Quotes by Tana French

I’m the least fanciful guy around, but on nights when I wonder whether there was any point to my day, I think about this: the first thing we ever did, when we started turning into humans, was draw a line across the cave door and say: Wild stays out. What I do is what the first men did. They built walls to keep back the sea. They fought the wolves for the hearth fire.

It meant nothing. Some people are like that: everything comes out like a lie. Not that theyre brilliant liars, just that theyre useless at telling the truth. You get left with no way to tell whats the real fake and whats the fake one.

The truth is the most desirable woman in the world and we are the most jealous lovers, reflexively denying anyone else the slightest glimpse of her. We betray her routinely, spending hours and days stupor-deep in lies, and then turn back to her holding out the lovers ultimate Möbius strip: But I only did it because I love you so much.

In all your life, only a few moments matter. Mostly you never get a good look at them except in hindsight, long after theyve zipped past you: the moment when you decided whether to talk to that girl, slow down on that blind bend, stop and find that condom. I was lucky, I guess you could call it. I got to see one of mine face-to-face, and recognize it for what it was.

You forget what it was like. Youd swear on your life you never will, but year by year it falls away. How your temperature ran off the mercury, your heart galloped flat-out and never needed to rest, everything was pitched on the edge of shattering glass. How wanting something was like dying of thirst. How your skin was too fine to keep out any of the million things flooding by; every color boiled bright enough to scald you, any second of any day could send you soaring or rip you to bloody shreds.

The closest I’d ever got to seeing a naked woman before was black and white cleavage, and then Rosie tossed her clothes in a corner just like they were getting in the way and spun around in the dim light of Number 16, palms up, luminous, laughing, almost close enough to touch. The thought still knocks the wind out of me. I was too young even to know what I wanted to do about her, I just knew nothing in the World, not the Mona Lisa walking through the Grand Canyon with the Holy Grail in one hand and a winning lotto ticket in the other, was ever going to be that beautiful.

Places are supposed to look smaller when you go back to them, but my road just looked schizoid. A couple of the houses had had nifty little makeovers involving double glazing and amusing faux-antique pastel paint; most of them hadnt. Number 16 looked like it was on its last legs: the roof was in tatters, there was a pile of bricks and a dead wheelbarrow by the front steps, and at some point in the last twenty years someone had set the door on fire. In Number 8, a window on the first floor was lit up, gold and cozy and dangerous as hell.

...the solitude was intoxicating. On my first night there I lay on my back on the sticky carpet for hours, in the murky orange pool of city glow coming through the window, smelling heady curry spices spiraling across the corridor and listening to two guys outside yelling at each other in Russian and someone practicing stormy flamboyant violin somewhere, and slowly realizing that there was not a single person in the world who could see me or ask me what I was doing or tell me to do anything else, and I felt as if at any moment the bedsit might detach itself from the buildings like a luminous soap bubble and drift off into the night, bobbing gently above the rooftops and the river and the stars.

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.

Her forehead was a maze of anxious little grooves, from a lifetime of wondering about whether everyone within range was OK.

Regardless of the advertising campaigns may tell us, we cant have it all. Sacrifice is not an option, or an anachronism; its a fact of life. We all cut off our own limbs to burn on some altar. The crucial thing is to choose an altar thats worth it and a limb you can accept losing. To go consenting to the sacrifice.

You can’t take credit for what you do when your back is against the wall.

Everyone else we knew growing up is the same: image of their parents, no matter how loud they told themselves theyd be different

I listen to the things people want out of love these days and they blow my mind. I go to the pub with the boys from the squad and listen while they explain, with minute precision, exactly what shape a woman should be, what bits she should shave how, what acts she should perform on which date and what she should always or never do or say or want; I eavesdrop on women in cafes while they reel off lists of which jobs a man is allowed, which cars, which labels, which flowers and restaurants and gemstones get the stamp of approval, and I want to shout, Are you people out of your tiny minds?

Girlfriends aren’t allowed to care if you have Stilton socks. Friends are.” All the same, she gave her hands a quick, professional shake and took hold of my foot. “Plus, you might be less of a pain in the arse if you got more action.

One of the reasons I love Murder is that victims are, as a general rule, dead... I dont make a habit of sharing this, in case people take me fore a sicko or- worse-a wimp, but give me a dead child, any day, over a child sobbing his heart out while you make him tell you what the bad man did next. Dead victims dont show up outside HQ to beg for answers, you never have to nudge them into reliving every hideous moment, and you never have to worry, and you never have to worry about what itll do to their lives if you fuck up. They stay put in the morgue, light-years beyond anything I can do right or wrong, and leave me free to focus on the people who sent them there.

Breslin gives me his wise-teacher smile, which is kind and crinkly and would make me feel warm all over if I was dumber than a bag of hair.

Hows Alison getting on?Conway snorted. Tucked up in the sick room like shes dying in some season finale. Little fadey voice on her and all. Shes having a great old time.

He told me and Rafe to stay put in case you came home, burn the note and get hot water and disinfectant and bandages rea

If she had hurt me, I could have forgiven her without even having to think about it; but I couldnt forgive her for being hurt.