Quotes from Tana French

Daniel glanced up from his book. "No pasts," he said. The fall of it, the finality, told me it was something he had said before.

Murder isn't like other squads. When it's working right, it would take your breath away: it's precision-cut and savage, lithe and momentous, it's a big cat leaping full-stretch or a beauty of a rifle so smooth it practically fires itself.

The truth is, if you don't exist without someone else, you don't exist at all.

Remember, pilgrim, as you pass by, As you are now so once was I; As I am now so will you be.…

I don't mind giving you a hand where you actually need it, but I'm not going to be left handling the real business while you chase it off on some nonsense you've got into your head.

The idea bent my brain.

A wisp of wind shivers the seed-heads on the grass.

but Cal learned a long time ago never to underestimate the spectacular natural wonder that is people's stupidity.

Lexie said she was planning to, and I'm quoting, 'kick him in the bollocks so hard he'd have to stick his hand down his throat if he wanted a wank.

Life feels like a big thing when it takes four days for all of it to leave a man. When it's gone in a few seconds, 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. Or a hay baler, or a propane tank.

Frank has a childhood memory of Ma "screeching at Jackie for being such a bold girl that her da had to go to the pub because he couldn't stand to be around her.

But you've seen plenty of her, from your

a solid, unbreakable-looking build, like he had been cast all in one slab.

It looked vaguely, frustratingly familiar, but I couldn't tell whether this was because I actually remembered it or because I knew I should.

This watching through cool intent eyes and delicately adjusting one factor or another till a man's fundamental instinct for self-preservation cracks, is savagery in its most pure, most polished and most highly evolved form.

I had—simply by surviving—become a freak of nature.

That was my baby brother. It doesn't matter how he went out that window, I should have caught him.

sunlight bringing the battered wood of the table alive with an impossible holy glow.

what I'm saying to you is, if you're going to have a woman in the house, you want one that fills a bit of space. It's no good having some skin-and-bones scrap of a girl with a mousy wee voice on her and not a word out of her from one day to the next. You wouldn't be getting your money's worth. 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?

my tastes have always leaned toward bespoke rather than brand name,

Be scared terrified petrified that everything you are is every kind of wrong. Good girl.

thought of the old superstition that the soul lingers near the body for a few days, bewildered and unsure.

I think you've got something there," said Daniel. "Not jealousy, after all: fear. It's a fascinating state of affairs. 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. What a strange reversal.

In some ways grief anonymizes as powerfully as a Greek tragedy mask, but in others it pares people to the essentials