Writer / Novelist / Author Tana French

BOOKS, NOVELS, AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY, BACKGROUND, PROFILE & BEST QUOTES

TANA FRENCH BOOKS

Born        May 1973, Vermont
Genre      Psychological Mystery
Language English

Tana French, an internationally acclaimed author, has enthralled readers with her gripping mysteries and nuanced characters. Born in Vermont and raised in Ireland, French's passion for storytelling was ignited at a young age, fueled by her love for l...

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Best Quotes

"I am not good at noticing when I'm happy, except in retrospect."

~ Tana French

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Tana French, an internationally acclaimed author, has enthralled readers with her gripping mysteries and nuanced characters. Born in Vermont and raised in Ireland, French's passion for storytelling was ignited at a young age, fueled by her love for literature and the rich tapestry of Irish culture.

After studying acting and English literature at Trinity College in Dublin, French embarked on a career in writing, honing her craft and developing her distinctive style of psychological suspense. Her debut novel, "In the Woods," published in 2007, introduced readers to her talent for crafting intricate plots, atmospheric settings, and deeply flawed characters.

Since then, French has become a household name in the world of crime fiction, with each new release eagerly anticipated by fans and critics alike. Her Dublin Murder Squad series, which includes novels such as "The Likeness," "Faithful Place," and "The Secret Place," has garnered widespread acclaim for its richly drawn characters, immersive storytelling, and intricate plotting.

French's writing style is characterized by its lyrical prose, atmospheric settings, and meticulous attention to detail. She has a gift for creating complex, multi-dimensional characters who grapple with moral ambiguity, personal demons, and the complexities of human relationships. Her novels often delve deep into the darker corners of the human psyche, exploring themes of identity, memory, and the nature of evil.

Readers are drawn to French's novels for their immersive storytelling, intricate plots, and richly drawn characters. Whether it's the atmospheric setting of Dublin, the intricate web of clues and red herrings, or the psychological depth of her protagonists, French's books offer a compelling blend of mystery, suspense, and literary fiction.

While French is perhaps best known for her Dublin Murder Squad series, she has also penned standalone novels such as "The Witch Elm" and "The Searcher," each showcasing her talent for crafting gripping mysteries with unforgettable characters.

In addition to her literary accomplishments, French has received numerous accolades and awards throughout her career, including the Edgar Award for Best First Novel and the Irish Book Award for Crime Fiction. Her novels have been translated into over 40 languages and adapted for television and film, further cementing her status as one of the preeminent voices in crime fiction today.

For those seeking a riveting mystery filled with twists, turns, and unforgettable characters, Tana French's novels are a must-read. With their immersive storytelling, atmospheric settings, and richly drawn characters, her books offer a captivating escape into the heart of the human psyche.

As for upcoming projects, fans can look forward to French's next novel, "The Woods Are Dark and Deep," the second installment in her Cal Hooper series, slated for release later this year. With promises of more twists, turns, and psychological intrigue, it's sure to be another thrilling addition to French's impressive body of work.

Tana French Best Quotes

Best Quotes


“I've always loved strong women, which is lucky for me 
because once you're 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 he's not into strong women is fooling himself 
mindless; he's 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.” 
― Tana French, Faithful Place 

“I had learned early to assume something dark and lethal 
hidden at the heart of anything I loved. When I couldn't 
find it, I responded, bewildered and wary, in the only 
way I knew how: by planting it there myself.” 
― Tana French, In the Woods 

“I am not good at noticing when I'm happy, except in 
retrospect.” 
― Tana French, In the Woods 

“Our entire society is based on discontent. People 
wanting more and more and more. Being constantly 
dissatisfied with their homes, their bodies, their décor, 
their clothes, everything – taking it for granted that 
that’s the whole point of life. Never to be satisfied. If 
you are perfectly happy with what you got, especially if 
what you got isn’t even all that spectacular then you’re 
dangerous. You’re breaking all the rules. You’re 
undermining the sacred economy. You’re challenging every 
assumption that society is built on.” 
― Tana French, The Likeness 

“What I am telling you, before you begin my story, is 
this -- two things: I crave truth. And I lie. ” 
― Tana French, In the Woods 

“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, The Likeness 

“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 ” 
― Tana French, The Likeness 

“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” 
― Tana French, The Likeness 

