Tana French Quotes
Some people are little Chernobyls, shimmering with silent, spreading poison: get anywhere near them and every breath you take will wreck you from the inside out.
I wanted to tell her that being loved is a talent too, that it takes as much guts and as much work as loving; that some people, for whatever reason, never learn the knack
Her forehead was a maze of anxious little grooves, from a lifetime of wondering about whether everyone within range was OK.
A bore or an uggo might manage not to get up anyone's nose, but if a girl's got brains and looks and personality, she's going to piss someone off, somewhere along the way.
Don't you ever feel that - that you just need to get away? From everything? That it's all too much?
The thing about being a mystery writer, what marks a mystery writer out from a chick lit author or historical fiction writer, is that you always find a mystery in every situation.
We think about mortality so little, these days, except to flail hysterically at it with trendy forms of exercise and high-fiber cereals and nicotine patches.
I don't do that kind of negativity. If you put your energy into thinking about how much the fall would hurt, you're already halfway down.
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.
For a moment, I felt as if the universe had turned upside down and we were falling softly into an enormous black bowl of stars, and I knew, beyond any doubt, that everything was going to be alright.
I came from a house full of books, so I took reading for granted. I was an outdoorsy little kid, too, so I got the best of both worlds by taking books up trees and reading there.
Everyone else we knew growing up is the same: image of their parents, no matter how loud they told themselves they'd be different
What I am telling you, before you begin my story, is this -- two things: I crave truth. And I lie.
My father told me once that the most important thing every man should know is what he would die for.
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.
Sometimes, when you're close to someone, you miss things. Other people can see them, but you can't.
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.
Both back when I was acting and now that I'm writing, I've always wanted the same thing out of my career: to be able to get up in the morning and do what I love doing.
I like writing about big turning points, where professional and personal lives coalesce, where the boundaries are coming down, and you're faced with a set of choices which will change life forever.
If you rewrite a paragraph fifty times and forty-nine of them are terrible, that's fine; you only need to get it right once.
I'm still very much in the apprentice stage of writing. I read somewhere that you need to write a million words before you know what you're doing - so I'm headed that way, but I'm nowhere near there.
When we can't see a pattern, we fit pieces together until one takes shape, because we have to.
... I stayed because running seemed too strange and too complicated. All I knew was how to fall back, find a patch of solid ground, and then dig my heels in and fight to start over.
I thought I could never write a proper book; I'd never done it before. But I thought I could write a sequence. Then I had a chapter. The next thing I knew I was turning acting down.
I have always been caught by the pull of the unremarkable, by the easily missed, infinitely nourishing beauty of the mundane.
But give me more credit than that. Someone else may have dealt the hand, but I picked it up off the table, I played every card, and I had my reasons.
Most people are only too delighted to wreck each other's heads. And for the tiny minority who do their pathetic best not to, this world is going to go right ahead and make sure they do it anyway.
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.
I weaned myself on the nostalgia equivalent of methadone (less addictive, less obvious, less likely to make you crazy): missing what I had never had.
One of my da's tragedies was always the fact that he was bright enough to understand just how comprehensively he had shat all over his life.
My memories of them had rubbed thin with overuse, worn to frail color transparencies flickering on the walls of my mind...
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
Maybe she, like me, would have loved the tiny details and inconveniences even more dearly than the wonders, because they are the things that prove you belong.
I wasn't sure I could make it through another hour of his company without throwing my stapler at his head.
You don't have to like your family, you don't even have to spend time with them, to know them right down to the bone.
Here's a little tip for you. If you don't like being called a murderer, don't kill people.
Take what you want and pay for it, says God. You can have anything you want, as long as you accept that there is a price and you will have to pay it.
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.
I should've known the eyes. Wide, bright blue, and something about the delicate arc of the lids: a cat's slant, a pale jeweled girl in an old painting, a secret.
How's Alison getting on?'Conway snorted. 'Tucked up in the sick room like she's dying in some season finale. Little fadey voice on her and all. She's 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