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It Took My Breath Away, That Evening. If You've Ever Dreamed That You Walked Into Your Best-loved Book Or Film Or Tv Program, Then Maybe You've Got Some Idea How It Felt: Things Coming Alive Around You, Strange And New And Utterly Familiar At The Same Time; The Catch In Your Heartbeat As You Move Through The Rooms That Had Such A Vivid Untouchable Life In Your Mind, As Your Feet Actually Touch The Carpet, As You Breathe The Air; The Odd, Secret Glow Of Warmth As These People You've Been Watching For So Long, From So Far Away, Open Their Circle And Sweep You Into It.

-Tana French

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It Took My Breath

Tana French

...

It Took My Breath Away, That Evening. If You've Ever Dreamed That You Walked Into Your Best-loved Book Or Film Or Tv Program, Then Maybe You've Got Some Idea How It Felt: Things Coming Alive Around You, Strange And New And Utterly Familiar At The Same Time; The Catch In Your Heartbeat As You Move Through The Rooms That Had Such A Vivid Untouchable Life In Your Mind, As Your Feet Actually Touch The Carpet, As You Breathe The Air; The Odd, Secret Glow Of Warmth As These People You've Been Watching For So Long, From So Far Away, Open Their Circle And Sweep You Into It.

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Maybe She, Like Me, Would Have Loved The Tiny Details And Inconveniences Even More Dearly Than The Wonders, Because They Are The Things That Prove You Belong.

Sometimes, When You're Close To Someone, You Miss Things. Other People Can See Them, But You Can't.

When I Was Acting, I Got Trained In Creating A Character As A Three-dimensional Person. If You're Doing It Right You Should Be Able To Draw An Audience Into The Character's World And Make Them Feel Their Fears.

Real Isn't What They Try To Tell You. Time Isn't. Grown-ups Hammer Down All These Markers, Bells, Schedules, Coffee-breaks, To Stake Down Time So You'll Start Believing It's Something Small And Mean, Something That Scrapes Flake After Flake Off Of Everything You Love Till There's Nothing Left; To Stake You Down So You Don't Lift Off And Fly Away, Somersaulting Through Whirlpools Of Months, Skimming Through Eddies Of Glittering Seconds, Pouring Handfuls Of Hours Over Your Upturned Face.

I Came From A House Full Of Books, So I Took Reading For Granted. I Was An Outdoorsy Little Kid, Too, So I Got The Best Of Both Worlds By Taking Books Up Trees And Reading There.

... I Stayed Because Running Seemed Too Strange And Too Complicated. All I Knew Was How To Fall Back, Find A Patch Of Solid Ground, And Then Dig My Heels In And Fight To Start Over.

Most People Are Only Too Delighted To Wreck Each Other's Heads. And For The Tiny Minority Who Do Their Pathetic Best Not To, This World Is Going To Go Right Ahead And Make Sure They Do It Anyway.

I'm Still Very Much In The Apprentice Stage Of Writing. I Read Somewhere That You Need To Write A Million Words Before You Know What You're Doing - So I'm Headed That Way, But I'm Nowhere Near There.

...and Our Footsteps Rang And Echoed Till It Sounded Like The Room Was Full Of Dancers, The House Calling Up All The People Who Had Danced Here Across Centuries Of Spring Evenings, Gallant Girls Seeing Gallant Boys Off To War, Old Men And Women Straight-backed While Outside Their World Disintegrated And The New One Battered At Their Doors, All Of Them Bruised And All Of Them Laughing, Welcoming Us Into Their Long Lineage.

My Father Told Me Once That The Most Important Thing Every Man Should Know Is What He Would Die For.

I Had Always Felt That I Was An Observer, Never A Participant; That I Was Watching From Behind A Thick Glass Wall As People Went About The Business Of Living--and Did It With Such Ease, With A Skill That They Took For Granted And That I Had Never Known.

Don't You Ever Feel That - That You Just Need To Get Away? From Everything? That It's All Too Much?

Both Back When I Was Acting And Now That I'm Writing, I've Always Wanted The Same Thing Out Of My Career: To Be Able To Get Up In The Morning And Do What I Love Doing.

