The Secret Place Quotes

“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, The Secret Place

“I love beautiful; always have. I never saw why I should hate what I wish I had. Love it harder. Work your way closer. Clasp your hands around it tighter. Till you find a way to make it yours.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“She hears all the voices from when she was little, soothing, strengthening: Don’t be scared, not of monsters, not of witches, not of big dogs. And now, snapping loud from every direction: Be scared, you have to be scared, ordering like this is your one absolute duty. Be scared you’re fat, be scared your boobs are too big and be scared they’re too small. Be scared to walk on your own, specially anywhere quiet enough that you can hear yourself think. Be scared of wearing the wrong stuff, saying the wrong thing, having a stupid laugh, being uncool. Be scared of guys not fancying you; be scared of guys, they’re animals, rabid, can’t stop themselves. Be scared of girls, they’re all vicious, they’ll cut you down before you can cut them. Be scared of strangers. Be scared you won’t do well enough in your exams, be scared of getting in trouble. Be scared terrified petrified that everything you are is every kind of wrong. Good girl.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“Trust your instincts, Dad always says. If something feels dodgy to you, if someone feels dodgy, you go with dodgy. Don’t give the benefit of the doubt because you want to be a nice person, don’t wait and see in case you look stupid. Safe comes first. Second could be too late.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“If I've learned one thing today, it's that teenage girls make Moriarty look like a babe in the woods." Detective Stephen Moran”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“Reminded myself: the ones you don’t like are a bonus. They can’t fool you as easy as the ones you do.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“What’s been coming to Becca, since all this began, is this: real isn’t what they try to tell you. Time isn’t. Grown-ups hammer down all these markers, bells schedules coffee-breaks, to stake down time so you’ll start believing it’s something small and mean, something that scrapes flake after flake off of everything you love till there’s nothing left; to stake you down so you won’t lift off and fly away, somersaulting through whirlpools of months, skimming through eddies of glittering seconds, pouring handfuls of hours over your upturned face.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“I'm only talking to one person here. If that's you, then you need to shut up and listen. If it's not, then you need to shut up because no one's talking to you.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“She wants to leap up and do a handstand, or get someone to race her fast and far to wreck them both: anything that will turn her body back into something that's about what it can do, not all about how it looks.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“Once you have mates who know you, right down under the this-and-that you decide people want to see today, then there's no room left for the someday person who'll magic you into being all your finest dreams. You've turned solid:you're the person your mates know, forever.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“They are forever, a brief and mortal forever, a forever that will grow into their bones and be held inside them after it ends, intact, indestructible.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“Alison’s mum has had a lot of plastic surgery and she wears fake eyelashes the size of hairbrushes. She looks sort of like a person but not really, like someone explained to aliens what a person is and they did their best to make one of their own.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“If I had to get there without friends, I could do it. Had been doing it. I'd never met anyone who brought me somewhere I wanted to stay, looked at me and saw someone I wanted to be for good; anyone who was worth giving up the more I wanted down the line.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“Always fuck with people's expectations, sunshine. It's good for their circulation.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“Everyone knows a wife and kids tie you down. What people miss sometimes is that mates, the proper kind, they do the same just as hard. Mates mean you've settled, made your bargain: this, wherever you are together, this is as far as you're going, ever. This is your stop; this is where you get off.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“If you care more about them than they do about you, they hate you for it.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“... But that age; remember that age? They’re not the same. They don’t put things together. That’s why half of what they do looks full-on certifiable, to you or me or any sane adult. Things don’t make sense, when you’re that age; you don’t make sense. You stop expecting to.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“My body my mind the way I dress the way I walk the way I talk, mine all mine.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“and the city fireworked alive all around us: flashing with neon signs and flaring with red and gold lights, buzzing with motorbikes and pumping with stereos, streaming warm wind through the open windows. The road unrolled in front of us, it sent its deep pulse up into the hearts of our bones, it flowed on long and strong enough to last us forever.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“Murder is the thoroughbred stable. Murder is a shine and a dazzle, a smooth ripple like honed muscle, take your breath away. Murder is a brand on your arm, like an elite army unit's, like a gladiator's, saying for all your life: One of us. The finest.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“That long sigh again, above us. This time I saw it, moving through the branches. Like the trees were listening; like they would've been sad about us, sad for us, only they'd heard it all so many thousand times before.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“I said I know my shot when I see it. Sometimes you don't even have to see it. Sometimes you feel it coming, screaming down the sky towards you like a meteor.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“I should've known the eyes. Wide, bright blue, and something about the delicate arc of the lids: a cat's slant, a pale jeweled girl in an old painting, a secret.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“I'd never met...anyone who was worth giving up the more I wanted down the line.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“When you're a little kid, you think people are just one thing; but then you get older, and you realize it's not that simple. Chris wasn't that simple. He was cruel and he was kind. And he didn't like realizing that. It bothered him, that he wasn't just one thing. It made him feel fragile. Like he could break into pieces any time, because he didn't know how to hold himself together. That was why he did that with those other girls, went with them and kept it secret: so he could try out being different things and see how it felt, and he'd be safe. He could be as lovely as he wanted or as horrible as he wanted, and it wouldn't count, because no one else would ever know.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“They always act like they're having an amazing time, they're louder and high-pitched, shoving each other and screaming with laughter at nothing. But Becca knows what they're like when they're happy, and that's not it. Their faces on the way home afterwards look older and strained, smeared with the scraps of leftover expressions that were pressed on too hard and won't lift away.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“This has nothing to do with what anyone else in all the world would approve or forbid. This is all their own.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“Her boarders are so hard and bright that these lumpy things are being blinded just by looking at her; she's opaque, she's impermeable, she's a million densities and dimensions more real than any of them. They break against her and roll off like mist.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“Like, okay. Everyone in history thought they were the ones who finally knew everything. In their naissance, right, they were positive they knew exactly how the universe worked. Til the next set of guys came along and proved they were missing like a hundred important things. and then that set of guys were sure they had it all down, til another set came along and showed them parts they were missing." He glances at Julia, checking if she's laughing at him, which she isn't, and if she's listening, which she is, completely. "So." he says, "it's pretty unlikely, mathematically, that we are living in the one single era that has everything figured out. Which means there's a decent possibility that the reason we can't explain how ghosts and stuff could exist is because we haven't figured it out yet, not because they don't. And it is pretty arrogant of us to think it definitely has to be the other way around.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“Not just the normal back-and-forth. A prickle in the air, a slicing edge. I couldn't tell if it was about her, or just the day that was it, or if it was the squad. Murder is different. The beat goes faster and harder; the tightrope is higher and narrower. One foot wrong, and you're gone.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place