Quotes from Tana French

what you get out of life is mostly what you planted. Not always, no, but mostly. If you think you're a success, you will be a success; if you think you deserve nothing but crap, you'll get nothing but crap. Your inner reality shapes your outer one, every day of your life. Do you follow me?

Breslin gives me his wise-teacher smile, which is kind and crinkly and would make me feel warm all over if I was dumber than a bag of hair.

My granddad was after dying the month before that, of a stroke. That took him four days. Life seems like a big thing when it takes four days for all of it to leave a man. When it's gone in a few sec- and, it looks awful small all of a sudden. We don't like to face up to that, but the animals know it. They've no notions about their dying. It's a little thing, only, you'd get it done in no time. All it takes is one nip from a fox.

It's ironic, isn't it? A hundred psychology students, and not one of us recognized a classic psychopath. You know the strange thing? I wished I had done everything he claimed I had. If I had, then it would all have made sense: I would have been getting what I deserved. But I hadn't done any of it, and yet that made absolutely no difference to what happened. There was no such thing as cause and

I felt different, changing. Like today was my day, if I could just figure out how. Like danger, but my danger, sweet tricky urgent luck, tumbling through the air, heads or tails?

He wants to punch something, but he knows that would do nothing but bust his knuckles. Having that much sense makes him feel old.

When you walk into the house, you want to be seeing your woman, and hearing her. You need to know she's there, or what's the point in having her at all?

Sam O'Neill drew a deft little caricature of the two of us as Mulder and Scully (I still have it, somewhere) and Cassie stuck it to the side of her computer, next to a bumper sticker that said BAD COP! NO DOUGHNUT!

I guess if you're not the trusting type, drugs probably aren't for you.

Here, the first light spreads across the fields like something holy is happening, striking sparks off a million dewdrops and turning the spiderwebs on the hedge to rainbows; mist curls off the grass, and the first calls of birds and sheep seem to arc effortless miles.

You can't take credit for what you do when your back is against the wall. That's nothing more than instinct, falling back on what you know best.

I didn't know you even could get arrested in Amsterdam

She had had the sense and the guts to let go of her ruined old self and walk away so simply, start over again, start fresh and clean as morning.

Here's one of the more disturbing things about working Murder: how little you think about the person who's been killed. There are some who move into your mind—children, battered pensioners, girls who went clubbing in their sparkly hopeful best and ended the night in bog drains—but mostly the victim is only your starting point; the gold at the end of the rainbow is the killer.

Aber irgendwie wurde ich trotzdem das ungute Gefühl nicht los, dass sie mich weggeschickt hatten, weil sie sich vor mir fürchteten. Wie ein entsetzlich missgestaltetes Kind, das eigentlich das Säuglingsalter nicht hätte überstehen sollen, oder wie ein siamesischer Zwilling, dessen andere Hälfte unter dem Messer gestorben war, so war ich einfach nur dadurch, dass ich überlebt hatte, zu einem Monstrum geworden.

These children will not be coming of age, this or any other summer. This August will not ask them to find hidden reserves of strength and courage as they confront the complexity of the adult world and come away sadder and wiser and bonded for life. This summer has other requirement for them.

It wasn't a remarkable face in any way, but it had a clean-lined sweetness that brought up summer barbecues, golden retrievers, soccer games on new-mown grass, and I have always been caught by the pull of the unremarkable, by the easily missed, infinitely nourishing beauty of the mundane.

till one day she got in a car and she just kept driving.

You know something?" Frank said, after a moment. "You've got a bad habit of taking too much credit for the stuff other people do around you.

She fits the clinical definition. No conscience, no empathy, pathological liar, manipulative, charming, intuitive, attention-seeking, easily bored, narcissistic, turns very nasty when she's thwarted in any way…

Plenty of people have told me—and several of them even meant it as a compliment—that I have a God-given talent for fucking with people's minds; and what you can do to strangers is nothing compared to what you can do to your very own family.

When Cal hangs up he has the same empty feeling he always gets after talking to Alyssa these days, a sense that somehow, in spite of having been on the phone for all that time, they haven't had a conversation at all; the whole thing was made of air and tumbleweed, nothing solid there. When she was a little kid she would trot along holding his hand and tell him everything, good and bad, it all poured straight from her heart to her mouth. He can't remember when that changed.

I'm not putting any deadlines on myself," Mart says with dignity, setting a heaped plate in front of Cal. "Not to suit you or anyone else. Now: get your laughing-tackle round that.

the evening wasn't a cold one, but it was starting to get dark and there was a sharp-edged, fidgety breeze prowling the garden, with no plants or long grass to soften it, tugging at branches and jabbing its way into corners.