Everyone Else We Knew Growing Up Is The Same: Image Of Their Parents, No Matter How Loud They Told Themselves They'd Be Different

But This Is What I Know About People Getting Ready To Walk Of The Edge Of Their Own Lives: They Want Someone To Know How They Got There. Maybe They Want To Know That When They Dissolve Into Earth And Water, That Last Fragment Will Be Saved, Held In Some Corner Of Someone's Mind; Or Maybe All They Want Is A Chance To Dump It Pulsing And Bloody Into Someone Else's Hands, So It Won't Weigh Them Down On The Journey. They Want To Leave Their Stories Behind. No One In All The World Knows That Better Than I Do.

I Can't Explain The Alchemy That Transmuted One Evening Into The Equivalent Of Years Held Lightly In Common. The Only Way I Can Put It Is That We Recognized, Too Surely Even For Surprise, That We Shared The Same Currency.

I Thought I Could Never Write A Proper Book; I'd Never Done It Before. But I Thought I Could Write A Sequence. Then I Had A Chapter. The Next Thing I Knew I Was Turning Acting Down.

What I Warn You To Remember Is That I Am A Detective. Our Relationship With Truth Is Fundamental But Cracked, Refracting Confusingly Like Fragmented Glass. It Is The Core Of Our Careers, The Endgame Of Every Move We Make, And We Pursue It With Strategies Painstakingly Constructed Of Lies And Concealment And Every Variation On Deception.

I Don't Do That Kind Of Negativity. If You Put Your Energy Into Thinking About How Much The Fall Would Hurt, You're Already Halfway Down.

I Am Not Good At Noticing When I'm Happy, Except In Retrospect. My Gift, Or Fatal Flaw, Is For Nostalgia. I Have Sometimes Been Accused Of Demanding Perfection, Of Rejecting Heart's Desires As Soon As I Get Close Enough That The Mysterious Impressionistic Gloss Disperses Into Plain Solid Dots, But The Truth Is Less Simplistic Than That. I Know Very Well That Perfection Is Made Up Of Frayed, Off-struck Mundanities. I Suppose You Could Say My Real Weakness Is A Kind Of Long-sightedness: Usually It Is Only At A Distance, And Much Too Late, That I Can See The Pattern.

People Need A Moral Code, To Help Them Make Decisions. All This Bio-yogurt Virtue And Financial Self-righteousness Are Just Filling The Gap In The Market. But The Problem Is That It's All Backwards. It's Not That You Do The Right Thing And Hope It Pays Off; The Morally Right Thing Is By Definition The Thing That Gives The Biggest Payoff.

This Is The One Thing I Hope: That She Never Stopped. I Hope When Her Body Couldn't Run Any Farther She Left It Behind Like Everything Else That Tried To Hold Her Down, She Floored The Pedal And She Went Like Wildfire, Streamed Down Night Freeways With Both Hands Off The Wheel And Her Head Back Screaming To The Sky Like A Lynx, White Lines And Green Lights Whipping Away Into The Dark, Her Tires Inches Off The Ground And Freedom Crashing Up Her Spine.

Her Forehead Was A Maze Of Anxious Little Grooves, From A Lifetime Of Wondering About Whether Everyone Within Range Was Ok.

Only Teenagers Think Boring Is Bad. Adults, Grown Men And Women Who've Been Around The Block A Few Times, Know That Boring Is A Gift Straight From God. Life Has More Than Enough Excitement Up Its Sleeve, Ready To Hit You With As Soon As You're Not Looking, Without You Adding To The Drama.

Over Time, The Ghosts Of Things That Happened Start To Turn Distant; Once They've Cut You A Couple Of Million Times, Their Edges Blunt On Your Scar Tissue, They Wear Thin. The Ones That Slice Like Razors Forever Are The Ghosts Of Things That Never Got The Chance To Happen.

A Bore Or An Uggo Might Manage Not To Get Up Anyone's Nose, But If A Girl's Got Brains And Looks And Personality, She's Going To Piss Someone Off, Somewhere Along The Way.

This Girl: She Bent Reality Around Her Like A Lens Bending Light, She Pleated It Into So Many Flickering Layers That You Could Never Tell Which One You Were Looking At, The Longer You Stared The Dizzier You Got.

My Memories Of Them Had Rubbed Thin With Overuse, Worn To Frail Color Transparencies Flickering On The Walls Of My Mind...

