Quotes from Tana French

I like incongruity.

the session turned out to be all about what words they were and weren't allowed to use; nothing about what they were doing, underneath all the words, and how they could do it better. 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.

We are so used to things transmuting into whatever we would like them to be that it comes as a profound outrage to encounter death, stubbornly unspinnable, only and immutably, itself.

Women blow my mind. The stuff that routinely gets done to them would make most men curl up and die, but women turn to steel and keep on coming.

It was beautiful. I love beautiful; always have. I never saw why I should hate what I wish I had. Love it harder. Work your way closer. Clasp your hands around it tighter. Till you find a way to make it yours.

Murder is a high-pressure squad and a small one, only twenty permanent members and under any added strain (anyone leaving, anyone new, too much work, too little work), it tends to develop a tinge of cabin-fevery hysteria, full of complicated alliances and frantic rumors.

Take what you want and pay for it, says God.

He picked out a card, examined it, tucked it back. "The thing is, I suppose," he said, "that one gets into the habit of being oneself. It takes some great upheaval to crack that shell and force us to discover what else might be underneath." And looking up smiling, pushing his glasses up his nose: "And with all that philosophizing, I've forgotten whose go it was. Did I just put . . .

Children—and Rosalind was little more—don't tell pointless lies unless the reality is too much to bear.

I'm going to bet on someone's wife hooking up with the guy next door,' I said. The villainous nuns would have made better TV-movie fodder, but they sounded like a pretty big stretch to me. 'Just playing the odds.

I laid a hand on his cheek; it was so bright that for a second I thought it was burning me, a pure painless fire.

I don't want to give the impression that my life was blighted by what happened at Knocknaree, that I drifted through twenty years as some kind of tragic figure with a haunted past, smiling sadly at the world from behind a bittersweet veil of cigarette smoke and memories.

We had been so small, so recklessly sure that together we could defy all the dark uncomplicated threats of the adult world, rust straight through them like a game of Red Rover, laughing and away.

can't explain the alchemy that transmuted one evening into the equivalent of years held lightly in common. The only way I can put it is that we recognized, too surely even for surprise, that we shared the same currency.

one never really knows what one is capable of until the situation presents itself.

The thought of a mortgage round my neck makes me edgy.

Everything about her is pure faultless middle-class–the accent, the clothes, the hair, the china patterns, it's as if she ordered herself from a catalogue–but you can see the incredible effort that goes into every second of it.

The tricky shiver in the air was a reminder: everything you believe is up for grabs, every ground rule can change on a moment's whim, and the dealer always, always wins.

Corruption is taken for granted, even grudgingly admired: the guerrilla cunning of the colonised is still ingrained into us, and tax evasion and shady deals are seen as forms of the same spirit of rebellion that hid horses and seed potatoes from the British.

It was such a pathetic little story, a snip of nothing, the kind teenage girls fight over and forget every day. It had led us to this week and this room.

I leaned my arms on the Ha'penny Bridge where people used to pay half a penny to cross the Liffey, I looked out at the Custom House and the shifting streams of lights and the steady dark roll of the river under the falling snow, and I hoped to God that somehow or other, before it was too late, we would all find our way back home.

I'm not sure what exactly I did for those two years. A lot of the time, I think, nothing. I know this is one of the unthinkable taboos of our society, but I had discovered in myself a talent for a wonderful, unrepentant laziness, the kind most people never know after childhood.

I'd rather see an apartment block any day, all charged up with people who go out to work every morning and keep this country buzzing and then come home to the nice little places they've earned, than a field doing bugger-all good to anyone except a couple of cows.

In my book, the media are a necessary evil: they live off the animal inside us, they bait the front pages with second-hand blood for the hyenas to snuffle up, but they come in useful enough that you want to stay on their good side.