood, a current as huge and primal as desire. Centuries of being turned out on the roadside at a landlord's whim, helpless, teach your bones that everything in life hangs on owning your home.

it's a fact of life. We all cut off our own limbs to burn on some altar. The crucial thing is to choose an altar that's worth it and a limb you can accept losing. To go consenting to the sacrifice.

Few deaths can match the refined agony of being the one left behind

It comes to him with the clarity of a sound, a neat small chink like metal hitting stone.

That's how guys work. If you care more about them than they do about you, they hate you for it.

For ten years Dublin's been changing faster than our minds can handle. The economic boom has given us too many people with helicopters and too many crushed into cockroachy flats from hell, way too many loathing their lives in fluorescent cubicles, enduring for the weekend and then starting all over again, and we're fracturing under the weight of it.

Her belief is built purely out of hope, piled on top of nothing, solid as smoke. Her worry, on the other hand, is dense and sharp-cornered as a lump of rock.

but all it takes is one whiff of the right smell—jasmine, lapsang souchong, a specific old-fashioned soap that I've never been able to identify—or one sideways shaft of afternoon light at a particular angle, and I'm lost, in thrall all over again.

If you want to kill someone, have enough respect for my time to make it someone, anyone, other than the most gobsmackingly obvious person in the world. One

Just about everything in this life is treacherous, ready to twist and shape-shift at any second; it seemed to me that the whole world would be a different place if you had someone you were certain of, certain to the bone, or if you could be that to someone else. I know husbands and wives who are that to each other. I know partners.

I hope in that half hour she lived all her million lives.

Es gibt ein spanisches Sprichwort", sagte er, "das mich immer fasziniert hat. 'Nimm, was du willst, und bezahl dafür, sagt Gott.

there are deep stubborn veins of nostalgia for the 1950s (even among people my age; in much of Ireland the fifties didn't end until 1995, when we skipped straight to Thatcher's eighties),

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.

Irgendwo hab ich gelesen, dass das letzte Wort auf der Black Box eines jeden abgestürzten Flugzeugs, das Letzte, was der Pilot sagt, wenn er weiß, dass er sterben wird, 'Mama' ist. Wenn dir mit Lichtgeschwindigkeit die ganze Welt und das ganze Leben entrissen wird, ist dieses Wort das Einzige, was dir bleibt.

It's taken me this long to start thinking about what luck can be, how smoothly and deliciously deceptive, how relentlessly twisted and knotted in on its own hidden places, and how lethal.

Our entire society's based on discontent: people wanting more and more and more, being constantly dissatisfied with their homes, their bodies, their decor, their clothes, everything. Taking it for granted that that's the whole point of life, never to be satisfied. If you're perfectly happy with what you've got–specially if what you've got isn't even all that spectacular–then you're dangerous.

Ich habe ihn geliebt, weißt du", sagte sie. "Ich hätte ihn so sehr geliebt, wie er mich gelassen hätte, bis ans Ende meines Lebens.

a queen in a fairy tale, left alone in her tower to mourn her lost, witch-stolen princess.

The air of the squad room hurt everywhere it touched me. Lexie in dim gold light on the screen was a dark lake I could high-dive into, she was a thin-ice river I could skate away on, she was a long-distance flight leaving now.

I've been trying not to say it out loud because I don't want to jinx it. Like a dumb kid; like one of those moaners who believe the universe has it in for them and everything is just looking for an excuse to turn to shite.

I had seen her in a temper before – I tell her it's her French grandfather's fault, Mediterranean lack of self-control – and I knew she'd settle down now she'd taken it out on the tree.

So far, you've only seen what bad luck can do to people. You're about to take your first good look at what people can do to each other. Believe me: not the same thing.

There's no password more powerful than your past.