Quote

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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Tana French
Age: 51
Born: 1973
Born: May 10
Actor
Novelist
Stage Actor
Writer
Burlington
Vermont
Living
Watching
Participants
Business
Skills
Observers
Felt
Took
Thick
Always
Behinds
Skill
Never
Wall
Glass
People
Behind
Ease
Went
Glasses
Participant
Known
Granted
Observer

More quotes by Tana French

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I can't explain the alchemy that transmuted one evening into the equivalent of years held lightly in common. The only way I can put it is that we recognized, too surely even for surprise, that we shared the same currency.
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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.
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Time works so hard for us, if only we can let it.
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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.
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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.
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I came from a house full of books, so I took reading for granted. I was an outdoorsy little kid, too, so I got the best of both worlds by taking books up trees and reading there.
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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...
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If you rewrite a paragraph fifty times and forty-nine of them are terrible, that's fine you only need to get it right once.
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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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Don't get discouraged if you're hammering away at a sentence or a paragraph or a chapter, and it keeps coming out wrong. You're allowed to get it wrong, as many times as you need to you only need to get it right once.
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Here's a little tip for you. If you don't like being called a murderer, don't kill people.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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
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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.
Tana French