Quotes from Tana French

figure out what to do here.

At first I barely recognized it as a person; stripped of substance by the bright sunfall through the leaves, flutter of white T-shirt, confusing gold swirl of hair, white brushstroke face and dense dark smudges of eyes, it had something illusory about it, as if my mind had conjured it from patches of light and shadow and at any moment it might break up and be gone.

She knows that killing a person does almost-invisible things to you; it leave you arm-linked with death, your head tilted just a degree that way, so that for the rest of your life your shadows mix together.

But because the whole point of the vow was for none of them to have to feel like this. The point was for one place in their lives to be impregnable. For just one kind of love to be stronger than any outside thing; to be safe.

If you don't know this by now, mate, you'd better write it down and learn it by heart: the right thing is not always the same as what's in your pretty little rule book.

It's massively unfair, love. I wish there was something I could say to make it better, but there isn't. Sometimes things are just really, really bad, and there's nothing anyone can do about it.

I am not good at noticing when I'm happy, except in retrospect. My gift, or fatal flaw, is for nostalgia

am not good at noticing when I'm happy, except in retrospect. My gift, or fatal flaw, is for nostalgia. I have sometimes been accused of demanding perfection, of rejecting heart's desires as soon as I get close enough that the mysterious impressionistic gloss disperses into plain solid dots, but the truth is less simplistic than that. I know very well that perfection is made up of frayed, off-struck mundanities.

Either the color on the TV set was off or he had used too much fake tan; his face was orange, the whites of his eyes spookily bright.

Selena feels the hidden things thinning away to black veils you could pop with a fingertip, puddling into harmless sleep on the ground.

It was a constant agony, consuming and debilitating as a toothache.

Now that's a concept that's always fascinated me: the real world. Only a very specific subset of people use the term, have you noticed? To me, it seems self-evident that everyone lives in the real world—we all breathe real oxygen, eat real food, the earth under our feet feels equally solid to all of us.

I was doing exactly the same thing as Aislinn: getting lost so deep inside the story in my head, I couldn't see past its walls to the outside world. I feel those walls shift and start to waver, with a rumble that shakes my bones from the inside out. I feel my face naked to the ice-flavored air that pours through the cracks and keeps coming. A great shiver is building in my back.

Cal wouldn't have known how to explain that it wasn't that he couldn't handle the job any more. It was that one or the other of them, him or the job, couldn't be trusted.

Where I'm seeing a dead end, he's seeing a brilliant new twist to his amazing story. I wish I could take my holidays inside Steve's head.

every flash of moonlight off a leaf looked like bared white teeth, the tree over the car looked dense with shadow-things hanging ready to drop. Every sound had me leaping around, but there was never anything to see.

I was twelve, after all, an age at which kids are bewildered and amorphous, transforming overnight, no matter how stable their lives are;

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.

She was telling the truth, but that didn't mean she was right.

That suits me down to the ground.

People are complicated. When you're a little kid, you don't realize, you think people are just one thing; but then you get older, and you realize it's not that simple. Chris wasn't that simple. He was cruel and he was kind. And he didn't like realizing that. It bothered him, that he wasn't just one thing. I think it made him feel . . .

the air around us had split open and whirled and re-formed itself and there was one less person in the room.

This is the truth of bombed-out ruins: hit a city hard enough and the cheap arrogant veneer will crumble faster than you can snap your fingers; it's the old stuff, the stuff that's endured, that might just keep enduring.

There's a Spanish proverb," he said, "that's always fascinated me. 'Take what you want and pay for it, says God.