List of Tana French Quotes

The Girls I Dream Of Are The Gentle Ones, Wistful By High Windows Or Singing Sweet Old Songs At A Piano, Long Hair Drifting, Tender As Apple Blossom. But A Girl Who Goes Into Battle Beside You And Keeps Your Back Is A Different Thing, A Thing To Make You Shiver. Think Of The First Time You Slept With Someone, Or The First Time You Fell In Love: That Blinding Explosion That Left You Cracking To The Fingertips With Electricity, Initiated And Transformed. I Tell You That Was Nothing, Nothing At All, Beside The Power Of Putting Your Lives, Simply And Daily, Into Each Other's Hands.

Now That's A Concept That's Always Fascinated Me: The Real World. Only A Very Specific Subset Of People Use The Term, Have You Noticed? To Me, It Seems Self-evident That Everyone Lives In The Real World - We All Breathe Real Oxygen, Eat Real Food, The Earth Under Our Feet Feels Equally Solid To All Of Us. But Clearly These People Have A Far More Tightly Circumscribed Definition Of Reality, One That I Find Deeply Mysterious, And An Almost Pathologically Intense Need To Bring Others Into Line With That Definition.

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.

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?

The Smell Of The Sea Swept Over The Wall And In Through The Empty Window-hole, Wide And Wild With A Million Intoxicating Secrets. I Don't Trust That Smell. It Hooks Us Somewhere Deeper Than Reason Or Civilization, In The Fragments Of Our Cells That Rocked In Oceans Before We Had Minds, And It Pulls Till We Follow Mindlessly As Rutting Animals....it Lures Us To Leap Off High Cliffs, Fling Ourselves On Towering Waves, Leaves Behind Everyone We Love And Face Into Thousands Of Miles Of Open Water For The Sake Of What Might Be On The Far Shore.

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.

It Took My Breath Away, That Evening. If You've Ever Dreamed That You Walked Into Your Best-loved Book Or Film Or Tv Program, Then Maybe You've Got Some Idea How It Felt: Things Coming Alive Around You, Strange And New And Utterly Familiar At The Same Time; The Catch In Your Heartbeat As You Move Through The Rooms That Had Such A Vivid Untouchable Life In Your Mind, As Your Feet Actually Touch The Carpet, As You Breathe The Air; The Odd, Secret Glow Of Warmth As These People You've Been Watching For So Long, From So Far Away, Open Their Circle And Sweep You Into It.

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.

This Is The One Thing I Hope: That She Never Stopped. I Hope When Her Body Couldn't Run Any Farther She Left It Behind Like Everything Else That Tried To Hold Her Down, She Floored The Pedal And She Went Like Wildfire, Streamed Down Night Freeways With Both Hands Off The Wheel And Her Head Back Screaming To The Sky Like A Lynx, White Lines And Green Lights Whipping Away Into The Dark, Her Tires Inches Off The Ground And Freedom Crashing Up Her Spine.

I Am, Of Course, Romanticizing; A Chronic Tendency Of Mine.

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.

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.