Tana French Quotes

When I was young as a teenager, that was the biggest mystery in the world to me: Why don't people connect?

You were standin' way too close to see it fall apart. And there were things you couldn't hear, 'cause you were listening with your heart.

Everybody looks a little crazy if you're looking close enough and if you can't look that close, then you don't really love them.

Every man is a volume if you know how to read him.

I just think the more we're observed by other people, the less we can observe them in order to play them and find their true condition.

I love working closely with people.

The closer you are to people, the more you realise what has happened to them.

I find the closer you get to people, the harder it is to satirise them.

When you're close to somebody, you can never really know how they're experiencing the world.

I think looking is the essential act of loving. Brothers, fathers and sons, lovers, whatever. What you do when you love someone is look at that person as that person is.

One of the illusions that we live by is that we can really know anybody else, and we're often surprised by traits in people that we thought we knew very well. The struggle to overcome loneliness, which is sort of our universal burden, leads us to leap to conclusions about who other people are.

This may be a bit of a broad statement, but I don't think there's anyone that I've met that I haven't created a bit of a deep relationship with. It's a really lovely thing to create a relation with people that might not anticipate that closeness. And that's kind of the light of my life, getting to be close to people.

Life is short. People are not easy to know. They're not easy to know, so if you don't tell them how you feel, you're not going to get anywhere, I feel.

I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.

Unless we give part of ourselves away, unless we can live with other people and understand them and help them, we are missing the most essential part of our own human lives.

Certainly the people who are close to me are happier. They feel freer.

The problem isn't to learn to love humanity, but to learn to love those members of it who happen to be at hand.

We feel understood by people who like us; misunderstood by people who don't -- and those feelings are probably realistic.

When you know a person particularly well, you cannot escape their ruffled feelings.

The friends I have, and the people whom I admire, are people who have an understanding of the conditions under which we live, and have a humanist sense of the world. If that's lacking in my understanding of a person's negotiation of the world, I can't be close with that person.

I find people confusing.

You can never be sure of anyone until you're close enough to see them clearly.

There's no more usual basis of union than mutual misunderstanding.

He reflected. 'I know a lot of different kids of people; what I want is to show each of them how the others really are. You hear so many lies!