Time works so hard for us, if only we can let it.

— Tana French

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 unsinkable, only and immutably itself.

— 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

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

We’ve become a nation of defaulters: we buy on credit, and when the bill comes in, we’re so deeply outraged that we refuse even to look at 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

What I am telling you, before you begin my story, is this -- two things: I crave truth. And I lie.

— Tana French

Who whose smell in the air of her room, whose fingerprints all over her friends’ secret places.

— Tana French

You can’t take credit for what you do when your back is against the wall.

— Tana French

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