“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, In the Woods 

“My father told me once that the most important thing 
every man should know is what he would die for.” 
― Tana French, Faithful Place 

“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.” 
― Tana French, The Likeness 

“Over time, the ghosts of things that happened start to 
turn distant; once they've cut you a couple of million 
times, their edges blunt on your scar tissue, they wear 
thin. The ones that slice like razors forever are the 
ghosts of things that never got the chance to happen.” 
― Tana French, Broken Harbour 

“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, The Likeness 

“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, In the Woods 

“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, The Secret Place 

“Time works so hard for us, if only we can let it.” 
― Tana French, The Likeness 

“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.” 
― Tana French, In the Woods 

“Human beings, as I know better than most, can get used 
to anything. Over time, even the unthinkable gradually 
wears a little niche for itself in your mind and becomes 
just something that happened.” 
― Tana French, In the Woods 

“She informed me, matter-of-factly, that she was old 
enough to know the difference between intriguing and 
fucked up. "You should go for younger women," she advised 
me. "They can't always tell.” 
― Tana French, In the Woods 

“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, Broken Harbour 

“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.” 
― Tana French, The Likeness 

“Her forehead was a maze of anxious little grooves, from 
a lifetime of wondering about whether everyone within 
range was OK.” 
― Tana French, Faithful Place 

“I listen to the things people want out of love these 
days and they blow my mind. I go to the pub with the boys 
from the squad and listen while they explain, with minute 
precision, exactly what shape a woman should be, what 
bits she should shave how, what acts she should perform 
on which date and what she should always or never do or 
say or want; I eavesdrop on women in cafes while they 
reel off lists of which jobs a man is allowed, which 
cars, which labels, which flowers and restaurants and 
gemstones get the stamp of approval, and I want to shout, 
Are you people out of your tiny minds?” 
― Tana French, Faithful Place 

“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, The Likeness 

“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.” 
― Tana French, In the Woods 

“I am, of course, romanticizing; a chronic tendency of 
mine.” 
― Tana French, In the Woods 

“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, The Likeness 

“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, The Likeness 

“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, The Likeness 

“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.” 
― Tana French, In the Woods 

“I am not good at noticing when I'm happy, except in 
retrospect. My gift, or fatal flaw, is for nostalgia. I 
have sometimes been accused of demanding perfection, of 
rejecting heart's desires as soon as I get close enough 
that the mysterious impressionistic gloss disperses into 
plain solid dots, but the truth is less simplistic than 
that. I know very well that perfection is made up of 
frayed, off-struck mundanities. I suppose you could say 
my real weakness is a kind of long-sightedness: usually 
it is only at a distance, and much too late, that I can 
see the pattern.” 
― Tana French, In the Woods 

“I love beautiful; always have. I never saw why I should 
hate what I wish I had. Love it harder. Work your way 
closer. Clasp your hands around it tighter. Till you find 
a way to make it yours.” 
― Tana French, The Secret Place 

“Sarte was right, Hell is other people” 
― Tana French, The Likeness 

“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” 
― Tana French, In the Woods 

“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.” 
― Tana French, Faithful Place 

“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, The Likeness 

“People you knew when you were teenagers, the ones who 
saw your stupidest haircut and the most embarrassing 
things you've done in your life, and they still cared 
about you after all that: they're not replaceable, you 
know?” 
― Tana French, Broken Harbour 

“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, The Likeness 

“I found out early that you can throw yourself away, 
missing what you've lost.” 
― Tana French, The Likeness 

“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, In the Woods 

“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.” 
― Tana French, The Likeness 

“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.” 
― Tana French, Broken Harbour 

“People need a moral code, to help them make decisions. 
All this bio-yogurt virtue and financial self-
righteousness are just filling the gap in the market. But 
the problem is that it's all backwards. It's not that you 
do the right thing and hope it pays off; the morally 
right thing is by definition the thing that gives the 
biggest payoff.” 
― Tana French, In the Woods 

“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, The Likeness 

“No one needs a relationship. What you need is the basic 
cop-on to figure that out, in the face of all the media 
bullshit screaming that you're nothing on your own and 
you're a dangerous freak if you disagree. The truth is, 
if you don't exist without someone else, you don't exist 
at all. And that doesn't just go for romance. I love my 
ma, I love my friends, I love the bones of them. If any 
of them wanted me to donate a kidney or crack a few 
heads, I'd do it, no questions asked. And if they all 
waved good-bye and walked out of my life tomorrow, I'd 
still be the same person I am today.” 
― Tana French, The Trespasser 

