For as long as I could remember, a part of me had been waiting for the day it would happen; with the cunning that comes to people whose minds have been stripped to one desire, she picked the only day we weren't waiting for.

— Tana French

Girlfriends aren’t allowed to care if you have Stilton socks. Friends are.” All the same, she gave her hands a quick, professional shake and took hold of my foot. “Plus, you might be less of a pain in the ass if you got more action.

— 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

He told me and Race to stay put in case you came home, burn the note and get hot water and disinfectant and bandages REA

— Tana French

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 summer 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

How's Alison getting on?' Conway snorted. 'Tucked up in the sick room like she's dying in some season finale. Little fade voice on her and all. She's having a great old time.

— Tana French

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

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

— Tana French

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

If her mind had held even the smallest chance of a future, she would have had no reason to tell me anything at all, whether it could send her to prison. But this is what I know about people getting ready to walk off the edges 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