Tana French Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

Acting Books Heart Nostalgia Wall Writing

Have you noticed how easily the very young die? They make the best martyrs for any cause, the best soldiers, the best suicides. It's because they're held here so lightly: they haven't yet accumulated loves and responsibilities and commitments and all the things that tie us securely to this world. They can let go of it as easily and simply as lifting a finger. But as you get older, you begin to find things that are worth holding onto, forever.

Tana French

Letting Go, Suicide, Commitment

"The Likeness". Book by Tana French, 2009.

4 Copy quote
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

4 Copy quote
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

4 Copy quote
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

4 Copy quote
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.

Tana French

Life Changing, Writing, Choices

"Tana French: I'm haunted by Ireland's ghost estates" by Alison Flood, www.theguardian.com. July 27, 2012.

4 Copy quote
It took my breath away, that evening. If you've ever dreamed that you walked into your best-loved book or film or TV program, then maybe you've got some idea how it felt: things coming alive around you, strange and new and utterly familiar at the same time; the catch in your heartbeat as you move through the rooms that had such a vivid untouchable life in your mind, as your feet actually touch the carpet, as you breathe the air; the odd, secret glow of warmth as these people you've been watching for so long, from so far away, open their circle and sweep you into it.

Tana French

Moving, Book, Feet

4 Copy quote
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.

Tana French

Book, Writing, Acting

"Tana French: I'm haunted by Ireland's ghost estates" by Alison Flood, www.theguardian.com. July 27, 2012.

4 Copy quote
...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

4 Copy quote
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.

Tana French

Tragedy, Facts, Enough

4 Copy quote
Being easily freaked out comes with its own special skill set: you develop subtle tricks to work around it, make sure people don't notice. Pretty soon, if you're a fast learner, you can get through the day looking almost exactly like a normal human being.

Tana French

Skills, People, Special

Tana French (2008). “The Likeness: Dublin Murder Squad: 2”, p.22, Hachette UK

4 Copy quote
The girls I dream of are the gentle ones, wistful by high windows or singing sweet old songs at a piano, long hair drifting, tender as apple blossom. But a girl who goes into battle beside you and keeps your back is a different thing, a thing to make you shiver. Think of the first time you slept with someone, or the first time you fell in love: that blinding explosion that left you cracking to the fingertips with electricity, initiated and transformed. I tell you that was nothing, nothing at all, beside the power of putting your lives, simply and daily, into each other's hands.

Tana French

Girl, Dream, Song

4 Copy quote
Sometimes I think about the sly, flickering line that separates being spared from being rejected. Sometimes I think of the ancient gods who demanded that their sacrifices be fearless and without blemish, and I wonder whether, whoever or whatever took Peter and Jamie away, it decided I wasn't good enough.

Tana French

Sacrifice, Thinking, Fearless

4 Copy quote
Regardless of the advertising campaigns may tell us, we can't have it all. 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's worth it and a limb you can accept losing. To go consenting to the sacrifice.

Tana French

Cutting, Sacrifice, May

Tana French (2008). “The Likeness: Dublin Murder Squad: 2”, p.412, Hachette UK

4 Copy quote
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.

Tana French

Wall, Glasses, Skills

4 Copy quote
I wasn't sure I could make it through another hour of his company without throwing my stapler at his head.

Tana French

Hours, Throwing, Company

Tana French (2008). “The Likeness: Dublin Murder Squad: 2”, p.60, Hachette UK

4 Copy quote
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

5 Copy quote
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

4 Copy quote
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

4 Copy quote
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

4 Copy quote
You forget what it was like. You'd 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.

Tana French

Life, Rip, Fall

4 Copy quote
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.

Tana French

Morning, Writing, Careers

4 Copy quote
Now that's a concept that's always fascinated me: the real world. Only a very specific subset of people use the term, have you noticed? To me, it seems self-evident that everyone lives in the real world - we all breathe real oxygen, eat real food, the earth under our feet feels equally solid to all of us. But clearly these people have a far more tightly circumscribed definition of reality, one that I find deeply mysterious, and an almost pathologically intense need to bring others into line with that definition.

Tana French

Real, Self, Oxygen

4 Copy quote
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

7 Copy quote
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

5 Copy quote
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.

Tana French

Profound, Mind, Encounters

4 Copy quote

You May Also Like:

Tana French

Follow

Born: 1973
Occupation: Novelist
Cite this Page: Citation

Popular Topics