The Witch Elm Quotes

The thing is, I suppose,” he said, “that one gets into the habit of being oneself. It takes some great upheaval to crack that shell and force us to discover what else might be underneath.

Then all the sharp intricate peaks on the monitor smoothed out to clean straight lines and my father made a terrible growling sound, but even without any of that I would have known, because the air around us had split open and whirled and re-formed itself and there was one less person in the room.

But we’re so desperate, aren’t we, to believe that bad luck only happens to people who deserve it.

what if I never got another day in my life when I was normal again?

ISCARIOT" "A box of doves I placed beside your chest Liar A stork of silk With rubies in it's nest Fire Of my love Will burn thee to a wizened word For ere to go unheard. A mare of wood Elder, elm and oak Liar Will keep you fair If you jest me no joke Fire Of my love Will burn thee to a wizened word For ere to go unheard. I'm old and bruised But my fate is that of youth Liar Trickster you Be a grisly dragon's tooth Fire Of my love Will burn thee to a wizened word For ere to go unheard. You gashed the heart of my heart Like a Portuguese Witch, I'd planned for you this land But you devoured my hand.

Once the fear took hold, I was fucked. I'd never known anything like it could exist: all-consuming, ravenous, a whirling black vortex that sucked me under so completely and mercilessly that it truly felt like I was being devoured alive, bones splintered, marrow sucked.

knew straightaway, from his smile, that he wasn’t a doctor; I’d already got the hang of the doctors’ smiles, firm and distancing, expertly calibrated to tell you how much time was left in the conversation.

The pictures are good, Toby. They’re good. But this is the only way, no one’ll ever look twice if they come from me, I went to art school—

I didn’t know you even could get arrested in Amsterdam

The button developed a life of its own, swollen with symbolism, a single chance at salvation pulsing redly in the corner and if I blew it too soon or left it too late then I was lost.

It’s taken me this long to start thinking about what luck can be, how smoothly and deliciously deceptive, how relentlessly twisted and knotted in on its own hidden places, and how lethal.

Every moment the patches of green grew bigger and the patches of snow grew smaller. Every moment more and more of the trees shook off their robes of snow. Soon, wherever you looked, instead of white shapes you saw the dark green of firs or the black prickly branches of bare oaks and beeches and elms. Then the mist turned from white to gold and presently cleared away altogether. Shafts of delicious sunlight struck down on to the forest floor and overhead you could see a blue sky between the tree tops. Soon there were more wonderful things happening. Coming suddenly round a corner into a glade of silver birch trees Edmund saw the ground covered in all directions with little yellow flowers- celandines. The noise of water grew louder. Presently they actually crossed a stream. Beyond it they found snowdrops growing.

Honestly it wasn’t Susanna I was tired of, not really; it was me, wronged innocent, white knight, cunning investigator, killer, selfish oblivious dick, petty provocateur, take your pick, what does it matter? it’ll all change again

but all it takes is one whiff of the right smell—jasmine, lapsang souchong, a specific old-fashioned soap that I’ve never been able to identify—or one sideways shaft of afternoon light at a particular angle, and I’m lost, in thrall all over again.

his memory was banjaxed,

problems,

men say, that false Dreams hold, clinging

years of observing from the outside (one gets into the habit of being oneself)—

my head hurt in a petty nagging way that wasn’t quite worth a painkiller.

Faye had always been sweet, flaky but sweet, unlikely to ask about your problems but deeply concerned about them if you reminded her they existed.

Unreadable stares everywhere, all of them pulsing with danger,

a solid, unbreakable-looking build, like he had been cast all in one slab.

She wasn’t that smart after all. Susanna, of all people, should have realized how those great upheavals can crack bedrock, shift tectonic plates, transform the landscape beyond recognition.

But we’re so desperate, aren’t we, to believe that bad luck only happens to people who deserve it. People genuinely can’t take it in that someone could die of cancer without bloody well smoking.

But even when the fear receded for a while, it was always there: dark, misshapen, taloned, hanging somewhere above and behind me, waiting for its next moment to drop onto my back and dig in deep.

