Quotes from Tana French

By the time he's forty, a man's either in the habit of being married or he's not.

All this bio-yogurt virtue and financial self-righteousness are just filling the gap in the market. But the problem is that it's all backwards. It's not that you do the right thing and hope it pays off; the morally right thing is by definition the thing that gives the biggest payoff.

There's no nipping women's ideas. Cut them down one place, they grow up another. You wouldn't know where you'd be.

You can't be hiding away up here hoping she'll forget. Like I told you, bucko: once a woman gets an idea, it's going nowhere.

men say, that false Dreams hold, clinging

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence," he told me reproachfully.

Cal doesn't think about Donna constantly, the way he did at first-- it took months of dogged work, blasting music or reciting football lineups out loud like a loon every time she came into his head, but he got there in the end. She still crops up from time to time, though, mostly when he runs across something that would make her smile. He always loved Dona's smile, quick and complete, sending every line of her face flying upwards.

Fasting is, I think, a profoundly instinctive form of appeal.

Often the discrepancy works for us: people don't know who to worry about, the little girl with the gun or the big guy apparently without, and the distraction of deciding keeps them off balance.

You can have anything you want, as long as you accept that there is a price and that you will have to pay it.

Murder is nature. Hadn't you noticed that? People maiming each other, raping each other, killing each other, doing all the stuff that animals do: that's nature in action. Nature is the devil I'm fighting, chum. Nature is my worst enemy. If it isn't yours, then you're in the wrong fucking gig.

When he goes weak is when she takes him by surprise like this, on an innocent fall morning, blooming right across his mind so fresh and vivid that he can almost smell her. He can't remember why he shouldn't pull out his phone, Hey, baby, listen to this. Probably he should delete her number, but they might need to talk about Alyssa sometime, and anyway he knows it by heart.

No matter how good you are, this world is always going to be better at this game. It's more cunning than you are, it's faster and it's a whole lot more ruthless. All you can do is try to keep up, know your weak spots and never stop expecting the sucker punch.

My breath felt like I'd been running. I didn't like this; didn't like how, with acres to choose from, I had come homing straight to Lexie's hiding place as if I had no choice. Around me the house seemed to have tightened and drawn closer, leaning in over my shoulder; watching; focused.

I got weary," Cal says. "Bone-weary." He did. Every morning got to be like waking up with the flu, knowing he had to trek miles up a mountain.

Your inner reality shapes your outer one, every day of your life.

A handful of ten-year-olds with underprivileged hair and no eyebrows were slouched on a wall, scoping out the cars and thinking wire hangers.

I want my daughter to learn that not everything in this world is determined by how often she hears it or how much she wants it to be true or how many other people are looking. Somewhere in there, for a thing to count as real, there has got to be some actual bloody reality.

Plenty of people think the same thing. All of them are teenagers, mentally if not physically. Only teenagers think boring is bad. Adults, gown men and women who've been around the block a few times, know that boring is a gift straight from God.

Over time, the ghosts of things that happened start to turn distant; once they've cut you a couple of million times, their edges blunt on your scar tissue, they wear thin. The ones that slice like razors forever are the ghosts of things that never got the chance to happen.

Dozens and dozens of people, they just keep coming, and every single one of their heads is crammed with stories they believe and stories they want to believe and stories someone else has made them believe, and every story is battering against the thin walls of the person's skull, drilling and gnawing for its chance to escape and attack someone else, bore its way in and feed off that mind too.

Kevin was a child. He never grew up. Thirty-seven years old and he still figured everything in the world was going to go the way he thought it should; it never hit him that the world might work its own way, whether that suited him or not.

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.

Only teenagers think boring is bad. Adults, grown men and women who've been around the block a few times, know that boring is a gift straight from God. Life has more than enough excitement up its sleeve, ready to hit you with as soon as you're not looking, without you adding to the drama.