Top Tana French Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

Tana French Biography

Tana French (born 1973) is an American-Irish writer and theatrical actress born in Vermont. Her debut novel In the Woods (2007), a psychological mystery, won the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity, and Barry awards for best first novel. She lives in Dublin. The British online newspaper, The Independent, has referred to her as the First Lady of Irish Crime, "who very quietly has become a huge international name among crime fiction readers."

Read about Tana French in Wikipedia

Random Authors

Tana French Quotes

When I was acting, I got trained in creating a character as a three-dimensional person. If you're doing it right you should be able to draw an audience into the character's world and make them feel their fears.

Acting, Audience, Character, Creating, Right, World

I thought I could never write a proper book; I'd never done it before. But I thought I could write a sequence. Then I had a chapter. The next thing I knew I was turning acting down.

Acting, Book, Done, Thing, Thought, Writing

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.

Acting, Allowed, Months, Somebody, Week

That kind of friendship doesn't just materialize at the end of the rainbow one morning in a soft-focus Hollywood haze. For it to last this long, and at such close quarters, some serious work had gone into it. Ask any ice-skater or ballet dancer or show jumper, anyone who lives by beautiful moving things: nothing takes as much work as effortlessness.

Ballet, Beautiful, Lives, Morning, Moving, Show

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.

Alive, Book, Circle, Circles, Moving, Vivid

Ireland is such a young society. The British were the ruling class up until they left about a hundred years ago, and we've been trying to work out what our class hierarchy is ever since.

Class, Ireland, Work Out, Years, Young

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.

Girl, Grow, Growing Up, Guys, Years

I've always loved strong women, which is lucky for me because once you're over about twenty-five there is no other kind. Women blow my mind. The stuff that routinely gets done to them would make most men curl up and die, but women turn to steel and keep on coming. Any man who claims he's not into strong women is fooling himself mindless; he's into strong women who know how to pout prettily and put on baby voices, and who will end up keeping his balls in her makeup bags.

Baby, Claims, Makeup, Men, Prettily, Strong Women

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.

Business, Glass, Glasses, Known, Skills, Wall

I had learned early to assume something dark and lethal hidden at the heart of anything I loved. When I couldn't find it, I responded, bewildered and wary, in the only way I knew how: by planting it there myself.

Assume, Dark, Fear, Heart, Responded, Wary

Here's a little tip for you. If you don't like being called a murderer, don't kill people.

Kill, Like, Littles, Murderer, People

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.

Eras, Mind, Precise, Profound, Stubbornly, Unspinnable

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.

Already, Fall, Halfway, Hurt, Thinking

I found out early that you can throw yourself away, missing what you've lost.

Away, Found, Lost, Missing, Throw

Privately, I consider religion to be a load of bollocks, but when you have a sobbing five year old wanting to know what happened to her hamster, you develop an instant belief in anything that dissolves some of the heartbreak off her face.

Bollocks, Develop, Faces, Heart, Know, Years

I am not good at noticing when I'm happy, except in retrospect. My gift, or fatal flaw, is for nostalgia. I have sometimes been accused of demanding perfection, of rejecting heart's desires as soon as I get close enough that the mysterious impressionistic gloss disperses into plain solid dots, but the truth is less simplistic than that. I know very well that perfection is made up of frayed, off-struck mundanities. I suppose you could say my real weakness is a kind of long-sightedness: usually it is only at a distance, and much too late, that I can see the pattern.

Distance, Enough, Frayed, Gift, Heart, Real

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.

Fall, Forget, Life, Mercury, Pitched, Rip

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.

Feet, Food, Mysterious, Oxygen, Real, Self

Some people should never meet.

Meet, People, Should

For a moment, I felt as if the universe had turned upside down and we were falling softly into an enormous black bowl of stars, and I knew, beyond any doubt, that everything was going to be alright.

Black, Enormous, Fall, Stars, Turned, Universe

1