I Listen To The Things People Want Out Of Love These Days And They Blow My Mind. I Go To The Pub With The Boys From The Squad And Listen While They Explain, With Minute Precision, Exactly What Shape A Woman Should Be, What Bits She Should Shave How, What Acts She Should Perform On Which Date And What She Should Always Or Never Do Or Say Or Want; I Eavesdrop On Women In Cafes While They Reel Off Lists Of Which Jobs A Man Is Allowed, Which Cars, Which Labels, Which Flowers And Restaurants And Gemstones Get The Stamp Of Approval, And I Want To Shout, Are You People Out Of Your Tiny Minds?

I've Got This Theory That Human Beings Are Innately Religious; We Have A Belief System. It Doesn't Have To Be A Theist Form, Necessarily. But We Need A Belief System, Some Framework On Which To Hang Our Behavior.

We Think Of Mortality So Little These Days... I Thought Of The Stern Victorian Determination To Keep Death In Mind, The Uncompromising Tombstones. Remember, Pilgrim, As You Pass By, As You Are Now So Once Was I: As I Am So Will You Be.

We Had No One Else To Learn This From- None Of Our Parents Were Shining Examples Of Relationship Success- So We Learned This From Each Other: When Someone You Love Needs You To, You Can Get A Hold Of Your Five-alarm Temper, Get A Hold Of The Shapeless Things That Scare You Senseless, Act Like An Adult Instead Of The Cro-magnon Teenager You Are, You Can Do A Million Things You Never Saw Coming.

We Were Still At The Age When Girls Are Years Older Than Guy, And The Guys Grow Up By Doing Their Best When The Girls Need Them To.

I Weaned Myself On The Nostalgia Equivalent Of Methadone (less Addictive, Less Obvious, Less Likely To Make You Crazy): Missing What I Had Never Had.

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.

I Read A Lot. I Always Have, But In Those Two Years I Gorged Myself On Books With A Voluptuous, Almost Erotic Gluttony. I Would Go To The Local Library And Take Out As Many As I Could, And Then Lock Myself In The Bedsit And Read Solidly For A Week. I Went For Old Books, The Older The Better - Tolstoy, Poe, Jacobean Tragedies, A Dusty Translation Of Laclos - So That When I Finally Resurfaced, Blinking And Dazzled, It Took Me Days To Stop Thinking In Their Cool, Polished, Crystalline Rhythms.

Here's A Little Tip For You. If You Don't Like Being Called A Murderer, Don't Kill People.

If You're Writing A Scene For A Character With Whom You Disagree In Every Way, You Still Need To Show How That Character Is Absolutely Justified In His Or Her Own Mind, Or The Scene Will Come Across As Being About The Author's Views Rather Than About The Character's.

It's Easy To Slide Into Believing You're The Hypnotist Here, The Mirage Master, The Smart Cookie Who Knows What's Real And How All The Tricks Are Done. The Fact Is You're Still Just Another Slack-jawed Mark In The Audience. No Matter How Good You Are, This World Is Always Going To Be Better At This Game. It's More Cunning Than You Are, It's Faster And It's A Whole Lot More Ruthless. All You Can Do Is Try To Keep Up, Know Your Weak Spots And Never Stop Expecting The Sucker Punch.

Some People Should Never Meet.

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When You're Too Close To People, When You Spend Too Much Time With Them And Love Them Too Dearly, Sometimes You Can't See Them

Privately, I Consider Religion To Be A Load Of Bollocks, But When You Have A Sobbing Five Year Old Wanting To Know What Happened To Her Hamster, You Develop An Instant Belief In Anything That Dissolves Some Of The Heartbreak Off Her Face.

You Start Admiring Someone Who's Famous For Actually Doing Something---imagine That---and I Swear To You I Will Buy You Every Item In Her Entire Wardrobe. But Over My Own Dead Body Will I Spend My Own Time And Money Turning You Into A Clone Of Some Brain-dead Waste Of Skin Who Thinks The Pinnacle Of Achievement Is Selling Her Wedding Shots To A Magazine.

Sarte Was Right, Hell Is Other People

Now Death Is Uncool, Old-fashioned. To My Mind The Defining Characteristic Of Our Era Is Spin, Everything Tailored To Vanishing Point By Market Research, Brands And Bands Manufactured To Precise Specifications; We Are So Used To Things Transmuting Into Whatever We Would Like Them To Be That It Comes As A Profound Outrage To Encounter Death, Stubbornly Unspinnable, Only And Immutably Itself.

