Quote

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.

Tana French

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Tana French
Age: 51
Born: 1973
Born: May 10
Actor
Novelist
Stage Actor
Writer
Burlington
Vermont
Right
Paragraph
Needs
Forty
Fifty
Nine
Terrible
Fine
Times
Need
Rewrite

More quotes by 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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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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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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Time works so hard for us, if only we can let it.
Tana French
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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.
Tana French
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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.
Tana French
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I am not good at noticing when I'm happy, except in retrospect.
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 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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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
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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.
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.
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.
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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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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Don't you ever feel that - that you just need to get away? From everything? That it's all too much?
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 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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I wasn't sure I could make it through another hour of his company without throwing my stapler at his head.
Tana French
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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.
Tana French