Tana French Quotes

What I am telling you, before you begin my story, is this - two things: I crave truth. And I lie.

I am not good at noticing when I'm happy, except in retrospect.

My father told me once that the most important thing every man should know is what he would die for.

We think of mortality so little these days...
I thought of the stern Victorian determination to keep death in mind, the uncompromising tombstones.
Remember, pilgrim, as you pass by,
As you are now so once was I:
As I am so will you be...

Time works so hard for us, if only we can let it.

People need a moral code, to help them make decisions. 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.

A bore or an uggo might manage not to get up anyone's nose, but if a girl's got brains and looks and personality, she's going to piss someone off, somewhere along the way.

I had learned early to assume something dark and lethal hidden at the heart of anything I loved. When I couldn't find it, I responded, bewildered and wary, in the only way I knew how: by planting it there myself.

I have always been caught by the pull of the unremarkable, by the easily missed, infinitely nourishing beauty of the mundane.

Human beings, as I know better than most, can get used to anything. Over time, even the unthinkable gradually wears a little niche for itself in your mind and becomes just something that happened.

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.

Who who whose smell in the air of her room, whose fingerprints all over her friends’ secret places.

We were still at the age when girls are years older than guy, and the guys grow up by doing their best when the girls need them to.

We’ve become a nation of defaulters: we buy on credit, and when the bill comes in, we’re so deeply outraged that we refuse even to look at it.