The Keeper Quotes

“a face that’s good-looking as long as you get it at the right angle and don’t have high expectations in the way of chins.”
― Tana French, The Keeper

“This townland doesn’t like being balked. If it isn’t fed what it wants, it’ll make its own fodder.”
― Tana French, The Keeper

“the Kilcarrow Arms doesn’t have much to recommend it, being shabby in a non-quaint way and staffed by people who look like they’re making plans to lose a fake nail in your drink.”
― Tana French, The Keeper

“Autumn is when Ardnakelty comes into its own. Its summers and winters are half-assed by Cal’s standards, but autumn is meant for nuance and there this place is expert, layering the air with the smells of earth and wet leaves, shading the land with every subtlety of green and gold, coding its weather hints in the slightest twist of breeze or shift of cloud. The last geese, straggling southward, send up their forlorn clamor.”
― Tana French, The Keeper

“he's found the intricate webs, constructed over centuries, that bind people to one another, to their land, and to their past”
― Tana French, The Keeper

“Sheila smiles. Her smile still has an out-of-practice look to it, like she’s doing something risky.”
― Tana French, The Keeper

“Cal dims the overhead light, to bring out the flicker of the fire. He wants the room to feel cozy, homey. Instead it takes on a contracted, huddled air, like some attack has brought down the electricity and left them cut off, with nothing to do but endure till the next thing happens.”
― Tana French, The Keeper

“My daddy wasn’t a prick,” Francie points out.
“Ah, he was,” Senan says.

“Sometimes, only. As a hobby. Not as a fuckin’ career.”
― Tana French, The Keeper

“Mrs. Duggan has filled her sitting room to the brim with herself. Every wall is crowded with ornate brown furniture stuffed with painted porcelain, silver frames, Sacred Heart statuettes; the carpet and the curtains are a tumult of ferocious purple flowers. The side table at her elbow is cluttered with small things, pear drops and dominoes and earrings, all of them wearing the furtively sinister air of amulets that could jinx your week if they found their way into your pocket. Even the air, hot and dry, seethes with the traces of cigarette ash and the faint, high whistling of the gas fire. At the heart of it all is Mrs. Duggan, vast and formless in a magenta dress coated with swirls of tiny magenta beads, like one of those underwater creatures that lie wide-mouthed on the seabed waiting to receive anyone and anything that comes their way.”
― Tana French, The Keeper

“Eugene follows Tommy at a snappy pace, picking up his feet like a city boy. Eugene doesn’t have exactly the demeanor Cal would expect from someone in his circumstances. The kid looks like he’s grieving hard, all right—he’s lost weight, and there are purple bags under his eyes—but what he mainly looks is tense and irked, like he considers the entire situation utterly unacceptable. He has the air of a man about to file an elaborate grievance with HR.”
― Tana French, The Keeper

“Eugene favors his mama more than his daddy: he’s middle height and narrow all over, with dark hair and a face that’s good-looking as long as you get it at the right angle and don’t have high expectations in the way of chins.”
― Tana French, The Keeper

“Murder is different. Even a hint of it shakes a place to the bone, setting in motion things that can’t be predicted or controlled. Suicide requires nothing but grief, which is hard enough; murder makes demands.”
― Tana French, The Keeper

“We make each other happy, and we're old enough to value that. We don't always agree on everything, but we're old enough to value that, too.”
― Tana French, The Keeper

“It took him a while to start understanding that their tie to their land is different not in its intensity but in its nature: rooted thousands of years deep, through strata of dispossession, famine, bloody rebellion. This land has been reclaimed, not claimed, and that changes things. The ferocity of their possession may not display itself in brandished shotguns and yelling dogs, but it's built into every cell, latent and ineradicable, ready to rise when it's needed.”
― Tana French, The Keeper

“No farmer is going to let an able-bodied man go to waste.”
― Tana French, The Keeper

“Suicide requires nothing but grief, which is hard enough; murder makes demands.”
― Tana French, The Keeper

“piseogs,”
― Tana French, The Keeper

“I don't need Tommy dead. He's no good to me that way. What I need is him tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail, with every man and woman in this place lined up to spit on him along the way, 'cause they all know he's a piece of shit and so is everything that comes outa his mouth.”
― Tana French, The Keeper

“Ardnakelty has no time for Guards. The townland will run its own investigation, spreading unseen below the official inquiry like ancient trailways underlie the brash modern roads; it’ll reach its own conclusions, and deal out its own justice.”
― Tana French, The Keeper

“Cal can smell water up ahead, a clear cold note cutting through the rich autumn tangle of scents.”
― Tana French, The Keeper

“Cal realizes”
― Tana French, The Keeper

“like one of those underwater creatures that lie wide-mouthed on the seabed waiting to receive anyone and anything that comes their way.”
― Tana French, The Keeper

“He digs into a supermarket bag at his feet and pulls out another of the small plastic objects. It turns out to be a figurine of the Virgin Mary. On closer inspection Cal realizes it’s a bottle, filled with some kind of clear liquid. The cap, in a tasteful shade of blue, is Mary’s crown. “That’s holy water inside it,” Bobby informs him. “Taken straight from the spring at Lourdes, and then blessed by a priest.” “One for everyone in the audience,” Mart says, patting his on the head. “Well, many thanks,” Cal says. “I appreciate that. Do I drink it?” “Use it as a mixer,” Senan tells him. “Goes great with gin.” “You do not,” Bobby says, shocked. “Well, you might take a sup if you had cancer or something, maybe. I wouldn’t say it’d taste nice, after being in the bottle so long. But mostly you’d use it to bless things with. Yourself, like, or your house. I put a bitta mine on the car, with the way people drive around here, and I was going to do the sheep, only I haven’t enough to go round.”
― Tana French, The Keeper

“The shop is in fact where Cal would expect to get wind of trouble, or of anything else underway in Ardnakelty townland, from pregnancy to potato blight.”
― Tana French, The Keeper

“His phone beeps: thumbs-up emoji.”
― Tana French, The Keeper

“She’ll be grand. She’s tough.” “I know she is,” Cal says. He doesn’t know how to say that that’s the problem”
― Tana French, The Keeper

“Autumn is when Ardnakelty comes into its own. Its summers and winters are half-assed by Cal’s standards”
― Tana French, The Keeper

“had to set her distances inside herself rather than outside.”
― Tana French, The Keeper

“years here”
― Tana French, The Keeper

“They have about two miles of road to cover”
― Tana French, The Keeper