Quote

I am not good at noticing when I'm happy, except in retrospect.

Tana French

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Tana French
Age: 51
Born: 1973
Born: May 10
Actor
Novelist
Stage Actor
Writer
Burlington
Vermont
Retrospect
Noticing
Except
Happy
Good

More quotes by Tana French

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If you're writing a scene for a character with whom you disagree in every way, you still need to show how that character is absolutely justified in his or her own mind, or the scene will come across as being about the author's views rather than about the character's.
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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
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Only teenagers think boring is bad. Adults, grown men and women who've been around the block a few times, know that boring is a gift straight from God. Life has more than enough excitement up its sleeve, ready to hit you with as soon as you're not looking, without you adding to the drama.
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Don't you ever feel that - that you just need to get away? From everything? That it's all too much?
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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.
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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.
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Her forehead was a maze of anxious little grooves, from a lifetime of wondering about whether everyone within range was OK.
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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.
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One of my da's tragedies was always the fact that he was bright enough to understand just how comprehensively he had shat all over his life.
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Over time, the ghosts of things that happened start to turn distant once they've cut you a couple of million times, their edges blunt on your scar tissue, they wear thin. The ones that slice like razors forever are the ghosts of things that never got the chance to happen.
Tana French
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You don't have to like your family, you don't even have to spend time with them, to know them right down to the bone.
Tana French
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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
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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
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When we can't see a pattern, we fit pieces together until one takes shape, because we have to.
Tana French
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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
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My memories of them had rubbed thin with overuse, worn to frail color transparencies flickering on the walls of my mind...
Tana French
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I like writing about big turning points, where professional and personal lives coalesce, where the boundaries are coming down, and you're faced with a set of choices which will change life forever.
Tana French
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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
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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.
Tana French
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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.
Tana French