The Likeness (Dublin Murder Squad #2)

by Tana French

I found out early that you can throw yourself away, missing what you’ve lost.

I hate nostalgia, it’s laziness with prettier accessories,

“Now that’s a concept that’s always fascinated me: the real world. Only a very specific subset of people use the term, have you noticed? To me, it seems self-evident that everyone lives in the real world—we all breathe real oxygen, eat real food, the earth under our feet feels equally solid to all of us. But clearly these people have a far more tightly circumscribed definition of reality, one that I find deeply mysterious, and an almost pathologically intense need to bring others into line with that definition.”

“Our entire society’s based on discontent: people wanting more and more and more, being constantly dissatisfied with their homes, their bodies, their decor, their clothes, everything. Taking it for granted that that’s the whole point of life, never to be satisfied. If you’re perfectly happy with what you’ve got—specially if what you’ve got isn’t even all that spectacular—then you’re dangerous. You’re breaking all the rules, you’re undermining the sacred economy, you’re challenging every assumption that society’s built on. That’s why Rafe’s dad throws a mickey fit whenever Rafe says he’s happy where he is. The way he sees it, we’re all subversives. We’re traitors.”

Lexie said she was planning to, and I’m quoting, ‘kick him in the bollocks so hard he’d have to stick his hand down his throat if he wanted a wank.’ ”

I had been right: freedom smelled like ozone and thunderstorms and gunpowder all at once, like snow and bonfires and cut grass, it tasted like seawater and oranges.

“There’s a Spanish proverb,” he said, “that’s always fascinated me. ‘Take what you want and pay for it, says God.’ ”

“I don’t believe in God,” Daniel said, “but that principle seems, to me, to have a divinity of its own; a kind of blazing purity. What could possibly be simpler, or more crucial? You can have anything you want, as long as you accept that there is a price and that you will have to pay it.”

“Regardless of what 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.”

He wanted the money purely because everything around him has told him that it’s what he should want. And he was utterly incapable of understanding that the five of us might have different priorities, priorities that we had established all by ourselves.”

I wanted to tell her that being loved is a talent too, that it takes as much guts and as much work as loving; that some people, for whatever reason, never learn the knack.