Quotes by Tana French

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 shouldve known the eyes. Wide, bright blue, and something about the delicate arc of the lids: a cats slant, a pale jeweled girl in an old painting, a secret.

Always fuck with peoples expectations, sunshine. Its good for their circulation.

The sudden, painful flare of envy caught me by surprise. I was a loner, my last few years in school. I could have done with a friend like that.

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.

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.

If youre good at this job, and I am, then every step in a murder case moves you in one direction: towards order. We get thrown shards of senseless wreckage, and we piece them together until we can lift the picture out of the darkness and hold it up to the white light of day, solid, complete, clear. Under all the paperwork and the politics, this is the job; this is its cool shining heart that I love with every fiber of mine. This case was different. It was running backwards, dragging us with it on some ferocious ebb tide. Every step washed us deeper in black chaos, wrapped us tighter in tendrils of crazy and pulled us downwards.

Breakfast was the full whammy: eggs, rashers, sausages, black pudding, fried bread, fried tomatoes. This was clearly some kind of statement, but I couldnt work out whether it was See, were doing just grand without you, or Im still slaving my fingers to the bone for you even though you dont deserve it, or possibly Well be even when this lot gives you a heart attack.

Just about everything in this life is treacherous, ready to twist and shape-shift at any second; it seemed to me that the whole world would be a different place if you had someone you were certain of, certain to the bone, or if you could be that to someone else.

Don’t fool yourself: we all have a cruel streak. We keep it under lock and key either because we’re afraid of getting punished or because we believe this will somehow make a difference, make the world a better place.

“I dont do that kind of negativity. If you put your energy into thinking about how much the fall would hurt, youre already halfway down.”

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

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

“Now death is uncool, old-fashioned. To my mind the defining characteristic of our era is spin, everything tailored to vanishing point by market research, brands and bands manufactured to precise specifications; we are so used to things transmuting into whatever we would like them to be that it comes as a profound outrage to encounter death, stubbornly unspinnable, only and immutably itself.”

“We had no one else to learn this from- none of our parents were shining examples of relationship success- so we learned this from each other: when someone you love needs you to, you can get a hold of your five-alarm temper, get a hold of the shapeless things that scare you senseless, act like an adult instead of the Cro-Magnon teenager you are, you can do a million things you never saw coming.”

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

“To my mind the defining characteristic of our era is spin, everything tailored to vanishing point by market research, brands and bands manufactured to precise specifications; we are so used to things transmuting into whatever we would like them to be that it comes as a profound outrage to encounter death, stubbornly unspinnable, only and immutably itself.”

“I am not good at noticing when Im happy, except in retrospect.”

“Ive always loved strong women, which is lucky for me because once youre 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 hes not into strong women is fooling himself mindless; hes 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.”