Quotes from Tana French

I've lost count of how many times I've caught myself in the half-second before I splattered temper everywhere and stuck myself cleaning up the mess for the rest of my life.

If you're not rich, you're a lesser being who shouldn't have the gall to expect a living wage from the decent people who are.

But we're so desperate, aren't we, to believe that bad luck only happens to people who deserve it. People genuinely can't take it in that someone could die of cancer without bloody well smoking.

the king led his men into battle. Always. That was what the ruler was: both on a practical level and on a mystical one, he was the one who stepped forwards to lead his tribe, put his life at stake for them, become the sacrifice for their safety. If he had refused to do that most crucial thing at that most crucial moment, they would have ripped him apart—and rightly so: he would have shown himself to be an impostor, with no right to the throne.

I don't think about my parents much. I've only got a handful of memories, and I don't want them wearing away, textures rubbing smooth, colors fading from overexposure. When I take them out, once in a blue moon, I need them bright enough to catch my breath and sharp enough to cut.

The whiskey was rich and smooth and it burned trails of light right down to my fingertips.

They're all used up by scrabbling to keep their footing; they don't have room to aim for anything bigger or farther than staying one jump ahead of bad things and snatching the occasional treat along the way. He

Now death is un-cool, old-fashioned. To my mind the defining characteristic of our era is spin, everything tailored to vanishing point by market research, brands and bands manufactured to precise specifications; 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.

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.

They're all used up by scrabbling to keep their footing; they don't have room to aim for anything bigger or farther than staying one jump ahead of bad things and snatching the occasional treat along the way.

Cal reached the point a long time ago where those words make him tired for all of humanity. All the innocents say that, and believe it to the bone, right up until the moment when they can't any more. My husband would never do that to our children, my baby ain't no thief. Cal feels like he ought to stand on a street corner handing out warnings, little pieces of paper that just say: Anyone could do anything.

At the dark heart of the horror was the knowledge that it was inescapable. The thing I couldn't bear wasn't burglars or blows to the head, wasn't anything I could beat or evade or set up defenses against; it was myself, whatever that had become.

The music has turned into a distant hysterical pounding and shrieking, like someone has a tiny Rihanna locked in a box.

my head hurt in a petty nagging way that wasn't quite worth a painkiller.

and I wanted this girl who was like no girl I had ever known, wanted her not in spite of her moods and her secret bruises and her sad attempts at artifice but because of them, because of them all.

Landscape is one of the few things he knows of where the reality doesn't let you down. The West of Ireland looked beautiful on the internet; from right smack int eh middle of it, it looks even better.

People snap the way they snap.

He can't shake the feeling that some emergency is heading towards him, someone is in danger, and he needs to keep all his wits about him to have a chance of fixing things.

The kid hasn't mastered the art of small talk. Every question comes out sounding like part of an interrogation.

Wild got into the air like a virus, and it's spreading. Watch the packs of kids roaming inner-city estates, mindless and brakeless as baboons, looking for something or someone to wreck. Watch the businessmen shoving past pregnant women for a seat on the train, using their 4x4s to force smaller cars out of their way, purple-faced and outraged when the world dares to contradict them.

The place felt like a weapon expertly crafted to strip you of all humanity, hollow you to a shell creature that would do anything it was told for the slim chance of someday getting out into the living world again.

We're ruled by venal little usurpers, all of us, and they make meaninglessness everywhere they go.

What I'm saying to you is, if you're going to have a woman in the house, you want one that fills a bit of space. It's no good having some skin-and-bones scrap fo a girl with a mousy wee voice on her and not a word out of her from one day to the next. You wouldn't be getting your money's worth. When you walk in the house, you want to be seeing your woman, and hearing her. You need to know she's there, or what's the point in having her at all?

The final step into feral is murder. We stand between that and you. We say, when no one else will, There are rules here. There are limits. There are boundaries that don't move.