Top 100 Dennis Lehane Quotes
#1. This terrible smallness of men was bigger than him, bigger than anything.
Dennis Lehane
#2. I believe so deeply in the primacy of language, in lifting your prose to the highest level you're capable of and making your words symphonic.
Dennis Lehane
#3. It was the lack of a clear reason that got to her most, & it stabbed her that a relationship that had once seemed unbreakable could slip apart so easily due to nothing more than time, family turmoil, & growth spurts.
Dennis Lehane
#4. There seemed to be little rhyme or reason as to why one day snatching the correct words from the ether was like opening a faucet and other days it was like opening a vein,
Dennis Lehane
#5. Her forehead was unlined in the way of the recently embalmed and her smile resembled that of someone undergoing electroshock.
Dennis Lehane
#6. You think the whole electrical system is fried?" Chuck said, "Good possibility." "That would mean fences." Chuck picked up an apple as it floated onto his foot. He went into a windup and kicked his leg and fired it into the wall. "Stee-rike one!" He turned to Teddy. "That would mean fences, yes.
Dennis Lehane
#7. In Greek tragedy, they fall from great heights. In noir, they fall from the curb.
Dennis Lehane
#8. I stared down the slim barrel of a gun, looked into eyes rabid with fear and hatred, and saw my reflection. Pulled the trigger to make it go away.
I heard the echoes of my gunshots, smelled the cordite, and in the smoke, I still saw my reflection and knew I always would.
Dennis Lehane
#9. He was done with every lie he'd ever allowed himself to believe, every lie he'd ever lived, every lie.
Dennis Lehane
#10. Teddy laughed, heard the sound of it carry off on the sweep of night air and dissolve in the distant surf, as if it had never been, as if the island and the sea and the salt took what you thought you had and ...
Dennis Lehane
#11. What's your name?"
"Emma Gould," she said. "What's yours?"
"Wanted."
"By all the girls or just the law?
Dennis Lehane
#12. He used it on the next guard, the one in front of the fence. He disarmed him, a kid, a baby, really, and the guard said, 'You going to kill me?'
'Jesus, kid, no,' Teddy said and snapped the butt of the rifle into the kid's temple.
Dennis Lehane
#13. When I was young, I asked my priest how to get to heaven and still protect yourself from all the evil in the world. He told me what God told His children;'You are sheep among wolves, be wise as the serpent, yet innocent as doves.
Dennis Lehane
#14. A man is the stories he tells about himself, and most of those stories are lies. Never look too closely. If you uncover his lies, it'll humiliate you both. Best just to live with the bullshit.
Dennis Lehane
#15. This world can only give me reminders of what I don't have, can never have, didn't have for long enough.
Dennis Lehane
#16. We met when we were both majoring in Space Invaders with a Pub Etiquette minor at the Happy Harbor Campus of UMass/Boston.
Dennis Lehane
#17. Those who did remember probably shrugged off the chill of her memory, turned their heads down to the sports page or up toward the approaching bus. The world is a terrible place, they thought. Bad things happen every day. My bus is late.
Dennis Lehane
#18. I have a lot of rage about things that didn't happen to me, tied up with watching an immigrant, working-class father struggle to make his way through the world - and seeing how society was modeled to keep him in his place.
Dennis Lehane
#19. Those eyes, Teddy thought. Even frozen in time, they howled. You wanted to climb inside the picture and say, 'No, no, no. It's okay, it's okay. Sssh.' You wanted to hold her until the shakes stopped, tell her that everything would be all right.
Dennis Lehane
#20. When you go to the other place, part of you doesn't come back.'
What other place, honey?' He placed his watch on the bedstand.
And the part of you that does?' She bit her lip and looked like she was about to punch herself in the face with both fists. 'Shouldn't.
Dennis Lehane
#21. Which would be worse, to live as a monster or to die as a good man?
Dennis Lehane
#22. We live in a world of disposable memory, nothing's built to last, not even shame.
Dennis Lehane
#24. You see the worst in the best of people," she said, shaking her head, "and the best in the worst of people.
Dennis Lehane
#25. It was like sitting through a movie, no matter how boring or confusing, until the end. Because at the end, sometimes things were explained or the ending itself was cool enough that you felt like sitting through all the boring stuff had been worth it.
Dennis Lehane
#26. But I often think we talk way too much in this society, that we consider verbalization a panacea that it very often is not, and that we turn a blind eye to the sort of morbid self-absorption that becomes a predictable by-product of it.
Dennis Lehane
#27. He'd never believed that power, in any shape or form, was anything more than the intemperate protrusion on the egomaniacal heart. Since all egomaniacs were insecure to their frightened cores, they this weilded "power" barbarically so the world would not find them out
Dennis Lehane
#28. Men. If you give them half a chance, they'll fuck you over just to prove they can.
