Top 100 Lehane Quotes
#1. Of the true mysteries of the universe . . . the one we may never solve is the mystery of other people. This is the underlying subject of all fiction--Who ARE you, and why are you different from me?--from a NYT Book Review review of Since We Fell, by Dennis Lehane
Noah Hawley
#2. In this vivid depiction of the wiseguys and poor sods who drift through his flawed hero's bar, Con Lehane also shows us their modest hopes and dreams ... There are no easy solutions in McNulty's world.
Margaret Maron
#3. Top-shelf fiction, a Crown Royal ride into the heart of Night and New York. Con Lehane's work is reminiscent of the best of Lawrence Block, which is to say that this is very good stuff, indeed.
George Pelecanos
#4. This terrible smallness of men was bigger than him, bigger than anything.
Dennis Lehane
#5. 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
#6. Growing up, Joe had adored his brother, Then he'd come to hate him. Now, he mostly didn't think about him. When he did, he had to admit, he missed his laugh.
Dennis Lehane
#7. The harsh light above them caught her face, and Sean could see what she'd look like when she was much older - a handsome woman, scarred by wisdom she never asked for.
Dennis Lehane
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. What they didn't tell you about absolute power was that it was never absolute; the instant you had it, someone had already lined up to try to take it away. Princes could sleep soundly, but never kings. The ear was always tuned for the creak on the
Dennis Lehane
#11. When they'd first come out in the morning, a single flounder lay flapping and puffing in the breezeway, one sad, swollen eye looking back toward the sea.
Dennis Lehane
#12. Don't forget - Charlie Chaplin too, my friend." "I'd do an imitation, but I don't know what he sounds like." "Hey, not bad, boss. You can open for me in the Catskills.
Dennis Lehane
#13. Her forehead was unlined in the way of the recently embalmed and her smile resembled that of someone undergoing electroshock.
Dennis Lehane
#14. 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
#15. In Greek tragedy, they fall from great heights. In noir, they fall from the curb.
Dennis Lehane
#16. There are so many more important things to worry about than how you're perceived by strangers.
Dennis Lehane
#17. 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
#18. He was done with every lie he'd ever allowed himself to believe, every lie he'd ever lived, every lie.
Dennis Lehane
#19. He knew her. He knew her, this man she'd married, this man she'd committed herself to walking through this life with. He knew her. And - wonder of wonders - he was still here.
Dennis Lehane
#20. If a man was lucky, he was moving toward something his whole life.
Dennis Lehane
#21. There are threads in our lives. You pull one, and everything else gets affected.
Dennis Lehane
#22. The trick, Teddy had long since learned, was to stay busy and stay focused. They couldn't catch you if you didn't stop running.
Dennis Lehane
#23. 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
#24. You should write because some stray scrap of your soul is trying to manifest itself verbally.
Dennis Lehane
#25. But as the years passed, he missed her more, not less, and his need for her became a cut that would not scar over, would not stop leaking.
Dennis Lehane
#26. The best thing that can happen to people entering creative professions is the dwindling of all other possibilities.
Dennis Lehane
#27. What's your name?"
"Emma Gould," she said. "What's yours?"
"Wanted."
"By all the girls or just the law?
Dennis Lehane
#28. I held her, he wanted to say, and if I knew for certain that all it would take to hold her again would be to die, then I couldn't raise the gun to my head fast enough.
Dennis Lehane
#30. 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
#31. The foundation of your life is luck. Hard work and talent make up the difference.
Dennis Lehane
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. This world can only give me reminders of what I don't have, can never have, didn't have for long enough.
Dennis Lehane
#36. We were supposed to grow old together, Dolores. Have kids. Take walks under old trees. I wanted to watch the lines etch themselves into your flesh and know when each and every one of them appeared. Die together.
Dennis Lehane
#37. 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
#38. Happiness made Marv anxious because he knew it didn't last. But happiness destroyed was worth wrapping your arms around because it always hugged you back.
Dennis Lehane
#39. 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
#40. Hospitals strip a lot from you - your independence, your confidence, sometimes your will to live. But pettiness too. Pettiness is the first casualty of the ICU waiting room. No one has the energy for it.
Dennis Lehane
#41. I think if a man beats you and fucks half the women he sees and no one will help you, axing him isn't the least understandable thing you can do.
Dennis Lehane
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. I sort of play golf because a lot of my friends are into it, but I'm awful - my handicap is about six or seven thousand.
Dennis Lehane
#45. He'd told his son recently that life was luck. But life, he'd come to realize as he aged, was also memory. The recollection of moments often proved richer than the moment themselves.
Dennis Lehane
#46. People evaluate you in terms of how you handle things going forward.
Chris Lehane
#47. Each day in this country, twenty-three hundred children are reported missing.
Dennis Lehane
#48. 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
#49. It occurred to him that thinking like this could explain why, even after all the jobs he'd pulled, he rarely had much money in his pockets. Sometimes it seemed like he stole money from one place just to give it away somewhere else.
