Quotes from Tana French

Only, somewhere far inside my spine and deep in the palms of my hands, something hummed; like a sound too low to hear, like a warning, like a cello string when a tuning fork strikes the perfect tone to call it awake.

Chris had cracked the four of them right across. Even after he was gone, the fault line he made had kept widening, deep under the surface, while everything up on top shone beautiful as new. We were just finishing the job he had begun.

The truth is the most desirable woman in the world and we are the most jealous lovers, reflexively denying anyone else the slightest glimpse of her. We betray her routinely, spending hours and days stupor-deep in lies, and then turn back to her holding out the lover's ultimate Möbius strip: But I only did it because I love you so much.

The corners of Cooper's mouth tucked in, which is as close as he gets to a smile. He said, "Do come in.

at dawn rabbits bring their kittens out from the foundations to play on ancient graves.

my friends and I were all poor together; it had very little to recommend it, but at least it had involved less effort.

Black people got mad about being treated like crap. Bad cops got mad 'cause they were getting called on their shit all of a sudden. Good cops got mad 'cause they were the bad guys when they hadn't done anything.

We mostly shop at Brown Thomas, during the sales, and occasionally come into work wearing embarrassingly identical soupçons.

You'd have brought her the moon.

The wych elm's whole crown was gone, only the trunk left, thick stubs of branches poking out obscenely. It should have looked pathetic, but instead it had a new, condensed force: some great malformed creature, musclebound and nameless, huddled in the darkness waiting for a sign.

Unreadable stares everywhere, all of them pulsing with danger,

dumped an enormous IKEA package in the house: presumably it would change the landscape if and when I got up the energy to assemble it, but until then it was just there, in the middle of everything, where I barked my shin or banged my elbow on it every time I tried to get past.

They say boys wreck your house and girls wreck your head, and it's the truth.

I've never got the self-flagellating middle-class belief that being poor and having a petty crime habit magically makes you more worthy, more deeply connected to some wellspring of artistic truth, even more real.

When I think about the Spain case, from deep inside endless nights, this is the moment I remember. Everything else, every other slip and stumble along the way, could have been redeemed. This is the one I clench tight because of how sharp it slices. Cold still air, a weak ray of sun glowing on the wall outside the window, smell of stale bread and apples.

Wir kannten uns, seit wir in Windeln gesteckt hatten, aber das war der Sommer, als sich alles veränderte, so schnell, dass wir nicht mehr mitkamen.

She looks sort of like a person but not really, like someone explained to aliens what a person is and they did their best to make one of their own.

Landscape is one of the few things he knows of where the reality doesn't let you down.

Selena said, "Maybe they did have. 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 . . .

I worry that I might come out of hypnosis with that sugar-high glaze of self-satisfied enlightenment, like a seventeen-year-old who's just discovered Kerouac, and start proselytizing strangers in pubs.

branded with her god's most inventive and sadistic curse: to tell the truth, and never to be believed.

she dumped me. She informed me, matter-of-factly, that she was old enough to know the difference between intriguing and fucked up. "You should go for younger women," she advised me. "They can't always tell.

You do what your woman or your kid needs, even when it feels a lot harder than dying.

It feels like someone's using a tennis ball machine to fire starving pug dogs at you.