In the Woods

by Tana French

I worry that I might come out of hypnosis with that sugar-high glaze of self-satisfied enlightenment, like a seventeen-year-old who’s just discovered Kerouac, and start proselytizing strangers in pubs.

It looked vaguely, frustratingly familiar, but I couldn’t tell whether this was because I actually remembered it or because I knew I should.

Remember, pilgrim, as you pass by, As you are now so once was I; As I am now so will you be.…Now

“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” he told me reproachfully.

Maybe she, like me, would have loved the tiny details and the inconveniences even more dearly than the wonders, because they are the things that prove you belong.

I thought of the old superstition that the soul lingers near the body for a few days, bewildered and unsure.

“No. But it’s dark out there—country-dark, not your city-dark. No streetlights or nothing. I wouldn’t have seen someone ten feet away. And I mightn’t have heard them, either; there are plenty of noises anyway.” Dark, and wood-noises: that trill went down my spine again.

On Monday night Rosalind and Jessica had come over somewhere around half past eight, watched television and played with the baby (I couldn’t imagine how; the kid had barely moved all the time we were there, it must have been like playing with a large potato),

The one joy of migraines is that they make a perfect excuse: they’re disabling, they’re not your fault, they can last as long as you need them to and nobody can prove you don’t have one.

I didn’t mind showing a bit of leg myself, in my day—no better way to make the boys look, am I right?”

Human beings, as I know better than most, can get used to anything. Over time, even the unthinkable gradually wears a little niche for itself in your mind and becomes just something that happened.

Katy had walked into danger the same way Cassie had: on the unmissable off-chance of magic.

About your easy heads my prayers I said with syllables of clay. What gift, I asked, shall I bring now Before I weep and walk away? Take, they replied, the oak and laurel. Take our fortune of tears and live Like a spendthrift lover. All we ask Is the one gift you cannot give.