“If she had hurt me, I could have forgiven her without 
even having to think about it; but I couldn't forgive her 
for being hurt.” 
― Tana French, In the Woods 

“She hears all the voices from when she was little, 
soothing, strengthening: Don’t be scared, not of 
monsters, not of witches, not of big dogs. And now, 
snapping loud from every direction: Be scared, you have 
to be scared, ordering like this is your one absolute 
duty. Be scared you’re fat, be scared your boobs are too 
big and be scared they’re too small. Be scared to walk on 
your own, specially anywhere quiet enough that you can 
hear yourself think. Be scared of wearing the wrong 
stuff, saying the wrong thing, having a stupid laugh, 
being uncool. Be scared of guys not fancying you; be 
scared of guys, they’re animals, rabid, can’t stop 
themselves. Be scared of girls, they’re all vicious, 
they’ll cut you down before you can cut them. Be scared 
of strangers. Be scared you won’t do well enough in your 
exams, be scared of getting in trouble. Be scared 
terrified petrified that everything you are is every kind 
of wrong. Good girl.” 
― Tana French, The Secret Place 

“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. I hope every second she could have had came 
flooding through that cottage like speed wind: ribbons 
and sea spray, a wedding ring and Chad’s mother crying, 
sun-wrinkles and gallops through wild red brush, a baby’s 
first tooth and its shoulder blades like tiny wings in 
Amsterdam Toronto Dubai; hawthorn flowers spinning 
through summer air, Daniel’s hair turning gray under high 
ceilings and candle flames and the sweet cadences of 
Abby’s singing. Time works so hard for us, Daniel told me 
once. I hope those last few minutes worked like hell for 
her. I hope in that half hour she lived all her million 
lives.” 
― Tana French, The Likeness 

“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, In the Woods 

“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, Faithful Place 

“There was a time when I believed I was the redeemed one, 
the boy borne safely home on the ebb of whatever freak 
tide carried Peter and Jamie away. Not any more. In ways 
too dark and crucial to be called metaphorical, I never 
left that wood.” 
― Tana French, In the Woods 

“But this is what I know about people getting ready to 
walk of the edge of their own lives: they want someone to 
know how they got there. Maybe they want to know that 
when they dissolve into earth and water, that last 
fragment will be saved, held in some corner of someone's 
mind; or maybe all they want is a chance to dump it 
pulsing and bloody into someone else's hands, so it won't 
weigh them down on the journey. They want to leave their 
stories behind. No one in all the world knows that better 
than I do.” 
― Tana French, Broken Harbour 

“How can I ever make you understand Cassie and me? I 
would have to take you there, walk you down every path of 
our secret shared geography. The truism says it’s against 
all odds for a straight man and woman to be real friends, 
platonic friends; we rolled thirteen, threw down five 
aces and ran away giggling. She was the summertime cousin 
out of storybooks, the one you taught to swim at some 
midge-humming lake and pestered with tadpoles down her 
swimsuit, with whom you practiced first kisses on a 
heather hillside and laughed about it years later over a 
clandestine joint in your granny’s cluttered attic. She 
painted my fingernails gold and dared me to leave them 
that way for work…We climbed out her window and down the 
fire escape and lay on the roof of the extension below, 
drinking improvised cocktails and singing Tom Waits and 
watching the stars spin dizzily around us.No.” 
― Tana French, In the Woods 

“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, The Likeness 

“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, In the Woods 

“My memories of them had rubbed thin with overuse, worn 
to frail color transparencies flickering on the walls of 
my mind” 
― Tana French, In the Woods 

“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.” 
― Tana French, The Likeness 

