“Our entire society is based on discontent. People wanting more and more and more. Being constantly dissatisfied with their homes, their bodies, their décor, their clothes, everything – taking it for granted that that’s the whole point of life. Never to be satisfied. If you are perfectly happy with what you got, especially if what you got isn’t even all the spectacular then you’re dangerous. You’re breaking all the rules. You’re undermining the sacred economy. You’re challenging every assumption that society is built on.”
― Tana French, quote from The Likeness
“There's a Spanish proverb," he said, "that's always fascinated me. "Take what you want and pay for it, says God.'" "I don't believe in God," Daniel said, "but that principle seems, to me, to have a divinity of its own; a kind of blazing purity. What could be simpler, or more crucial? You can have anything you want, as long as you accept that there is a price and that you will have to pay it.”
― Tana French, quote from The Likeness
“I wanted to tell her that being loved is a talent too, that it takes as much guts and as much work as loving; that some people, for whatever reason, never learn the knack ”
― Tana French, quote from The Likeness
“When you're too close to people, when you spend too much time with them and love them too dearly, sometimes you can't see them”
― Tana French, quote from The Likeness
“Some people are little Chernobyls, shimmering with silent, spreading poison: get anywhere near them and every breath you take will wreck you from the inside out.”
― Tana French, quote from The Likeness
“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.”
― Tana French, quote from The Likeness
“Have you noticed how easily the very young die? They make the best martyrs for any cause, the best soldiers, the best suicides. It's because they're held here so lightly: they haven't yet accumulated loves and responsibilities and commitments and all the things that tie us securely to this world. They can let go of it as easily and simply as lifting a finger. But as you get older, you begin to find things that are worth holding onto, forever.”
― Tana French, quote from The Likeness
“Time works so hard for us, if only we can let it.”
― Tana French, quote from The Likeness
“Being easily freaked out comes with its own special skill set: you develop subtle tricks to work around it, make sure people don't notice. Pretty soon, if you're a fast learner, you can get through the day looking almost exactly like a normal human being.”
― Tana French, quote from The Likeness
“Take what you want and pay for it, says God. You can have anything you want, as long as you accept that there is a price and you will have to pay it.”
― Tana French, quote from The Likeness
“Sarte was right, Hell is other people”
― Tana French, quote from The Likeness
“I had been right: freedom smelled like ozone and thunderstorms and gunpowder all at once, like snow and bonfires and cut grass, it tasted like seawater and oranges.”
― Tana French, quote from The Likeness
“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.”
― Tana French, quote from The Likeness
“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.”
― Tana French, quote from The Likeness
“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.”
― Tana French, quote from The Likeness
“I found out early that you can throw yourself away, missing what you've lost.”
― Tana French, quote from The Likeness
“But give me more credit than that. Someone else may have dealt the hand, but I picked it up off the table, I played every card, and I had my reasons.”
― Tana French, quote from The Likeness
“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.”
― Tana French, quote from The Likeness
“I weaned myself on the nostalgia equivalent of methadone (less addictive, less obvious, less likely to make you crazy): missing what I had never had.”
― Tana French, quote from The Likeness
“It was-this always seems to shock people all over again- a happy childhood. For the first few months I spent a lot of time at the bottom of the garden, crying till I threw up and yelling rude words at the neighborhood kids who tried to make friends. But children are pragmatic, they come alive and kicking out of a whole lot worse than orphanhood, and I could only hold out so long against the fact that nothing would bring my parents back and against the thousand vivid things around me, Emma-next-door hanging over the wall and my new bike glinting red in the sunshine and the half-wild kittens in the garden shed, all fidgeting insistently while they waited for me to wake up again and come out to play. I found out early that you can throw yourself away, missing what you've lost. ”
― Tana French, quote from The Likeness
“... I stayed because running seemed too strange and too complicated. All I knew was how to fall back, find a patch of solid ground, and then dig my heels in and fight to start over.”
― Tana French, quote from The Likeness
“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.”
― Tana French, quote from The Likeness
“I wasn't sure I could make it through another hour of his company without throwing my stapler at his head.”
― Tana French, quote from The Likeness
“This girl: she bent reality around her like a lens bending light, she pleated it into so many flickering layers that you could never tell which one you were looking at, the longer you stared the dizzier you got.”
