356 Quotes by Tana French

In my book, the media are a necessary evil: they live off the animal inside us, they bait the front pages with second-hand blood for the hyenas to snuffle up, but they come in useful enough that you want to stay on their good side.

Once you have mates who know you, right down under the this-and-that you decide people want to see today, then there's no room left for the someday person who'll magic you into being all your finest dreams. You've turned solid:you're the person your mates know, forever.

and I wanted this girl who was like no girl I had ever known, wanted her not in spite of her moods and her secret bruises and her sad attempts at artifice but because of them, because of them all.

I had seen her in a temper before – I tell her it's her French grandfather's fault, Mediterranean lack of self-control – and I knew she'd settle down now she'd taken it out on the tree.

Sacrifice is not an option, or an anachronism; it´s a fact of life. We all cut off our own limbs to burn on some altar. The crucial thing is to choose an altar that is worth it and a limb you can accept losing.

The wych elm's whole crown was gone, only the trunk left, thick stubs of branches poking out obscenely. It should have looked pathetic, but instead it had a new, condensed force: some great malformed creature, musclebound and nameless, huddled in the darkness waiting for a sign.

Wayne,” I said to Cassie, while we were getting him a Sprite and watching him pick his acne in the one-way glass. “Why didn’t his parents just tattoo ‘Nobody in my family has ever finished secondary school’ on his forehead at birth?

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.

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