Tana French Quotes - Page 3

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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.

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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

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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

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...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

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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Here's a little tip for you. If you don't like being called a murderer, don't kill people.

Tana French

People, Littles, Murderer

FaceBook post by Tana French from Sep 07, 2016

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There's a Spanish proverb," he said, "that's always fascinated me. "Take what you want and pay for it, says God.'" "I don't believe in God," Daniel said, "but that principle seems, to me, to have a divinity of its own; a kind of blazing purity. What could be simpler, or more crucial? You can have anything you want, as long as you accept that there is a price and that you will have to pay it.

Tana French

Believe, Long, Principles

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

Tana French

Lying, Two, Stories

FaceBook post by Tana French from Aug 09, 2016

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That kind of friendship doesn't just materialize at the end of the rainbow one morning in a soft-focus Hollywood haze. For it to last this long, and at such close quarters, some serious work had gone into it. Ask any ice-skater or ballet dancer or show jumper, anyone who lives by beautiful moving things: nothing takes as much work as effortlessness.

Tana French

Beautiful, Morning, Moving

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Real isn't what they try to tell you. Time isn't. Grown-ups hammer down all these markers, bells, schedules, coffee-breaks, to stake down time so you'll start believing it's something small and mean, something that scrapes flake after flake off of everything you love till there's nothing left; to stake you down so you don't lift off and fly away, somersaulting through whirlpools of months, skimming through eddies of glittering seconds, pouring handfuls of hours over your upturned face.

Tana French

Real, Coffee, Believe

Tana French (2014). “The Secret Place: Dublin Murder Squad: 5”, p.186, Hachette UK

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I can't explain the alchemy that transmuted one evening into the equivalent of years held lightly in common. The only way I can put it is that we recognized, too surely even for surprise, that we shared the same currency.

Tana French

Years, Way, Evening

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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

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Born: 1973
Occupation: Novelist
Cite this Page: Citation

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