The Secret Place Quotes

“If I had to get there without friends, I could do it. Had been doing it. I'd never met anyone who brought me somewhere I wanted to stay, looked at me and saw someone I wanted to be for good; anyone who was worth giving up the more I wanted down the line.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“Everyone knows a wife and kids tie you down. What people miss sometimes is that mates, the proper kind, they do the same just as hard. Mates mean you've settled, made your bargain: this, wherever you are together, this is as far as you're going, ever. This is your stop; this is where you get off.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“I should've known the eyes. Wide, bright blue, and something about the delicate arc of the lids: a cat's slant, a pale jeweled girl in an old painting, a secret.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“That long sigh again, above us. This time I saw it, moving through the branches. Like the trees were listening; like they would've been sad about us, sad for us, only they'd heard it all so many thousand times before.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“I said I know my shot when I see it. Sometimes you don't even have to see it. Sometimes you feel it coming, screaming down the sky towards you like a meteor.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“The lines of her face, turned up to the sky, would have broken your heart.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“Argentina. The word itself had lost little of its power to startle and had, due to my ignorance of the physical place it occupied on the globe, assumed a peculiar life of its own. There was the harsh Ar at the beginning, which called up gold, idols, lost cities in the jungle, which in turn led to the hushed and sinister chamber of Gen, with the bright, interrogative Tina at the end—all nonsense, of course, but then it seemed in some muddled way that name itself, one of the few concrete facts available to me, might itself be a cryptogram or clue.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Not just the normal back-and-forth. A prickle in the air, a slicing edge. I couldn't tell if it was about her, or just the day that was it, or if it was the squad. Murder is different. The beat goes faster and harder; the tightrope is higher and narrower. One foot wrong, and you're gone.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“They were amazed by each other, stunned silent, all in the circle of cypresses and night wind. The world outside was gone, nothing. Inside that circle the air was unfurling new colors, it was changing to something that cascaded and fountained pure gold and dazzle, and every breath changed them too.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“Who who whose smell in the air of her room, whose fingerprints all over her friends’ secret places.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“How's Alison getting on?'

Conway snorted. 'Tucked up in the sick room like she's dying in some season finale. Little fadey voice on her and all. She's having a great old time.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“Everyone's thought that: maybe even if, maybe we still could, maybe small bits of precious things can be salvaged. No one with cop-on thinks it after the first try. But her voice, quiet and sad, shimmering the air into those pearly colors: for a second I believed it, all over again.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“Smoked like it was fuel and he was going to get every last inch to the gallon.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“The shot of cold air hits Becca like it's been fired straight through the glass from the huge outside, wild and magic, pungent with foxes and juniper.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“I said she's not thick, kid. I didn't say she was Professor fucking Moriarty.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“It does that to you, being a detective. You look at blank space and see gears turning, motives and cunning; nothing looks innocent any more. Most times when you prove away the gears, the blank space looks lovely, peaceful. But that arm: innocent, it looked just as dangerous.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place