I Used To Think I Sewed Us Together At The Edges With My Own Hands, Pulled The Stitches Tight And I Could Unpick Them Any Time I Wanted. Now I Think It Always Ran Deeper Than That And Farther, Underground; Out Of Sight And Way Beyond My Control.

We Think About Mortality So Little, These Days, Except To Flail Hysterically At It With Trendy Forms Of Exercise And High-fiber Cereals And Nicotine Patches.

Our Entire Society Is Based On Discontent. People Wanting More And More And More. Being Constantly Dissatisfied With Their Homes, Their Bodies, Their Décor, Their Clothes, Everything – Taking It For Granted That That’s The Whole Point Of Life. Never To Be Satisfied. If You Are Perfectly Happy With What You Got, Especially If What You Got Isn’t Even All The Spectacular Then You’re Dangerous. You’re Breaking All The Rules. You’re Undermining The Sacred Economy. You’re Challenging Every Assumption That Society Is Built On.

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 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.

The Thing About Being A Mystery Writer, What Marks A Mystery Writer Out From A Chick Lit Author Or Historical Fiction Writer, Is That You Always Find A Mystery In Every Situation.

I Had Learned Early To Assume Something Dark And Lethal Hidden At The Heart Of Anything I Loved. When I Couldn't Find It, I Responded, Bewildered And Wary, In The Only Way I Knew How: By Planting It There Myself.

I Have Always Been Caught By The Pull Of The Unremarkable, By The Easily Missed, Infinitely Nourishing Beauty Of The Mundane.

Some People Are Little Chernobyls, Shimmering With Silent, Spreading Poison: Get Anywhere Near Them And Every Breath You Take Will Wreck You From The Inside Out.

But Give Me More Credit Than That. Someone Else May Have Dealt The Hand, But I Picked It Up Off The Table, I Played Every Card, And I Had My Reasons.

Time Works So Hard For Us, If Only We Can Let It.

The Smell Of The Sea Swept Over The Wall And In Through The Empty Window-hole, Wide And Wild With A Million Intoxicating Secrets. I Don't Trust That Smell. It Hooks Us Somewhere Deeper Than Reason Or Civilization, In The Fragments Of Our Cells That Rocked In Oceans Before We Had Minds, And It Pulls Till We Follow Mindlessly As Rutting Animals....it Lures Us To Leap Off High Cliffs, Fling Ourselves On Towering Waves, Leaves Behind Everyone We Love And Face Into Thousands Of Miles Of Open Water For The Sake Of What Might Be On The Far Shore.

Have You Noticed How Easily The Very Young Die? They Make The Best Martyrs For Any Cause, The Best Soldiers, The Best Suicides. It's Because They're Held Here So Lightly: They Haven't Yet Accumulated Loves And Responsibilities And Commitments And All The Things That Tie Us Securely To This World. They Can Let Go Of It As Easily And Simply As Lifting A Finger. But As You Get Older, You Begin To Find Things That Are Worth Holding Onto, Forever.

I Am, Of Course, Romanticizing; A Chronic Tendency Of Mine.

If You Rewrite A Paragraph Fifty Times And Forty-nine Of Them Are Terrible, That's Fine; You Only Need To Get It Right Once.

With Acting, You Have To Depend On Somebody Else To Decide If You Are Allowed To Work. You Can Spend Weeks And Months When You Are Not Acting At All.

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

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.

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I Love Writing. I Feel Ridiculously Lucky That This Is What I Get To Do All Day.

Regardless Of 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.

I Hate Nostalgia, It's Laziness With Prettier Accessories.

Being Easily Freaked Out Comes With Its Own Special Skill Set: You Develop Subtle Tricks To Work Around It, Make Sure People Don't Notice. Pretty Soon, If You're A Fast Learner, You Can Get Through The Day Looking Almost Exactly Like A Normal Human Being.

What I Am Telling You, Before You Begin My Story, Is This -- Two Things: I Crave Truth. And I Lie.

I Am Not Good At Noticing When I'm Happy, Except In Retrospect.

When We Can't See A Pattern, We Fit Pieces Together Until One Takes Shape, Because We Have To.

I Found Out Early That You Can Throw Yourself Away, Missing What You've Lost.

I Wasn't Sure I Could Make It Through Another Hour Of His Company Without Throwing My Stapler At His Head.

