356 Quotes by Tana French

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.

I’ve always loved strong women, which is lucky for me because once you’re over about twenty-five there is no other kind. Women blow my mind. The stuff that routinely gets done to them would make most men curl up and die, but women turn to steel and keep on coming. Any man who claims he’s not into strong women is fooling himself mindless; he’s into strong women who know how to pout prettily and put on baby voices, and who will end up keeping his balls in her makeup bags.

This has nothing to do with what anyone else in all the world would approve or forbid. This is all their own.

The thing is, I suppose,” he said, “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.

Then all the sharp intricate peaks on the monitor smoothed out to clean straight lines and my father made a terrible growling sound, but even without any of that I would have known, because the air around us had split open and whirled and re-formed itself and there was one less person in the room.

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 suppose I’ve always had a yearning, in spite of the fact that I am temperamentally unsuited to the role in every possible way, to be a hero out of myth, golden and reckless, galloping bareback to meet my fate on a wild horse no other man could ride.

There’s optimistic, and then there’s plain crazy.

Ireland is such a young society. The British were the ruling class up until they left about a hundred years ago, and we’ve been trying to work out what our class hierarchy is ever since.