“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, Faithful Place 

“Out of absolutely nowhere I felt a sudden, sweet shot of 
joy, piercing and distilled as the jolt I imagine heroin 
users get when the fix hits the vein. It was my partner 
bracing herself on her hands as she slid fluidly off the 
desk, it was the neat practiced movement of flipping my 
notebook shut one-handed, it was my superintendent 
wriggling into his suit jacket and covertly checking his 
shoulders for dandruff, it was the garishly lit office 
with a stack of marker-labeled case files sagging in the 
corner and evening rubbing up against the window. It was 
the realization, all over again, that this was real and 
it was my life. Maybe Katy Devlin, if she had made it 
that far, would have felt this way about blisters on her 
toes, the pungent smell of sweat and floor wax in the 
dance studios, the early-morning breakfast bells raced 
down echoing corridors. Maybe she, like me, would have 
loved the tiny details and the inconveniences even more 
dearly than the wonders, because they are the things that 
prove you belong.” 
― Tana French, In the Woods 

“In all your life, only a few moments matter. Mostly you 
never get a good look at them except in hindsight, long 
after they've zipped past you: the moment when you 
decided whether to talk to that girl, slow down on that 
blind bend, stop and find that condom. I was lucky, I 
guess you could call it. I got to see one of mine face-to-
face, and recognize it for what it was.” 
― Tana French, Faithful Place 

“Trust your instincts, Dad always says. If something 
feels dodgy to you, if someone feels dodgy, you go with 
dodgy. Don’t give the benefit of the doubt because you 
want to be a nice person, don’t wait and see in case you 
look stupid. Safe comes first. Second could be too late.” 
― Tana French, The Secret Place 

“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, Faithful Place 

“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, In the Woods 

“We think of mortality so little these days...I thought 
of the stern Victorian determination to keep death in 
mind, the uncompromising tombstones.Remember, pilgrim, as 
you pass by,As you are now so once was I:As I am so will 
you be...” 
― Tana French, In the Woods 

“I’m amazed this guy manages to get out of bed in the 
morning without working himself into a panic attack over 
the chance that he might trip on the bath mat and stab 
himself through the eye socket with his toothbrush and be 
left with a permanent twitch that’ll ruin his chances of 
landing an airplane safely if the pilot has a heart 
attack and doom hundreds to a fiery death.” 
― Tana French, The Trespasser 

“This girl: she bent reality around her like a lens 
bending light, she pleated it into so many flickering 
layers that you could never tell which one you were 
looking at, the longer you stared the dizzier you got.” 
― Tana French, The Likeness 

“There has always been something enigmatic about Cassie. 
This is one of the things I like in her, and I like it 
all the more for being, paradoxically, a quality that 
isn't readily apparent, elusiveness brought to so high a 
level it becomes almost invisible. She gives the 
impression of being startlingly, almost childishly open--
which is true, as far as it goes: what you see is in fact 
what you get. But what you don't get, what you barely 
glimpse: this is the side of Cassie that fascinated me 
always. Even after all this time I knew there were rooms 
inside her that she had never let me guess at, let alone 
enter. There were questions she wouldn't answer, topics 
she would discuss only in the abstract; try to pin her 
down and she would skim away laughing, as nimbly as a 
figure skater.” 
― Tana French, In the Woods 

“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.” 
― Tana French, Faithful Place 

“You can be a rich scumbag just as easily as a poor 
scumbag, or you can be a decent human being either way. 
Money’s got nothing to do with it. It’s nice to have, but 
it’s not what makes you who you are.” 
― Tana French, Faithful Place 

“The idea was flawed, of course," he said irritably. 
"Innately and fatally flawed. It depended on two of the 
human race's greatest myths: the possibility of 
permanence, and the simplicity of human nature. Both of 
which are all well and good in literature, but the purest 
fantasy outside the covers of a book. Our story should 
have stopped that night with the cold cocoa, the night we 
moved in: and they all lived happily ever after, the end. 
Inconveniently, however, real life demanded that we keep 
on living.” 
― Tana French, The Likeness 

“...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, The Likeness 

“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, The Likeness 

“Probably he was thinking what a boring bollocks I was. 
Plenty of people think the same thing- all of them are 
teenagers, mentally if not physically. 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 then enough 
excitement up its sleeve, ready to hit you as soon as 
you're not looking, without you adding to the drama.” 
― Tana French, Broken Harbour 

“If I've learned one thing today, it's that teenage girls 
make Moriarty look like a babe in the woods." Detective 
Stephen Moran” 
― Tana French, The Secret Place 

“I have always been caught by the pull of the 
unremarkable, by the easily missed, infinitely nourishing 
beauty of the mundane.” 
― Tana French, Broken Harbour 

