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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
Together
Pattern
Patterns
Shape
Fit
Shapes
Pieces
Takes

More quotes by Tana French

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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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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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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.
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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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Sometimes, when you're close to someone, you miss things. Other people can see them, but you can't.
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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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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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
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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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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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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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Her forehead was a maze of anxious little grooves, from a lifetime of wondering about whether everyone within range was OK.
Tana French
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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.
Tana French
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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.
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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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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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 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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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
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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