Dennis Lehane
#50. In his time on earth, he'd learned one truth above all else when it came to power - those who lost it usually didn't see it vanishing until it was already gone.
Dennis Lehane
#51. Joe closed his hand over the watch and it was still warm from his father's pocket, ticking against his palm like a heart.
Dennis Lehane
#52. How many psychiatrists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?" "I don't know. How many?" "Eight." "Why?" "Oh, stop overanalyzing it.
Dennis Lehane
#53. Which would be worse, to live as a monster or to die as a good man?
Dennis Lehane
#54. We live in a world of disposable memory, nothing's built to last, not even shame.
Dennis Lehane
#55. Choice, I've always believed, is all that separates us from animals.
Dennis Lehane
#56. She was afraid of all that and so much more, but what terrified her most was inside of her, an insect of unnatural intelligence who'd been living in her brain her entire life, playing with it, clicking across it, wrenching loose its cables on a whim.
Dennis Lehane
#57. As they've always been. And they don't change just because you want them to.
Dennis Lehane
#58. Visitation Street is urban opera writ large. Gritty and magical, filled with mystery, poetry and pain, Ivy Pochoda's voice recalls Richard Price, Junot Diaz, and even Alice Sebold, yet it's indelibly her own.
Dennis Lehane
#60. You see the worst in the best of people," she said, shaking her head, "and the best in the worst of people.
Dennis Lehane
#61. I loved this woman the way you love ... well, nothing," he said, a note of suprise in his voice. "You can't compare that kind of love to anything, can you? It's its own unique gift.
Dennis Lehane
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. Men. If you give them half a chance, they'll fuck you over just to prove they can.
Dennis Lehane
#67. I love to write, so it rarely seems like work - even when it gets arduous.
Dennis Lehane
#68. Bob, who had never been late in his life, suspected there was something hostile at the core of people who always were.
Dennis Lehane
#70. And she was-definitely-a woman who did not shrink from gauntlets, but stepped up to them, and said, Okay, bring it. Bring your worst. I will get back up. Every time. I will not shrivel and die. So watch out.
Dennis Lehane
#71. And that's when it hit me. Like a building had fallen on me. The oxygen in my chest swirled into a vortex created by a single instant of horrifying clarity.
Dennis Lehane
#72. Conflate a narcissistic instinct for self-preservation with moral superiority.
Dennis Lehane
#73. For a moment-maybe even a succession of moments and none sharp enough to point to as the cause-he'd been happy.
Dennis Lehane
#74. It was one of those sneaky days in late winter where spring came along to get a lay of the land.
Dennis Lehane
#75. It's hard to close the door on optimistic expectations when you love someone.
Dennis Lehane
#76. Music" - he smiled his glorious smile and raised his index finger - "music speaks for the soul because words are too small.
Dennis Lehane
#77. Things weren't ever what they were supposed to be; they were what they were, and that was the simple truth of it, a truth that didn't change just because you wanted it to.
Dennis Lehane
#78. Inland Florida was not the Florida of blue ocean, white sand, and crushed-white-shell parking lots. It was a land sun bleached and sickened after too many droughts and wildfires.
Dennis Lehane
#80. 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
#81. Do you know the primary difference between men and gods?" "No, sir." "Gods don't think they can become men.
Dennis Lehane
#82. All he wanted was to not be alone, but he knew there was no getting rescued from that
Dennis Lehane
#84. And he hated himself and hated her,too, for the ruin they'd made of each other.
Dennis Lehane
#85. When a woman once asked Joe how he could come from such a magnificent home and such a good family and still become a gangster, Joe's answer was two-pronged: (a) he wasn't a gangster, he was an outlaw; (b) he came from a magnificent house not a magnificent home.
Dennis Lehane
#86. 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
#87. You are sheep among wolves. Be wise as serpents, yet innocent as doves.
Dennis Lehane
#88. How much violence, Marshal, do you think a man can carry before it breaks him?
Dennis Lehane
#89. You can have two families in this life, Joe, the one you're born to and the one you build.
Dennis Lehane
#90. If you tell people what you are going to do, and you suggest it's going to be successful, you need to be successful. Because once you create those expectations and you don't fulfill them, when you already have a significant credibility problem, it just further degrades your credibility.
Chris Lehane
#92. So, about the only difference I see between a thief and a banker most times is a college degree.
Dennis Lehane
#93. It's a lot easier to ask a woman's forgiveness than her permission.
Dennis Lehane
#95. 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
#96. It took only a second for another to arrive on the same path as yours and change your life to a point it couldn't change back. One second.
Dennis Lehane
#97. That if you believe, really believe, and if your strategy is sound, and if you're willing to leave everything you've got on the field of battle to win the day" - he held his arms wide - "you can do anything." She'd
Dennis Lehane
#98. Maybe there are some things we were put on this earth not to know.
Dennis Lehane
#99. That when a woman moves on, she doesn't look back, and I'm that woman.
Dennis Lehane
#100. She told him that he had the most beautiful voice she'd ever heard, that it sounded like whiskey and wood smoke.
Dennis Lehane
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