Broken Harbor Quotes

“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, Broken Harbour

“Rule Number Three, and Four and Five and about a dozen more: you do not go with the flow in this job. You make the flow go with you.”
― Tana French, Broken Harbour

“If I believed in curses, I would believe that this is mine: when it matters most, in the moments when I know with the greatest clarity exactly what needs to be done, everything I say comes out wrong.”
― Tana French, Broken Harbour

“The sudden, painful flare of envy caught me by surprise. I was a loner, my last few years in school. I could have done with a friend like that.”
― Tana French, Broken Harbour

“If you're good at this job, and I am, then every step in a murder case moves you in one direction: towards order. We get thrown shards of senseless wreckage, and we piece them together until we can lift the picture out of the darkness and hold it up to the white light of day, solid, complete, clear. Under all the paperwork and the politics, this is the job; this is its cool shining heart that I love with every fiber of mine. This case was different. It was running backwards, dragging us with it on some ferocious ebb tide. Every step washed us deeper in black chaos, wrapped us tighter in tendrils of crazy and pulled us downwards.”
― Tana French, Broken Harbour

“If her mind had held even the smallest chance of a future, she would have had no reason to tell me anything at all, whether or not it could send her to prison. But this is what I know about people getting ready to walk off the edges of their own lives: they want someone to know how they got there. Maybe they want to know that when they dissolve into earth and water, that last fragment will be saved, held in some corner of someone's mind; or maybe all they want is is a chance to dump it pulsing and bloody into someone else's hands, so it won't weigh them down on the journey. They want to leave their stories behind. No one in all the world knows that better than I do.”
― Tana French, Broken Harbour

“I had forgotten that God, or the world, or whatever carves the rules in stone, doesn't give you time off for good behavior.”
― Tana French, Broken Harbour

“Some stuff is gonna find a way to happen; once it's got started, you can't stop it no matter what you do.”
― Tana French, Broken Harbour

“All those years of endless excruciating therapy sessions, of staying vigilant over every move and word and thought; I had been sure I was mended, all the breaks healed, all the blood washed away. I knew I had earned my way to safety. I had believed, beyond any doubt, that that meant I was safe.”
― Tana French, Broken Harbor

“For as long as I could remember, a part of me had been waiting for the day it would happen; with the cunning that comes to people whose minds have been stripped to one desire, she picked the only day we weren't waiting for.”
― Tana French, Broken Harbour

“It wasn't a remarkable face in any way, but it had a clean-lined sweetness that brought up summer barbecues, golden retrievers, soccer games on new-mown grass, and I have always been caught by the pull of the unremarkable, by the easily missed, infinitely nourishing beauty of the mundane.”
― Tana French, Broken Harbour