Dennis Lehane
#29. Bob, who had never been late in his life, suspected there was something hostile at the core of people who always were.
Dennis Lehane
#30. Conflate a narcissistic instinct for self-preservation with moral superiority.
Dennis Lehane
#31. It was one of those sneaky days in late winter where spring came along to get a lay of the land.
Dennis Lehane
#32. The foghorn of Boston Light moaned across the harbor, a sound Teddy had heard every night of his childhood in Hull. The loneliest sound he knew. Made you want to hold something, a person, a pillow, yourself.
Dennis Lehane
#33. Do you know the primary difference between men and gods?" "No, sir." "Gods don't think they can become men.
Dennis Lehane
#34. All he wanted was to not be alone, but he knew there was no getting rescued from that
Dennis Lehane
#36. I won the parental lottery. Most of the kids I grew up with either came from really fractured homes, or really violent ones. I went home to a very traditional, good Irish Catholic family.
Dennis Lehane
#37. You are sheep among wolves. Be wise as serpents, yet innocent as doves.
Dennis Lehane
#38. So, about the only difference I see between a thief and a banker most times is a college degree.
Dennis Lehane
#39. It's a lot easier to ask a woman's forgiveness than her permission.
Dennis Lehane
#41. You ever hear of Little Christmas?" he asked her. "'Course," she said. "January sixth." "Nobody remembers it anymore." "Meant something in my time," she said. "My old man's too." Her voice picked up a tone of distracted pity. "Not yours, though." "Not mine," Bob agreed and felt a trapped
Dennis Lehane
#42. She told him that he had the most beautiful voice she'd ever heard, that it sounded like whiskey and wood smoke.
Dennis Lehane
#43. The world does not have tidy endings. The world does not have neat connections. It is not filled with epiphanies that work perfectly at the moment that you need them.
Dennis Lehane
#46. I don't have room in my heart for most people. Got nothing against them, but I got nothing for them, either.
Dennis Lehane
#47. Believe it or not, Marshal, I believe in talk therapy, basic interpersonal skills. I have this radical idea that if you treat a patient with respect and listen to what he's trying to tell you, you just might reach him. (87)
Dennis Lehane
#48. I open up - " Cawley again: "Using your keys, correct, Mr. Ganton?" Ganton nodded at Cawley, looked back at his knees. "I use my keys, yeah, 'cause the door's locked.
Dennis Lehane
#49. But always in the back of your throat is this scream, barely suppressed.
Dennis Lehane
#50. Chuck said, "Hey. How many surrealists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?" Cawley looked over at him. "I'll bite. How many?" "Fish," Chuck said and let loose a bright bark of a laugh.
Dennis Lehane
#51. This woman was hard-core. Fuck with her at your peril.
Dennis Lehane
#52. Grief, I swear to God, doesn't live in the heart. It lives in the senses. And sometimes, all I want to do is cut off my nose so I can't smell her, hack my fingers off at the joint.
Dennis Lehane
#53. People just want you to see them as they hope to be seen. And everyone wants to be seen as interesting.
Dennis Lehane
#54. Not that Danny seemed intent on fucking it up, just that he was a man after all, and no one knew better than Luther himself how completely a man could step on his own dick when what he thought he wanted contradicted what he knew he needed. The
Dennis Lehane
#55. Narrative becomes the way you make sense of chaos. That's how you focus the world. It's the only reason you should ever try this writing job.
Dennis Lehane
#56. The mean things of this world had only one lesson-we are meaner than you'd ever imagine.
Dennis Lehane
#57. How naive can you be before it becomes unforgivable?
Dennis Lehane
#58. You're just pissed off. And when you're pissed off, you lash out.
Dennis Lehane
#59. Danny could see it in their faces when they shook Steve's hand - they'd have preferred him dead. Death allowed for the illusion of heroism. The maimed turned that illusion into an uncomfortable odor.
Dennis Lehane
#60. The ornament of beauty, Shakespeare wrote, is suspect. And he was right. But beauty itself, unadorned and unaffected, is sacred, I think, worthy of our awe and our loyalty.
Dennis Lehane
#61. I normally can't stand vice-free people. They conflate a narcissistic instinct for self-preservation with moral superiority. Plus they suck the life right out of a party.
Dennis Lehane
#62. All the stuff our fathers took for granted as long as you worked hard, the great safety net and the fair wage and the gold watch at the end of it all? That's all gone around here, my friend.
Dennis Lehane
#63. You've learned that every good lie is threaded with truth and every accepted truth leaks lies.
Dennis Lehane
#64. The truth of himself was a lonely boy in an empty house, waiting for someone to knock on his bedroom door and ask if he was okay.
