Quotes from Tana French

No matter how good you are, this world is always going to be better at this game.

The moment when Cassie had said, "We'll have it," had set in motion some unstoppable tectonic shift; familiar things were cracking open and twisting inside out before my eyes, the world turning beautiful and dangerous as a bright spinning blade.

One of my da's tragedies was always the fact that he was bright enough to understand just how comprehensively he had shat all over his life. He would have been a lot better off thick as a plank.

this is the only story in the world that nobody but me will ever be able to tell.

Sooner or later, we all end up getting a good kick in the certainties. That's what life is. The trick is to turn that kick into a stepping-stone towards the next level of certainty.

You start thinking that's the whole world, nowhere else exists, then you end up with all this hysterical shite. Best friends forever, she-said-you-said-I-said wars, everyone working themselves into fits over they don't even know what. Nothing's just normal; everything's right up here, all the time.

Every sunny familiar spot in our shared landscape had become a dark minefield, fraught with treacherous nuances and implications.

You can't take credit for what you do when your back is against the wall.

Over my own dead body was I going to stake myself down somewhere, being someone, that didn't have all the beautiful I could cram into me.

None of them say anything. They keep their eyes closed. They lie still and feel the world change shape around them and inside them, feel the boundaries set solid; feel the wild left outside, to prowl perimeters till it thins into something imagined, something forgotten.

She had held her whole life, everything she was, as lightly as a wildflower tucked in her hair, to be tossed away at any second as she took off burning streaks down the highway.

The thing is (…) 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.

The thing about being a mystery writer, what marks a mystery writer out from a chick lit author or historical fiction writer, is that you always find a mystery in every situation.

I'm always looking for the potential mystery in everything; I can't imagine writing about anything else.

I'm still very much in the apprentice stage of writing. I read somewhere that you need to write a million words before you know what you're doing - so I'm headed that way, but I'm nowhere near there.

I wanted to tell her that being loved is a talent too, that it takes as much guts and as much work as loving; that some people, for whatever reason, never learn the knack

I read one book where the characters never said anything; instead, they spent all their time grunting and bleating and hissing and cooing and growling and chirping and... It was like a menagerie in there. After a while, I wasn't even taking in the rest of the book, because that was all I could see: the dialogue tags.

With acting, you have to depend on somebody else to decide if you are allowed to work. You can spend weeks and months when you are not acting at all.

I came from a house full of books, so I took reading for granted. I was an outdoorsy little kid, too, so I got the best of both worlds by taking books up trees and reading there.

For me, a relationship with a place is very fundamental. When you're moving - when you're leaving your life and the place where you've lived on a semi-regular basis - you tend to connect the sense of your entire life to that place that you've left.

I remember reading about the Marie Celeste when I was a kid and becoming obsessed with what happened.

I had been right: freedom smelled like ozone and thunderstorms and gunpowder all at once, like snow and bonfires and cut grass, it tasted like seawater and oranges.