Quotes from Tana French

At first he wondered if he might be too old to get accustomed to it at all, but his body has come through for him.

Despite not having touched a drop of booze yesterday, he has the same feeling he associates with hangovers, a heavy, prickly disinclination towards everything around him. He wants today over and done with.

think the mentality has its origins in the Puritan moral framework: the emphasis on fitting into a strict hierarchical structure, the element of self-loathing, the horror of anything pleasurable or artistic or unregimented . . . But I've always wondered how that paradigm made the transition to become the boundary, not just of virtue, but of reality itself.

All that St. Kilda's gloss, that walk through old oak doors like you belong, effortless: I wanted that. I wanted to lick it off my banged-up fists along with my enemy's blood. This

He feels no urge to understand the stars better; he's contented with them as they are.

I think it's just your basic teenage debris.

It's a wilderness out there; the normal rules don't apply. Decent, polite people who don't raise their voices from one year's end to the next buy a modem and turn into Mel Gibson on tequila slammers.

years of observing from the outside (one gets into the habit of being oneself)—

Worrying had always seemed to me like a laughable waste of time and energy; so much simpler to go happily about your business and deal with the problem when it arose, if it did, which it mostly didn't.

His private opinion about a lot of the baby thugs and delinquents he encountered on the job was that what they really yearned after, whether they knew it or not, was a rifle and a horse and a herd of cattle to drive through dangerous terrain.

Every kid has a right to some rebellion. I'd been angelic all through school. It evens out.

I spent a lot of the holidays at Charlie's home in Herefordshire, learning to drive on his

Plenty of people take me for a pompous git way too fond of the sound of his own voice, which is absolutely fine with me. Go ahead and dismiss me; go right ahead and drop your guard.

Sun melting over it, slow as butter on toast.

Neem wat je wil, zegt God, en betaal er voor (Spaans gezegde).

Today has gone on long enough.

Dublin goes fast, these days, fast and jam-packed and jostling, everyone terrified of being left behind and forcing themselves louder and louder to make sure they don't disappear.

I'm confused by the idea that you shouldn't go into a pub and do anything that might be bad for you,

I am a poor wayfaring stranger Traveling through this world alone But there's no sickness, toil or danger In that bright world to which I go. I'm going there to see my loved ones I'm going there, no more to roam I'm only going over Jordan I'm only going over home.

It was the sheer blazing courage of it that hit me first: the passion of trust it would take, to put your future where your mouth was, no half measures, scoop up all your tomorrows and put them so deliberately, so simply, in the hands of the people you loved best.

She wasn't that smart after all. Susanna, of all people, should have realized how those great upheavals can crack bedrock, shift tectonic plates, transform the landscape beyond recognition.

For as long as I could remember, a part of me had been waiting for the day it would happen; with the cunning that comes to people whose minds have been stripped to one desire, she picked the only day we weren't waiting for.

Homicidal satanic cults are the detective's version of yetis: no one has ever seen one and there is no proof that they exist, but one big blurry fingerprint and the media turn into a gibbering, foaming pack, so we have to act as though we take the idea at least semi-seriously.

There had been love there. It had looked solid and simple as bread; real. And it felt real to live in, a warm element through which we moved easily and which we breathed in with every breath.