Quotes from Tana French

The thing about old neighborhoods: people still mind each other's business.

The joy of the new, hip, happening, double-espresso Dublin is that you can blame any strange mood on coffee deprivation. This never worked in the era of tea, at least not at the same level of street cred.

Frank told me once--and I don't know whether he's right or not, and I didn't tell Sam this either--that all the best undercovers have a dark thread woven into them, somewhere.

I think when you're kids, you're less . . . defined? Then you get older and you start deciding what kind of person you want to be, and it doesn't always match up with what your friends are turning into.

I'd never met...anyone who was worth giving up the more I wanted down the line.

I coped, in the grand tradition of children everywhere, by retreating into my imagination.

I was never afraid of getting killed and I was never afraid of losing my nerve. My kind of courage holds up best under fire; it's different dangers, more refined and insidious ones, that shake me.

If I believed in curses, I would believe that this is mine: when it matters most, in the moments when I know with the greatest clarity exactly what needs to be done, everything I say comes out wrong.

once the ruler is no longer willing to be the sacrifice for his people, he becomes not a leader but a leech,

Throughout history--even a hundred years ago, even fifty--it was discontent that was considered the threat to society, the defiance of natural law, the danger that had to be exterminated at all costs. Now it's contentment,

You don't have to like your family, you don't even have to spend time with them, to know them right down to the bone.

I should've known the eyes. Wide, bright blue, and something about the delicate arc of the lids: a cat's slant, a pale jeweled girl in an old painting, a secret.

My father once told me that the most important thing every man should know is what he would die for. If you don't know that, he said, what are you worth? Nothing. You're not a man at all.

I loved him, you know,' she said. 'I would have loved him as hard as he'd let me, for the rest of my life.

someone else, bore its way in and feed off that mind too. Even the cute little student mincing along in her flowery dress, the shuffling old fella with his shuffling spaniel, they look Ebola-lethal. I don't know what the fuck is wrong with me. Maybe I'm getting the flu.

But we're so desperate, aren't we, to believe that bad luck only happens to people who deserve it.

That long sigh again, above us. This time I saw it, moving through the branches. Like the trees were listening; like they would've been sad about us, sad for us, only they'd heard it all so many thousand times before.

Some part of me believed, unassailably, and wordlessly and perhaps with a flick of justice, that they had sent me away because they were afraid of me. Like some monstrously deformed child who should never have lived beyond infancy, or a conjoined twin whose other half died under the knife, I had- simply by surviving-become a freak of nature.

Every detective has a certain kind of case that he or she finds almost unbearable, against which the usual shield of practiced professional detachment turns brittle and untrustworthy. Cassie, though nobody else knows this, has nightmares when she works rape-murders; I, displaying a singular lack of originality, have serious trouble with murdered children; and, apparently, family killings gave Sam the heebie-jeebies. This case could turn out to be perfect for all three of us.

I said I know my shot when I see it. Sometimes you don't even have to see it. Sometimes you feel it coming, screaming down the sky towards you like a meteor.

The economic boom has given us too many people with helicopters and too many crushed into cockroachy flats from hell, way too many loathing their lives in fluorescent cubicles, enduring for the weekend and then starting all over again, and we're fracturing under the weight of it.

the room looks like it was bought through some Decorate Your Home app where you plug in your budget and your favorite colors and the whole thing arrives in a van the next day. In

What I saw transformed with a click like a shaken kaleidoscope. I stopped falling in love with her and started to like her immensely.

He feels that nineteen-year-olds, almost all of them, don't have their feet on the ground. They're turning loose from their families and they haven't found anything else to moor themselves to; they blow like tumbleweed. They're unknowns, to the people that used to know them inside out and to themselves.