Quotes from Tana French

In some ways grief anonymizes as powerfully as a Greek tragedy mask.

If someone rescues you, they own you. Not because you owe them—you can sort that, with enough good favors or bottles of booze dressed up in ribbons. They own you because you're not the lead in your story any more. You're the poor struggling loser/helpless damsel/plucky sidekick who was saved from danger/dishonor/humiliation by the brilliant brave compassionate hero/heroine, and they get to decide which, because you're not the one running this story, not any more.

It was as if Tutankhamen or Miss Havisham had wandered into the pub one night and started bitching about the head on the pints.

Lexie's baby. Four weeks . . .not quite a quarter of an inch: a tiny gemstone, a single spark of color slipping between your fingers and through the cracks and gone. A heart the size of a fleck of glitter and vibrating like a hummingbird, seeded with a billion things that would never happen now.

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.

Now it seems obvious, of course, that even a strong person has weak spots and that I had hit Cassie's full force, with all the precision of a jeweler fragmenting a stone along a flaw. She must have thought, sometimes, of her namesake, the votary branded with her god's most inventive and sadistic curse: to tell the truth, and never to be believed.

Somewhere at the back of my head I heard a click, tiny and irrevocable. Memory magnifies it to a wrenching, echoing crack, but the truth is that it was the very smallness that made it so terrible.

I had, of course, sworn never to let the place cross my mind again; but human beings can't help being curious, I suppose, as long as the knowledge doesn't come at too high a price.

My body my mind the way I dress the way I walk the way I talk, mine all mine.

All's you can do is your best," he says. "Sometimes it doesn't work out the way you intend it to. You just gotta keep doing it anyway.

But that age; remember that age? They're not the same. They don't put things together. That's why half of what they do looks full-on certifiable, to you or me or any sane adult. Things don't make sense, when you're that age; you don't make sense. You stop expecting to.

That's why we have rules to begin with, Richie: because you can't trust your mind to tell you what's right and wrong.

Interesting fact from the front lines: raw grief smells like ripped leaves and splintered branches, a jagged green shriek.

Today Henry would be running a banana republic with serious border issues and a dodgy nuclear-weapons program.

But a girl who goes into battle beside you and keeps your back is a different thing, a thing to make you shiver.

I watched her on the stand in that unfamiliar suit and thought of the soft hairs at the back of her neck, warm and smelling of the sun, and it seemed an impossible thing to me, it seemed the vastest and saddest miracle of my life: I touched her hair, once.

When you're too close to people, when you spend too much time with them and love them too dearly, sometimes you can't see them. Unless Daniel was bluffing, he had made one last mistake, the same one he had been making all along. He was seeing the other four not as they were but as they should have been, could have been in some softer-edged and warmer world.

Just about everything in this life is treacherous, ready to twist and shape-shift at any second; it seemed to me that the whole world would be a different place if you had someone you were certain of, certain to the bone, or if you could be that to someone else.

I reckon it was always going to happen, one way or another. She wasn't made right for this world. She'd been running away from it since she was nine.

Murder is the thoroughbred stable. Murder is a shine and a dazzle, a smooth ripple like honed muscle, take your breath away. Murder is a brand on your arm, like an elite army unit's, like a gladiator's, saying for all your life: One of us. The finest.

and the city fireworked alive all around us: flashing with neon signs and flaring with red and gold lights, buzzing with motorbikes and pumping with stereos, streaming warm wind through the open windows. The road unrolled in front of us, it sent its deep pulse up into the hearts of our bones, it flowed on long and strong enough to last us forever.

My memories of them had rubbed thin with overuse, worn to frail color transparencies flickering on the walls of my mind: Jamie scrambling intent and surefooted up to a high branch, Peter's laugh arcing out of the trompe-l'oeil dazzle of green ahead. Through some slow sea change they had become children out of a haunting storybook, bright myths from a lost civilization; it was hard to believe they had once been real and my friends.

Your irritation is important to us," Cassie droned, looking at me upside down with her head tipped backwards over her headrest, "and will be exacerbated in rotation. Thank you for holding.

If you put your energy into how much a fall would hurt, you're already half way down.