― Tana French, quote from The Likeness
“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 hope every second she could have had came flooding through that cottage like speed wind: ribbons and sea spray, a wedding ring and Chad’s mother crying, sun-wrinkles and gallops through wild red brush, a baby’s first tooth and its shoulder blades like tiny wings in Amsterdam Toronto Dubai; hawthorn flowers spinning through summer air, Daniel’s hair turning gray under high ceilings and candle flames and the sweet cadences of Abby’s singing. Time works so hard for us, Daniel told me once. I hope those last few minutes worked like hell for her. I hope in that half hour she lived all her million lives.”
― Tana French, quote from The Likeness
“...and our footsteps rang and echoed till it sounded like the room was full of dancers, the house calling up all the people who had danced here across centuries of spring evenings, gallant girls seeing gallant boys off to war, old men and women straight-backed while outside their world disintegrated and the new one battered at their doors, all of them bruised and all of them laughing, welcoming us into their long lineage.”
― Tana French, quote from The Likeness
“I was a wrecked thing smeared over with dark finger marks and stuck with shards of nightmare, and I had no right there any more. I moved through my lost life like a ghost, trying not to touch anything with my bleeding hands, and dreamed of learning to sail in a warm place, Bermuda or Bondi, and telling people sweet soft lies about my past.”
― Tana French, quote from The Likeness
“The idea was flawed, of course," he said irritably. "Innately and fatally flawed. It depended on two of the human race's greatest myths: the possibility of permanence, and the simplicity of human nature. Both of which are all well and good in literature, but the purest fantasy outside the covers of a book. Our story should have stopped that night with the cold cocoa, the night we moved in: and they all lived happily ever after, the end. Inconveniently, however, real life demanded that we keep on living.”
― Tana French, quote from The Likeness
“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.”
― Tana French, quote from The Likeness
“I didn't even try to explain to him what I was seeing, the fine spreading web through which we had all tugged one another to this place, the multiple innocences that make guilt.”
― Tana French, quote from The Likeness
Tana French
Born place: in Ireland
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“...she was afraid of losing her shape, spreading out, not being able to contain herself any longer, beginning (that would be worst of all) to talk a lot, to tell everybody, to cry.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Edible Woman
“I stared at Kate in disbelief.
"I know, I know," she said, walking toward me, hands raised as if to calm a dangerous beast.
"She's not coming," I said.
"She's coming."
"She can't."
"She's coming.”
― Kenneth Oppel, quote from Skybreaker
“even the most dependable of men will stumble every now and then
There are some people who insist that every time one door closes, another door opens, but this isn't always the case. There are doors that are meant to stay closed, ones that lead to rooms filled with serpents, rooms of regret, rooms that will lbind you if you dare to raise your eye to the keyhole in all innocence, simply to see what's inside
Silence doesn't frighten us. We can just look at each other and recognize that there is pain in this world, even on beautiful nights when twilight settles in our backyards , sifting through the grass and the hedges
you can't change what's means to be
I had found if you didn't expect much, you weren't disappointed as much
I'd simply have to live with the doubt hanging over me
You could tell she didn't want to, she was trying with all her might to hold it back, but sometimes it's impossible to do that. I know from personal experience. You have to turn yourself cold as ice in order to stop yourself, and then if anything falls from your eyes it will only be blue ice crystals, hard and unbreakable as stone
people who have faith were ao lucky, you didn't want to ruin anything for them. you didn't want to plant doubt where there was none. you had to treat such individuals tenderly and hope that some of whatever they were feeling rubs off on you
everything is stupid when you really think about it. people get up everyday and they act like whatever they do is so important , but they're all just going to die in the end, so none of it matters.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from Blue Diary
“Just a short while ago the Republicans were objects of fear and hatred—now they’re just pathetic assholes. Barry took them to the paint and cut their throats. (O-BAM-a!) Now they walk around like white frat boys in Bed-Stuy, talking tough to show they aren’t scared as the urine streams down their chinos into their cordovans. Obama has these dweebs so turned around all they can do is get behind some fat junkie DJ, a gibberish-spewing PsychoBimbette from the Far North, and a tele-dork who gives adrenaline-crazed, 1950s-style “chalk talks” (speaking of little white dicks) like some health-class instructor in a sex-offender unit.”
― Don Winslow, quote from Savages
“shuffled their way through the cattle shoots in front of each restaurant’s counter.”
― Rachel Vincent, quote from My Soul to Lose
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No Exit and Three Ot...
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The Golem's EyeBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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