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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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Tana French
Age: 51
Born: 1973
Born: May 10
Actor
Novelist
Stage Actor
Writer
Burlington
Vermont
Shapes
Pieces
Takes
Together
Pattern
Patterns
Shape
Fit

More quotes by 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.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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
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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 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.
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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Most people are only too delighted to wreck each other's heads. And for the tiny minority who do their pathetic best not to, this world is going to go right ahead and make sure they do it anyway.
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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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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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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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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I wasn't sure I could make it through another hour of his company without throwing my stapler at his head.
Tana French