Quotes from Tana French

All that is implicit in her, curled unimagined inside her bones; but so are hundreds of other latent lives, unchosen and easily vanished as whisks of light.

I loved Rosie's mind. If I could have got inside there, I would happily have spent the rest of my life wandering around, just looking.

the truth is that every murder case is, if not simple, capable of simplicity, and that this is not only necessary but breathtaking, that if there are miracles then this is one. In these rooms, the world's vast hissing tangle of shadows burns away, all its treacherous grays are honed to the stark purity of a bare blade, two-edged:cause and effect, good and evil.

What I wanted was someone I belonged with, beyond any doubt or denial; someone where every glance was a guarantee, solid proof that we were stuck to each other for life.

Nothing in this world takes over your blood like a murder case, nothing demands you, mind and body, with such a huge and blazing and irresistible voice.

He strikes me as a psychopath, and they lie easier than they tell the truth.

a cipher, composed entirely of the jumbled reflections of what he thinks other people want to see.

Like I told Richie, cause and effect isn't a luxury. Take it away and we're left paralyzed, clinging to some tiny raft lurching wild and random on endless black sea. If my mother could go into the water just because, then so could theirs, any night, any minute; so could they. When we can't see a pattern, we fit pieces together until one takes shape, because we have to.

A man needs to know when to let things lie.

I wouldn't say the carpet matches the curtains there," someone else says.

Selena had been singing along, absently, gazing into nowhere. She looked at us like she was trying to work out who we were, before she got up

The thing is that many of their most passionate moral stances, as far as Cal can see, have to do with what words you should and shouldn't use for people, based on what problems they have, what race they are, or who they like to sleep with. While Cal agrees that you should call people whatever they prefer to be called, he considers this to be a question of basic manners, not of morals.

Everyone was always talking about talking, and the most moral person was the one who yelled at the most other people for doing the talking all wrong.

I just knew nothing in the world, not the Mona Lisa walking through the Grand Canyon with the Holy Grail in one hand and a winning Lotto ticket in the other, was ever going to be that beautiful. Kevin

If you know your job, you have a responsibility to pass the knowledge on.

All through this case, since the moment the car crested the hill and we saw Knocknaree spread out in front of us, the opaque membrane between me and that day in the wood had been slowly, relentlessly thinning; it had grown so fine that I could hear the small furtive movements on the other side, beating wings and tiny scrabbling feet like a moth battering against your cupped hands.

They're unsettled and they're frightened, and what they want from me isn't the lovely presents, any more; it goes much deeper. They're afraid that they're not who they always thought they were, and they want me to find them reassurance

victims? What happened to 'It's just you and me, we're all they've got'?" I said, "It got pointless, kid. That's what happened. Scorcher Kennedy's right: he's got a beauty of a case. If I were the DPP, I'd give

I had come to think of my memories as solid, shining little tings, to be hunted out and treasured, and it was deeply unsettling to think that they might be fool's gold, tricky and fog-shaped and not at all what they seemed.

I live inside my own skin. Anything that happens outside it doesn't change who I am. This isn't something I'm proud of; as far as I'm concerned, it's a bare minimum baseline requirement for calling yourself an adult human being,

maybe everyone will start believing me about the mysterious

She must have thought, sometimes, of her namesake, the votary branded with her god's most inventive and sadistic curse: to tell the truth, and never to be believed.

The moment I said Broken Harbor to O'Kelly, every faded scar in my mind had lit up like a beacon. I had walked the glittering lines of those scars, obedient as a farm animal, from that moment straight to this one. I had moved through this case shining like Conor Brennan had shone on that dark road, a blazing signal for predators and scavengers far and wide.

ready to start pushing. What-if-maybe crap is for weak people. It belongs to the ones who don't have the strength to make actual situations go their way, so they have to hide away in daydreams where they can play at controlling what comes next. And that makes them even weaker.