73+ Tana French Quotes On Travel, Beauty And Order

Tana French is an Irish novelist, playwright, and literary critic. She is best known for her Dublin Murder Squad series of crime novels, which have won numerous awards and have been translated into more than 40 languages. Her other works include the standalone novels The Witch Elm and The Searcher, as well as the short story collection The Wild Goose Chase. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Tana French on love, life, travel.

Top 10 Tana French Quotes

1. 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
2. Don't you ever feel that - that you just need to get away? From everything? That it's all too much?
3. I hate nostalgia, it's laziness with prettier accessories.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. What I am telling you, before you begin my story, is this -- two things: I crave truth. And I lie.
9. When we can't see a pattern, we fit pieces together until one takes shape, because we have to.
10. Time works so hard for us, if only we can let it.

Tana French Short Quotes

• I am not good at noticing when I'm happy, except in retrospect.
• Sometimes, when you're close to someone, you miss things. Other people can see them, but you can't.
• Here's a little tip for you. If you don't like being called a murderer, don't kill people.
• I found out early that you can throw yourself away, missing what you've lost.
• I am, of course, romanticizing; a chronic tendency of mine.
• Sarte was right, Hell is other people
• Some people should never meet.

Tana French Quotes About Love

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

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

I love writing. I feel ridiculously lucky that this is what I get to do all day. — Tana French

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

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

Tana French Quotes About Life

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

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

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

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

Tana French Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

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

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. — Tana French

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. — Tana French

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

I wasn't sure I could make it through another hour of his company without throwing my stapler at his head. — Tana French

Privately, I consider religion to be a load of bollocks, but when you have a sobbing five year old wanting to know what happened to her hamster, you develop an instant belief in anything that dissolves some of the heartbreak off her face. — Tana French

You start admiring someone who's famous for actually doing something---imagine that---and I swear to you I will buy you every item in her entire wardrobe. But over my own dead body will I spend my own time and money turning you into a clone of some brain-dead waste of skin who thinks the pinnacle of achievement is selling her wedding shots to a magazine. — Tana French

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

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

Don't get discouraged if you're hammering away at a sentence or a paragraph or a chapter, and it keeps coming out wrong. You're allowed to get it wrong, as many times as you need to; you only need to get it right once. — Tana French

I’m the least fanciful guy around, but on nights when I wonder whether there was any point to my day, I think about this: the first thing we ever did, when we started turning into humans, was draw a line across the cave door and say: Wild stays out. What I do is what the first men did. They built walls to keep back the sea. They fought the wolves for the hearth fire. — Tana French

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you're writing a scene for a character with whom you disagree in every way, you still need to show how that character is absolutely justified in his or her own mind, or the scene will come across as being about the author's views rather than about the character's. — Tana French

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

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

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

...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

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

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

I have always been caught by the pull of the unremarkable, by the easily missed, infinitely nourishing beauty of the mundane. — Tana French

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. — Tana French

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

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

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. — Tana French

My memories of them had rubbed thin with overuse, worn to frail color transparencies flickering on the walls of my mind... — Tana French

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

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. — Tana French

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

When I was acting, I got trained in creating a character as a three-dimensional person. If you're doing it right you should be able to draw an audience into the character's world and make them feel their fears. — Tana French

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

Her forehead was a maze of anxious little grooves, from a lifetime of wondering about whether everyone within range was OK. — Tana French

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

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

I've got this theory that human beings are innately religious; we have a belief system. It doesn't have to be a theist form, necessarily. But we need a belief system, some framework on which to hang our behavior. — Tana French

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

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

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

... 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

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

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

Life Lessons by Tana French

1. Tana French's work often explores the complexities of human relationships and the power of emotions to shape our lives.
2. Through her characters, French teaches us to be mindful of our actions and to recognize the importance of understanding and empathy in our relationships with others.
3. Her stories also emphasize the importance of self-reflection and the power of our own inner journeys to shape our lives.