Dennis Lehane
#65. I'd like to say I found a sublime beauty in it all, but I didn't. And yet. And yet, this life we'd built filled our car
Dennis Lehane
#66. We all die alone ... I could have helped her with the dying.
Dennis Lehane
#67. And two men standing up top, weeping like children because they'd somehow never known the world could get this bad.
Dennis Lehane
#68. The world didn't give a shit. It didn't bestow. It took
Dennis Lehane
#69. Monsters don't dress like monsters; they dress like humans. Even stranger, they rarely know they're the monsters.
Dennis Lehane
#70. I'm a detective, but nuns could stonewall Sam Spade into an asylum
Dennis Lehane
#71. Yeah, well, it's not like the old days." I bit into my lobster roll. Maybe the best lobster roll in Boston, which made it, arguably, the best lobster roll in the world. "It's
Dennis Lehane
#72. Don't get me wrong, I love literary fiction. It's faux literary fiction I can't stand.
Dennis Lehane
#73. That's the thing about being a victim; you start to think it'll happen to you on a regular basis. It's living with the reality of your own vulnerability, and it sucks.
Dennis Lehane
#74. It's an island, boss. They'll always find us. Teddy met Chuck's eyes and nodded. For the first time since they'd met, he could see fear in Chuck's eyes, his jaw trying to tighten against it.
Dennis Lehane
#75. I'm driving a stolen car On a pitch black night And I'm telling myself I'm gonna be alright.
Dennis Lehane
#76. Someday ... , we'll medicate human experience right out of the human experience.
Dennis Lehane
#78. At that moment, Dave would have lifted a house for Jimmy, held it up to his chest until Jimmy told him where to put it down.
Dennis Lehane
#79. We don't know how she got out of her room
It's as if she evaporated, straight through the walls.
Dennis Lehane
#80. We're not our brother's keeper, Joseph. In fact, it's an insult to our brother to presume he can't take care of himself.
Dennis Lehane
#81. Waking, after all, was an almost natal state. You surfaced without history, then spent the blinks and yawns reassembling your past, shuffling the shards into chronological order before fortifying yourself for the present.
Dennis Lehane
#83. She was his wife, mother, best friend, sister, lover, and priest.
Dennis Lehane
#85. She should have a ride named after her at Epcot, man.
Dennis Lehane
#86. You didn't die and go to a better place; this was the better place because you weren't dead. Heaven wasn't in the clouds; it was the air in your lungs.
Dennis Lehane
#87. This was the photograph, I knew, that had already burned its way into my dreams and my shadows, into that part of my mind that I have no control over. Its image would reappear in all its wanton cruelty for the rest of my life, particularly when I was least prepared for it.
Dennis Lehane
#88. The loneliness of another can be shocking when it lays itself bare without warning.
Dennis Lehane
#89. People don't fix each other, Joseph. And they never become anything but what they've always been.
Dennis Lehane
#90. Driving down 93, I realized once and for all, that I love the things that chafe. The things that fill me with stress so total I can't remember when a block of it didn't rest on top of my heart. I love what, if broken, can't be repaired. What, if lost can't be replaced.
I love my burdens.
Dennis Lehane
#91. We live by night and dance fast so grass can't grow under our feet. That's our creed.
Dennis Lehane
#92. moaned his final breath into the imitation Oriental.
Dennis Lehane
#93. She said once that time is nothing to me but a series of bookmarks that I use to jump back and forth through the text of my life, returning again and again to the events that mark me in the eyes of my more astute colleagues, as bearing all the characteristics of the classic melancholic.
Dennis Lehane
#94. On September 7th, after the Cubs dropped Game Three, the two teams boarded the Michigan Central together to embark on the twenty-seven hour trip, and Babe Ruth got drunk and started stealing hats.
Dennis Lehane
#95. Hell, everyone's nice until some kind of hard choice is put in front of them.
Coronado: Stories
Dennis Lehane
#96. I can't remember coming across a more precise evocation of innocence lost since Golding's The Lord of the Flies. With The Death of Sweet Mister, Daniel Woodrell has written his masterpiece-spare, dark, and incandescently beautiful. It broke my heart.
Dennis Lehane
#97. I found that I could write two kinds of short stories: I could write very absurd, kind of surrealistic, funny stories; or I could write very dark, realistic - hyper-realistic - stories. I was never happy with that, because I couldn't meld the two.
Dennis Lehane
#98. What you put out into the world will always come back for you.
Dennis Lehane
#99. I'm alone," Angie had told me a month ago.
"No, you're not."
"You're not alone," I said, my arms wrapped around her from behind.
"Yes, I am. And all your holding and all your love can't change that right now.
Dennis Lehane
#100. Marv stared at his phone. Kids these days. It was like on that day in school when they taught personal responsibility, this entire fucking generation had banged in sick.
Dennis Lehane
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