“The thing is, I suppose,” he said, “that one gets into 
the habit of being oneself. It takes some great upheaval 
to crack that shell and force us to discover what else 
might be underneath.” 
― Tana French, The Witch Elm 

“I know this is one of the unthinkable taboos of our 
society, but I had discovered in myself a talent for a 
wonderful, unrepentant laziness, the kind most people 
never know after childhood. I had a prism from an old 
chandelier hanging in my window, and I could spend entire 
afternoons lying on my bed and watching it flick tiny 
chips of rainbow around the room. 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, In the Woods 

“Some people should never meet.” 
― Tana French, Faithful Place 

“... 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.” 
― Tana French, The Likeness 

“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, Broken Harbour 

“You can knock down a genuine belief, if you load up with 
enough facts that contradict it; but a belief that’s 
built on nothing except who the person wants to be, 
nothing can crumble that.” 
― Tana French, The Trespasser 

“It was-this always seems to shock people all over again- 
a happy childhood. For the first few months I spent a lot 
of time at the bottom of the garden, crying till I threw 
up and yelling rude words at the neighborhood kids who 
tried to make friends. But children are pragmatic, they 
come alive and kicking out of a whole lot worse than 
orphanhood, and I could only hold out so long against the 
fact that nothing would bring my parents back and against 
the thousand vivid things around me, Emma-next-door 
hanging over the wall and my new bike glinting red in the 
sunshine and the half-wild kittens in the garden shed, 
all fidgeting insistently while they waited for me to 
wake up again and come out to play. I found out early 
that you can throw yourself away, missing what you've 
lost. ” 
― Tana French, The Likeness 

“Self-immolation's a nice gesture, but it doesn't usually 
achieve very much.” 
― Tana French, In the Woods 

“I told people I was taking a gap year, but the truth was 
that I wanted to do nothing, absolutely nothing, for as 
long as possible, maybe for the rest of my life.” 
― Tana French, In the Woods 

“What I warn you to remember is that I am a detective. 
Our relationship with truth is fundamental but cracked, 
refracting confusingly like fragmented glass. It is the 
core of our careers, the endgame of every move we make, 
and we pursue it with strategies painstakingly 
constructed of lies and concealment and every variation 
on deception.” 
― Tana French, In the Woods 

“In the moment when that glass passed from his hand to 
mine, something sent up a high wild warning cry in the 
back of my mind. Persephone's irrevocable pomegranate 
seeds, Never take food from strangers; old stories where 
one sip or bite seals the spellbound walls forever, 
dissolves the road home into mist and blows it away on 
the wind.” 
― Tana French, The Likeness 

“I wasn't sure I could make it through another hour of 
his company without throwing my stapler at his head.” 
― Tana French, The Likeness 

“I was a wrecked thing smeared over with dark finger 
marks and stuck with shards of nightmare, and I had no 
right there any more. I moved through my lost life like a 
ghost, trying not to touch anything with my bleeding 
hands, and dreamed of learning to sail in a warm place, 
Bermuda or Bondi, and telling people sweet soft lies 
about my past.” 
― Tana French, The Likeness 

“I remember this country back when I was growing up. We 
went to church, we ate family suppers around the table, 
and it would never even have crossed a kid's mind to tell 
an adult to fuck off. There was plenty of bad there, I 
don't forget that, but we all knew exactly where we stood 
and we didn't break the rules lightly. If that sounds 
like small stuff to you, if it sounds boring or old-
fashioned or uncool, think about this: people smiled at 
strangers, people said hello to neighbors, people left 
their doors unlocked and helped old women with their 
shopping bags, and the murder rate was scraping zero. 

Sometime since then, we started turning feral. Wild got 
into the air like a virus, and it's spreading. Watch the 
packs of kids roaming inner-city estates, mindless and 
brakeless as baboons, looking for something or someone to 
wreck. Watch the businessmen shoving past pregnant women 
for a seat on the train, using their 4x4s to force 
smaller cars out of their way, purple-faced and outraged 
when the world dares to contradict them. Watch the 
teenagers throw screaming stamping tantrums when, for 
once, they can't have it the second they want it. 
Everything that stops us being animals is eroding, 
washing away like sand, going and gone.” 
― Tana French, Broken Harbour 

“Ah, background checks,' I say. 'The foundation of every 
beautiful romance.” 
― Tana French, The Trespasser 

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