The Searcher Quotes

“Over the last few years it’s been brought home to him that the boundaries between morals, manners and etiquette, which have always seemed crystal-clear to him, may not look the same to everyone else. He hears talk about the immorality of young people nowadays, but it seems to him that Alyssa and Ben and their friends spend plenty of their time concentrating on right and wrong. The thing is that many of their most passionate moral stances, as far as Cal can see, have to do with what words you should and shouldn’t use for people, based on what problems they have, what race they are, or who they like to sleep with. While Cal agrees that you should call people whatever they prefer to be called, he considers this to be a question of basic manners, not of morals.”
― Tana French, The Searcher

“All’s you can do is your best,” he says. “Sometimes it doesn’t work out the way you intend it to. You just gotta keep doing it anyway.”
― Tana French, The Searcher

“He appreciates mornings not for their effect on him, but for themselves. Even smack in the middle of a temperamental Chicago neighborhood, dawn sounds rose up with a startling delicacy, and the air had a lemony, clean-scoured tinge that made you breathe deeper and wider. Here, the first light spreads across the fields like something holy is happening, striking sparks off a million dewdrops and turning the spiderwebs on the hedge to rainbows; mist curls off the grass, and the first calls of birds and sheep seem to arc effortless miles. Whenever he can make himself, Cal gets up early and eats his breakfast sitting on his back step, enjoying the chill and the earthy tang of the air.”
― Tana French, The Searcher

“He feels that nineteen-year-olds, almost all of them, don't have their feet on the ground. They're turning loose from their families and they haven't found anything else to moor themselves to; they blow like tumbleweed. They're unknowns, to the people that used to know them inside out and to themselves.”
― Tana French, The Searcher

“He hated the way every drug in its different way scooped the solidity right out of the world and left it quicksand-textured, cracked across and wavering at the edges. They did the same thing to people: people on drugs stopped being what you knew them to be. They looked you right in the face and saw things that had nothing to do with you.”
― Tana French, The Searcher

“It makes the situation bloom with a seductive, ephemeral intimacy, like they’re the last people left awake at a house party, caught up in a conversation that won’t count tomorrow morning.”
― Tana French, The Searcher

“The mountains on the horizon look like someone took a pocketknife and sliced neat curves out of the star-thick sky, leaving empty blackness. Here and there, spread out, are the yellow rectangles of windows, tiny and valiant.”
― Tana French, The Searcher

“Everyone was talking about talking, and the most moral person was the one who yelled at the most other people for doing the talking all wrong.”
― Tana French, The Searcher

“Etiquette is the stuff you gotta do just 'cause that's how everyone else does it. Like holding your fork in your left hand, or saying 'Bless you' if someone sneezes. Manners is treating people with respect.”
― Tana French, The Searcher

“I've only myself to please. There's great freedom in that.”
― Tana French, The Searcher

“Trey says, with absolute bedrock certainty, "He wouldn't do that."
Cal reached the point a long time ago where those words make him tired for all of humanity. All the innocents say that, and believe it tot he bone, right p until the moment when they can't any more. My husband would never do that to our children, my baby ain't no thief. Cal feels like he ought to stand on a street corner handing out warnings, little pieces of paper that just say: Anyone could do anything.”
― Tana French, The Searcher

“The wind combs the heather and gorse with a low ceaseless rustle. Its smell has a sweetness almost too cold to catch. The sky is a fine-grained gray, and from somewhere in its heights a bird sends down a pure wild whistling.”
― Tana French, The Searcher

“He hated the way every drug in its different way scooped the solidity right out of the world and left it quicksand-textured, cracked across and wavering at the edges. They did the same thing to people: people on drugs stopped being what you knew them to be.”
― Tana French, The Searcher

“The sky, dappled in subtle gradations of gray, goes on forever; so do the fields, coded in shades of green by their different uses, divided up by sprawling hedges, dry-stone walls and the odd narrow back road.”
― Tana French, The Searcher

“He wants to punch something, but he knows that would do nothing but bust his knuckles. Having that much sense makes him feel old.”
― Tana French, The Searcher

“It rains day and night, mildly but uncompromisingly, so Cal takes the desk inside and goes back to his wallpaper. He enjoys this rain. It has no aggression to it; its steady rhythm and the scents it brings in through the windows gentle the house’s shabbiness, giving it a homey feel. He’s learned to see the landscape changing under it, greens turning richer and wildflowers rising. It feels like an ally, rather than the annoyance it is in the city.”
― Tana French, The Searcher