The Girls I Dream Of Are The Gentle Ones, Wistful By High Windows Or Singing Sweet Old Songs At A Piano, Long Hair Drifting, Tender As Apple Blossom. But A Girl Who Goes Into Battle Beside You And Keeps Your Back Is A Different Thing, A Thing To Make You Shiver. Think Of The First Time You Slept With Someone, Or The First Time You Fell In Love: That Blinding Explosion That Left You Cracking To The Fingertips With Electricity, Initiated And Transformed. I Tell You That Was Nothing, Nothing At All, Beside The Power Of Putting Your Lives, Simply And Daily, Into Each Other's Hands.

I’m The Least Fanciful Guy Around, But On Nights When I Wonder Whether There Was Any Point To My Day, I Think About This: The First Thing We Ever Did, When We Started Turning Into Humans, Was Draw A Line Across The Cave Door And Say: Wild Stays Out. What I Do Is What The First Men Did. They Built Walls To Keep Back The Sea. They Fought The Wolves For The Hearth Fire.

One Of My Da's Tragedies Was Always The Fact That He Was Bright Enough To Understand Just How Comprehensively He Had Shat All Over His Life.

Sometimes I Think About The Sly, Flickering Line That Separates Being Spared From Being Rejected. Sometimes I Think Of The Ancient Gods Who Demanded That Their Sacrifices Be Fearless And Without Blemish, And I Wonder Whether, Whoever Or Whatever Took Peter And Jamie Away, It Decided I Wasn't Good Enough.

I Like Writing About Big Turning Points, Where Professional And Personal Lives Coalesce, Where The Boundaries Are Coming Down, And You're Faced With A Set Of Choices Which Will Change Life Forever.

That Kind Of Friendship Doesn't Just Materialize At The End Of The Rainbow One Morning In A Soft-focus Hollywood Haze. For It To Last This Long, And At Such Close Quarters, Some Serious Work Had Gone Into It. Ask Any Ice-skater Or Ballet Dancer Or Show Jumper, Anyone Who Lives By Beautiful Moving Things: Nothing Takes As Much Work As Effortlessness.

Take What You Want And Pay For It, Says God. You Can Have Anything You Want, As Long As You Accept That There Is A Price And You Will Have To Pay It.

You Don't Have To Like Your Family, You Don't Even Have To Spend Time With Them, To Know Them Right Down To The Bone.

You Forget What It Was Like. You'd Swear On Your Life You Never Will, But Year By Year It Falls Away. How Your Temperature Ran Off The Mercury, Your Heart Galloped Flat-out And Never Needed To Rest, Everything Was Pitched On The Edge Of Shattering Glass. How Wanting Something Was Like Dying Of Thirst. How Your Skin Was Too Fine To Keep Out Any Of The Million Things Flooding By; Every Color Boiled Bright Enough To Scald You, Any Second Of Any Day Could Send You Soaring Or Rip You To Bloody Shreds.

It Took My Breath Away, That Evening. If You've Ever Dreamed That You Walked Into Your Best-loved Book Or Film Or Tv Program, Then Maybe You've Got Some Idea How It Felt: Things Coming Alive Around You, Strange And New And Utterly Familiar At The Same Time; The Catch In Your Heartbeat As You Move Through The Rooms That Had Such A Vivid Untouchable Life In Your Mind, As Your Feet Actually Touch The Carpet, As You Breathe The Air; The Odd, Secret Glow Of Warmth As These People You've Been Watching For So Long, From So Far Away, Open Their Circle And Sweep You Into It.

There Was A Time When I Believed I Was The Redeemed One, The Boy Borne Safely Home On The Ebb Of Whatever Freak Tide Carried Peter And Jamie Away. Not Any More. In Ways Too Dark And Crucial To Be Called Metaphorical, I Never Left That Wood.

Don't Get Discouraged If You're Hammering Away At A Sentence Or A Paragraph Or A Chapter, And It Keeps Coming Out Wrong. You're Allowed To Get It Wrong, As Many Times As You Need To; You Only Need To Get It Right Once.

Ireland Is Such A Young Society. The British Were The Ruling Class Up Until They Left About A Hundred Years Ago, And We've Been Trying To Work Out What Our Class Hierarchy Is Ever Since.

For A Moment, I Felt As If The Universe Had Turned Upside Down And We Were Falling Softly Into An Enormous Black Bowl Of Stars, And I Knew, Beyond Any Doubt, That Everything Was Going To Be Alright.

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