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Tana French Quotes - Page 4

All Quotes Acting Heart Nostalgia Wall Writing
This is the one thing I hope: that she never stopped. I hope when her body couldn't run any farther she left it behind like everything else that tried to hold her down, she floored the pedal and she went like wildfire,

This is the one thing I hope: that she never stopped. I hope when her body couldn't run any farther she left it behind like everything else that tried to hold her down, she floored the pedal and she went like wildfire, streamed down night freeways with both hands off the wheel and her head back screaming to the sky like a lynx, white lines and green lights whipping away into the dark, her tires inches off the ground and freedom crashing up her spine.

Tana French
Running, Dark, Night

We were still at the age when girls are years older than guy, and the guys grow up by doing their best when the girls need them to.

Tana French
Girl, Growing Up, Years

Only teenagers think boring is bad. Adults, grown men and women who've been around the block a few times, know that boring is a gift straight from God. Life has more than enough excitement up its sleeve, ready to hit you with as soon as you're not looking, without you adding to the drama.

Tana French
Drama, Block, Teenager
Tana French (2008). “The Likeness: Dublin Murder Squad: 2”, p.572, Hachette UK

I read a lot. I always have, but in those two years I gorged myself on books with a voluptuous, almost erotic gluttony. I would go to the local library and take out as many as I could, and then lock myself in the bedsit and read solidly for a week. I went for old books, the older the better - Tolstoy, Poe, Jacobean tragedies, a dusty translation of Laclos - so that when I finally resurfaced, blinking and dazzled, it took me days to stop thinking in their cool, polished, crystalline rhythms.

Tana French
Book, Thinking, Years
"In the Woods". Book by Tana French, January 30, 2007.

The smell of the sea swept over the wall and in through the empty window-hole, wide and wild with a million intoxicating secrets. I don't trust that smell. It hooks us somewhere deeper than reason or civilization, in the fragments of our cells that rocked in oceans before we had minds, and it pulls till we follow mindlessly as rutting animals....It lures us to leap off high cliffs, fling ourselves on towering waves, leaves behind everyone we love and face into thousands of miles of open water for the sake of what might be on the far shore.

Tana French
Wall, Ocean, Animal

I had been right: freedom smelled like ozone and thunderstorms and gunpowder all at once, like snow and bonfires and cut grass, it tasted like seawater and oranges.

Tana French
Cutting, Ozone, Orange
Tana French (2008). “The Likeness: Dublin Murder Squad: 2”, p.345, Hachette UK

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

Tana French
Growing Up, Parent, Different

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.

Tana French
Fear, Teenager, Shining

With acting, you have to depend on somebody else to decide if you are allowed to work. You can spend weeks and months when you are not acting at all.

Tana French
Acting, Months, Week

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

Tana French
Father, Pride, Men

...and our footsteps rang and echoed till it sounded like the room was full of dancers, the house calling up all the people who had danced here across centuries of spring evenings, gallant girls seeing gallant boys off to war, old men and women straight-backed while outside their world disintegrated and the new one battered at their doors, all of them bruised and all of them laughing, welcoming us into their long lineage.

Tana French
Girl, Spring, War

I used to think I sewed us together at the edges with my own hands, pulled the stitches tight and I could unpick them any time I wanted. Now I think it always ran deeper than that and farther, underground; out of sight and way beyond my control.

Tana French
Thinking, Sight, Hands

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