They brought in a mandatory sensitivity training session – which was fine by Cal, given the way some of the guys treated, for example, witnesses from bad hoods and rape victims, except the session turned out to be all about what words they were and weren’t allowed to use; nothing about what they were doing, underneath all the words, and how they could do it better.

— Tana French

Tana French Quotes

Only, somewhere far inside my spine and deep in the palms of my hands, something hummed; like a sound too low to hear, like a warning, like a cello string when a tuning fork strikes the perfect tone to call it awake.

— Tana French

Chris had cracked the four of them right across. Even after he was gone, the fault line he made had kept widening, deep under the surface, while everything up on top shone beautiful as new. We were just finishing the job he had begun.

— Tana French

It feels like someone’s using a tennis ball machine to fire starving pug dogs at you.

— Tana French

Worrying had always seemed to me like a laughable waste of time and energy; so much simpler to go happily about your business and deal with the problem when it arose, if it did, which it mostly didn’t.

— Tana French

Sun melting over it, slow as butter on toast.

— Tana French

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve caught myself in the half-second before I splattered temper everywhere and stuck myself cleaning up the mess for the rest of my life.

— Tana French

If you’re not rich, you’re a lesser being who shouldn’t have the gall to expect a living wage from the decent people who are.

— Tana French

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.

— Tana French

The final step into feral is murder. We stand between that and you. We say, when no one else will, There are rules here. There are limits. There are boundaries that don’t move.

— Tana French

That was my baby brother. It doesn’t matter how he went out that window, I should have caught him.

— Tana French

A handful of ten-year-olds with underprivileged hair and no eyebrows were slouched on a wall, scoping out the cars and thinking wire hangers.

— Tana French

If you don’t know this by now, mate, you’d better write it down and learn it by heart: the right thing is not always the same as what’s in your pretty little rule book.

— Tana French

It’s massively unfair, love. I wish there was something I could say to make it better, but there isn’t. Sometimes things are just really, really bad, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.

— Tana French

I want my daughter to learn that not everything in this world is determined by how often she hears it or how much she wants it to be true or how many other people are looking. Somewhere in there, for a thing to count as real, there has got to be some actual bloody reality.

— Tana French

Kevin was a child. He never grew up. Thirty-seven years old and he still figured everything in the world was going to go the way he thought it should; it never hit him that the world might work its own way, whether that suited him or not.

— Tana French

One of the ways you take charge of where you’re going is by acting like you’re already there.

— Tana French

No matter how good you are, this world is always going to be better at this game.

— Tana French

I said, “Please tell me that little story wasn’t your excuse for killing two people.” There was a very long silence. Then Shay said, “How long were you listening at that door?

— Tana French

Whether they start out that way or got brought to it somehow, their focus isn’t much broader than a prey animal’s.

— Tana French

No matter how good you are, this world is always going to be better at this game. It’s more cunning than you are, it’s faster and it’s a whole lot more ruthless. All you can do is try to keep up, know your weak spots and never stop expecting the sucker punch.

— Tana French
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