356 Quotes by Tana French

Everyone knows a wife and kids tie you down. What people miss sometimes is that mates, the proper kind, they do the same just as hard. Mates mean you’ve settled, made your bargain: this, wherever you are together, this is as far as you’re going, ever. This is your stop; this is where you get off.

When we can’t see a pattern, we fit pieces together until one takes shape, because we have to.

But if you’ve seen a dead body, you know how they change the air: that huge silence, the absence strong as a black hole, time stopped and molecules frozen around the still thing that’s learned the final secret, the one he can never tell.

When she was born I wanted to go out and kill someone for her, so she would know for sure, all her life, that I was ready to do it if it needed doing.

Here’s a little tip for you. If you don’t like being called a murderer, don’t kill people.

I had always felt that I was an observer, never a participant; that I was watching from behind a thick glass wall as people went about the business of living – and did it with such ease, with a skill that they took for granted and that I had never known.

You’ll light your own bloody self on fire if you have to. And then you can pat yourself on the back and tell yourself you knew it all along. Congratulations.

Some people should never meet. The fallout spreads too wide and gets into the ground for much too long.

Then I sit there, running the heat to try and thaw my feet after Lucy’s flat, and watch the people going past. They make me edgy. Dozens and dozens of people, they just keep coming, and every single one of their heads is crammed with stories they believe and stories they want to believe and stories someone else has made them believe, and every story is battering against the thin walls of the person’s skull, drilling and gnawing for its chance to escape and attack someone.