“morals involve something more than terminology. Ben damn near lost his mind over the importance of using the proper terms for people in wheelchairs, and he clearly felt pretty proud of himself for doing that, but he didn’t mention ever doing anything useful for one single person in one single wheelchair, and Cal would bet a year’s pension that the little twerp would have brought it up if he had. And on top of that, the right terms change every few years, so that someone who thinks like Ben has to be always listening for other people to tell him what’s moral and immoral now. It seems to Cal that this isn’t how a man, or a woman either, goes about having a sense of right and wrong.”
― Tana French, The Searcher

“Go on and educate me, then,” Senan says to Cal. “What’s a yeet?” “A what?” Cal says. “A yeet. I’m sitting on the sofa tonight after my tea, doing a bit of digesting, and my youngest lad comes running in, launches himself onto my feckin’ belly like he’s been shot from a cannon, yells ‘Yeet!’ out of him right in my face, and legs it out again. I asked one of my other fellas what he was on about, but he only laughed his arse off and told me I’m getting old. Then he asked me for twenty quid to go into town.” “Did you give it to him?” Cal asks. “I did not. I told him to fuck off and get a job. What the hell is a yeet?” “You never saw a yeet?” Cal says. He finds himself fed up to the back teeth with being tossed around by these guys like a beach ball. “They’re pet animals. Like hamsters, only bigger and uglier. Great big fat faces and little piggy eyes.” “I haven’t got a fat fuckin’ face. You’re telling me my young lad’s after calling me a hamster?” “Well,” Cal says, “that word’s used for something else, too, but I hope your boy wouldn’t know about that. How old is he?” “Ten.” “He got the internet?” Senan is swelling up and turning red. “If that little fecker’s been looking at porn, he can say good-bye to his drum kit, and his Xbox, and his—everything. What’s a yeet? Did he call his own father a prick?” “He’s only winding you up, ye eejit,” the buck-naked window guy tells him. “He’s no more notion of yeets than you have.” Senan glares at Cal. “Never heard of ’em,” Cal says. “But you’re cute when you’re angry.”
― Tana French, The Searcher

“Eating a creature shouldn’t be a light thing.”
― Tana French, The Searcher

“Whatever people do, right up to killing, nature absorbs it, closes over the fissure and goes on about its own doings. He can't tell whether this is a comforting thing or a melancholy one.”
― Tana French, The Searcher

“He wonders, without necessarily believing in ghosts, whether their ghosts wander. It comes to him that even if they do, even if he were to take up his coat now and go walking the back roads and the mountain sides, he wouldn't meet them. Their lives and their deaths grew out of a land that Cal isn't made from and hasn't sown or harvested, and they've soaked back into that land. He could walk right through those ghosts and never feel their urgent prickle. He wonders if Trey ever meets them, on long walks homewards under the dimming sky.”
― Tana French, The Searcher

“Her belief is built purely out of hope, piled on top of nothing, solid as smoke. Her worry, on the other hand, is dense and sharp-cornered as a lump of rock.”
― Tana French, The Searcher

“Landscape is one of the few things he knows of where the reality doesn’t let you down. The West of Ireland looked beautiful on the internet; from right smack in the middle of it, it looks even better. The air is rich as fruitcake, like you should do more with it than just breathe it; bite off a big mouthful, maybe, or rub handfuls of it over your face.”
― Tana French, The Searcher

“Morals,” he says in the end, “is the stuff that doesn’t change. The stuff you do no matter what other people do. Like, if someone’s an asshole to you, you might not be mannerly to him; you might tell him to go fuck himself, or even punch him in the face. But if you see him trapped in a burning car, you’re still gonna open the door and pull him out. However much of an asshole he is. That’s your morals.”
― Tana French, The Searcher

“Die Berge am Horizont sehen aus, als hätte jemand ein Taschenmesser genommen und glatte Bögen aus dem sternsatten Himmel geschnitten, so dass nur leere Schwärze zurückbleibt.”
― Tana French, The Searcher

“Die Luft ist gehaltvoll wie Früchtebrot, als sollte man mehr mit ihr machen als sie nur einatmen, vielleicht ein großes Stück herausbeißen oder sie sich händeweise ins Gesicht reiben.”
― Tana French, The Searcher

“He can’t shake the feeling that some emergency is heading towards him, someone is in danger, and he needs to keep all his wits about him to have a chance of fixing things.”
― Tana French, The Searcher

“what I’m saying to you is, if you’re going to have a woman in the house, you want one that fills a bit of space. It’s no good having some skin-and-bones scrap of a girl with a mousy wee voice on her and not a word out of her from one day to the next. You wouldn’t be getting your money’s worth. When you walk into the house, you want to be seeing your woman, and hearing her. You need to know she’s there, or what’s the point in having her at all?”
― Tana French, The Searcher

“Manners is treating people with respect.”
― Tana French, The Searcher

“but Cal learned a long time ago never to underestimate the spectacular natural wonder that is people’s stupidity.”
― Tana French, The Searcher