Worrying had always seemed to me like a laughable waste of time and energy; so much simpler to go happily about your business and deal with the problem when it arose, if it did, which it mostly didn’t.

I’ve never got the self-flagellating middle-class belief that being poor and having a petty crime habit magically makes you more worthy, more deeply connected to some wellspring of artistic truth, even more real.

The place felt like a weapon expertly crafted to strip you of all humanity, hollow you to a shell creature that would do anything it was told for the slim chance of someday getting out into the living world again.

The stuff he did to me, the stuff that felt like it was turning me into someone else? It didn't actually change who I was at all. I was always ruthless. It was just a question of what it would take to bring it out.

As of May 25, 2018, Susanna’s line on this page is outdated: with the repeal of the eighth amendment to the Irish constitution, pregnant women will have the legal right to give or refuse consent to medical treatment.

Once the fear took hold, I was fucked. I'd never known anything like it could exist: all-consuming, ravenous, a whirling black vortex that sucked me under so completely and mercilessly that it truly felt like I was being devoured alive, bones splintered, marrow sucked. After an eternity (lying in bed with my heart jackhammering, adrenaline firing me like a strobe light, feeling the last few threads that held my mind together stretch to a snapping point) something would happen to break the vortex's hold—a nurse coming in so that I had to make mechanical cheerful chitchat, an uncontrollable rush of sleep—and I would clamber up out of it, shaky and weak as a half-drowned animal. But even when the fear receded for a while, it was always there: dark, misshapen, taloned, hanging somewhere above and behind me, waiting for its next moment to drop onto my back and dig in deep.

They’re unsettled and they’re frightened, and what they want from me isn’t the lovely presents, any more; it goes much deeper. They’re afraid that they’re not who they always thought they were, and they want me to find them reassurance

At the dark heart of the horror was the knowledge that it was inescapable. The thing I couldn’t bear wasn’t burglars or blows to the head, wasn’t anything I could beat or evade or set up defenses against; it was myself, whatever that had become.

dumped an enormous IKEA package in the house: presumably it would change the landscape if and when I got up the energy to assemble it, but until then it was just there, in the middle of everything, where I barked my shin or banged my elbow on it every time I tried to get past.

The wych elm's whole crown was gone, only the trunk left, thick stubs of branches poking out obscenely. It should have looked pathetic, but instead it had a new, condensed force: some great malformed creature, musclebound and nameless, huddled in the darkness waiting for a sign.

But I can’t help it: for me it all goes back to that night, the dark corroded hinge between before and after, the slipped-in sheet of trick glass that tints everything on one side in its own murky colors and leaves everything on the other luminous, achingly close, untouched and untouchable.

At first I barely recognized it as a person; stripped of substance by the bright sunfall through the leaves, flutter of white T-shirt, confusing gold swirl of hair, white brushstroke face and dense dark smudges of eyes, it had something illusory about it, as if my mind had conjured it from patches of light and shadow and at any moment it might break up and be gone.

He picked out a card, examined it, tucked it back. “The thing is, I suppose,” he said, “that one gets into the habit of being oneself. It takes some great upheaval to crack that shell and force us to discover what else might be underneath.” And looking up smiling, pushing his glasses up his nose: “And with all that philosophizing, I’ve forgotten whose go it was. Did I just put . . .

And even if I somehow didn’t: I had killed someone, and I always would have. It was always going to be like this. There was no undoing this, no talking my way out, no fixing it or apologizing it away, no smoothing off the sharp edges or planing it down so it could be tucked away into some smaller, manageable box. Instead it would grind me away till I fit around its own immutable shape.

It should have felt even more horrifying this way—targeted, stalked, hunted down—but it didn’t. If they had come after me specifically, for something I’d done or something I had, then I wasn’t just roadkill, not just some object to be mown down because it happened to be in their way: I was real, a person; I had been the crucial factor at the heart of the whole thing, rather than a meaningless irrelevance to be ignored, tossed aside. And if I was a person within all this, then I could do something about it.

