Top 100 Lehane's Quotes
#1. 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
#2. Happiness comes in moments, & then it's gone until the next time. Could be years. But sadness settles it.
Dennis Lehane
#3. It's good not only to realize that you can't please all of the people all of the time, but that you don't want to. There's a certain type of reader that you don't ever want to write for.
Dennis Lehane
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. My father's gone," Joe said eventually. "Emma's dead. Your brother's dead. My brothers scattered. Shit, D, you're one of the only people I know anymore. I lose you, who the fuck am I?
Dennis Lehane
#7. 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
#8. It's a lot easier to ask a woman's forgiveness than her permission.
Dennis Lehane
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#13. It's hard to close the door on optimistic expectations when you love someone.
Dennis Lehane
#14. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. You see the worst in the best of people," she said, shaking her head, "and the best in the worst of people.
Dennis Lehane
#21. 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
#22. As they've always been. And they don't change just because you want them to.
Dennis Lehane
#23. 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
#24. Choice, I've always believed, is all that separates us from animals.
Dennis Lehane
#25. We live in a world of disposable memory, nothing's built to last, not even shame.
Dennis Lehane
#26. Which would be worse, to live as a monster or to die as a good man?
Dennis Lehane
#28. 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
#29. Maybe that's what love is-counting the bandages until someone says, 'Enough'.
Dennis Lehane
#30. Hell, everyone's nice until some kind of hard choice is put in front of them.
Coronado: Stories
Dennis Lehane
#31. How am I supposed to let you go, that's all I'm asking. I want to hold you again, smell you, and, yes too, I just want you to fade. To please, please fade ...
Dennis Lehane
#32. It's odd how fast a beautiful woman can turn a guy's mind into lint storage. Just by being a beautiful woman.
Dennis Lehane
#33. Love like that? Hell, it seems so pure, it's damn near criminal.
Dennis Lehane
#34. Vanity is a weakness. I know this. It's a shallow dependence on the exterior self, on how one looks instead of what one is.
Dennis Lehane
#35. We live by night and dance fast so grass can't grow under our feet. That's our creed.
Dennis Lehane
#36. There's darkness in this world you can't learn about by watching TV and reading books.
Dennis Lehane
#37. An entire tree swept past the door, upside down, its roots sprouting upward like horns. "You see that?" "Yeah. It's gonna wake up in the middle of the ocean, say, 'Wait a second. This isn't right.' "'I'm supposed to be over there.' "'Took me years to get that hill looking the way I wanted it.
Dennis Lehane
#38. 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
#39. We don't know how she got out of her room
It's as if she evaporated, straight through the walls.
Dennis Lehane
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. Patrick Kenzie asking a bemused waitress for a newspaper in smalltown USA. 'It's like a homepage without a scroll button?
Dennis Lehane
#44. Don't get me wrong, I love literary fiction. It's faux literary fiction I can't stand.
Dennis Lehane
#45. 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
#46. I go on the presumption that everyone's full of shit until proven otherwise, and this usually serves me in good stead.
Dennis Lehane
#47. Jimmy looked back over at his wife, and Celeste could feel the tenderest of aches in the look. She could feel another teardrop piece of Jimmy's heart detach and free-fall down the inside of his chest.
Dennis Lehane
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. It's very simple. If you learn how to write well, to write with depth, cream will rise to the top. You'll get published. But, there is no secret.
Dennis Lehane
#51. 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
#52. In Greek tragedy, they fall from great heights. In noir, they fall from the curb.
Dennis Lehane
#53. The best thing that can happen to people entering creative professions is the dwindling of all other possibilities.
Dennis Lehane
#54. 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
#55. You should write because some stray scrap of your soul is trying to manifest itself verbally.
Dennis Lehane
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. There are threads in our lives. You pull one, and everything else gets affected.
Dennis Lehane
#59. If a man was lucky, he was moving toward something his whole life.
Dennis Lehane
#60. 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
#61. He was done with every lie he'd ever allowed himself to believe, every lie he'd ever lived, every lie.
Dennis Lehane
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. There are so many more important things to worry about than how you're perceived by strangers.
Dennis Lehane
#65. What's your name?"
"Emma Gould," she said. "What's yours?"
"Wanted."
"By all the girls or just the law?
Dennis Lehane
#66. 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
#67. Her forehead was unlined in the way of the recently embalmed and her smile resembled that of someone undergoing electroshock.
Dennis Lehane
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. This terrible smallness of men was bigger than him, bigger than anything.
Dennis Lehane
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. Each day in this country, twenty-three hundred children are reported missing.
Dennis Lehane
#82. People evaluate you in terms of how you handle things going forward.
Chris Lehane
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#94. This world can only give me reminders of what I don't have, can never have, didn't have for long enough.
Dennis Lehane
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. The foundation of your life is luck. Hard work and talent make up the difference.
Dennis Lehane
#98. 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
#100. 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
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