Tana French
Tana French
Tana Frenchis an Irish novelist and theatrical actress. Her debut novel In the Woods, a psychological mystery, won the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity, and Barry awards for best first novel. She lives in Dublin...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionNovelist
CountryIreland
couple cutting forever
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.
missing lost found
I found out early that you can throw yourself away, missing what you've lost.
father pride men
My father told me once that the most important thing every man should know is what he would die for.
long pay want
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.
growing-up parent matter
Everyone else we knew growing up is the same: image of their parents, no matter how loud they told themselves they'd be different
letting-go suicide commitment
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.
hands giving credit
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.
tiny details wonder
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.
profound mind band
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.
acting months week
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.
retrospect noticing
I am not good at noticing when I'm happy, except in retrospect.
wall heart night
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.
skills people special
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.
tendencies courses mines
I am, of course, romanticizing; a chronic tendency of mine.