Normally I would have handled that conversation a lot better. After all, it wasn’t like Susanna had transformed into an entirely different person; she had always liked getting up in arms about injustices, real and imagined, and I’d never done anything but roll my eyes cheerfully and let it go. The same with Leon: he had always been a moody little bollix, I knew better than to let it get to me, normally I would have walked off and left him to it long before his mood could rub off on me. Now, apparently, minor variations on their usual bullshit had the power to knock me sideways.

Now I think I was wrong. I think my luck was built into me, the keystone that cohered my bones, the golden thread that stitched together the secret tapestries of my DNA; I think it was the gem glittering at the fount of me, coloring everything I did and every word I said. And if somehow that has been excised from me, and if in fact I am still here without it, then what am I? Acknowledgments I owe huge thanks to the amazing Darley Anderson and everyone at the agency, especially Mary, Emma, Pippa, Rosanna and Kristina; Andrea Schulz, my wonderful editor, whose enormous skill, patience and wisdom have made this book so much better than I thought it could be; Ben Petrone, who is just plain great, and everyone at Viking; Susanne Halbleib and everyone at Fischer Verlage; Katy Loftus, for her faith in this book and for putting her finger on the one thing that would make the most difference; my brother, Alex French, for the computer bits and for sending me the link to the case of Bella in the Wych Elm; Fearghas Ó Cochláin, for the medical bits; Ellen at ancestrysisters.com, for genealogy help; Dave Walsh, for his enormous help with the intricacies of police procedure; Ciara Considine, Clare Ferraro and Sue Fletcher,

Praise for The Witch Elm “‘I’ve always considered myself to be, basically, a lucky person.’ That’s the first line of Tana French’s extraordinary new novel. . . . Here’s a things-go-bad story Thomas Hardy could have written in his prime. . . . The book is lifted by French’s nervy, almost obsessive prose. . . . This is good work by a good writer. For the reader, what luck.” —Stephen King, The New York Times Book Review “Tana French is at her suspenseful best in The Witch Elm. . . . [Her] best and most intricately nuanced novel yet. . . . She is in a class by herself as a superb psychological novelist. . . . Get ready for the whiplash brought on by its final twists and turns.” —Janet Maslin, The New York Times “Like all of her novels, it becomes an incisive psychological portrait embedded in a mesmerizing murder mystery. [French] could make a Target run feel tense and revelatory.” —Los Angeles Times “Like all of French’s novels, The Witch Elm can be swooningly evocative. . . . Even if Toby isn’t on the Dublin Murder Squad, the events in The Witch Elm spur his great, transformative upheaval. The discovery they force on him revolves around one question: Whose story is this? By the time French is done retooling the mystery form—it seems there’s nothing she can’t make it do, no purpose she can’t make it serve—the answer is

Crucially, some people with different, equally disquieting gifts could see these aspects of others. In the poetic fragment known as the Ljóðatal, the ‘List of Spells’, Odin boasts of his magical ability with a series of individual charms, and in one of them we see the true viciousness of his power: I know a tenth [spell]: if I see sorceresses playing up in the air, I can so contrive it that they go astray from the home of their shapes [heimhama] from the home of their minds [heimhuga]. The spell is directed against the independent spirits of witches, sent out from their bodies on their mistresses’ errands. Odin’s charm is terrible in its severance of their very souls, cut away to dissipate forever.

What if a curse now loomed over the school? And what if the séance had unleashed it?

What speaks to me most is close to the ground: the shrubs and vines, rather than the great elms, oaks, and maples. The understory, as botanists call it. In the decades after the war, when the city turned its back on the park—firing the groundskeepers, ceding greater and greater swaths of land to the muggers and drug dealers—it was not the big trees that began to disappear; it was the shrubs: the witch hazel and jetbead, black haw and sweet pepperbush. The park became like the city: skyscrapers, no texture. And that meant it was dying. The things that live at ground level are what hold the earth fast. . . . It is the shrubs that allow the park to survive.