Dennis Lehane Quotes

Grief, he said, is carnivorous.

I don't have room in my heart for most people. Got nothing against them, but I got nothing for them, either.

The other side of his desk. Yeah, well, like I always say, miss, you could

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?

In Greek tragedy, they fall from great heights. In noir, they fall from the curb.

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

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.

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.

Achievement? Depends on luck - to be born in the right place at the right time and be of the right color. To live long enough to be in the right place at the right time to make one's fortune. Yes, yes, hard work and talent make up the difference. They are crucial, and you know I'd never argue different. But the foundation of all lives is luck. Good or bad. Luck is life and life is luck. And it's leaking from the moment it lands in your hand.

For a moment-maybe even a succession of moments and none sharp enough to point to as the cause-he'd been happy.

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.

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.

I will not dream anymore, you said. I will not set myself up for the pain. But then your team made the playoffs, or you saw a movie, or a billboard glowing dusky orange and advertising Aruba, or a girl who bore more than a passing resemblance to a woman you'd dated in high school - a woman you'd loved and lost - danced above you with shimmering eyes, and you said, fuck it, let's dream just one more time.

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.

The world didn't give a shit. It didn't bestow. It took

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We live in a world of disposable memory, nothing's built to last, not even shame.

I love television. I think we're in a renaissance of epic proportion in television now.

We don't know how she got out of her room
It's as if she evaporated, straight through the walls.

Baby, why are you all wet?

He looked up at the underside of the bridge, everyone battling to either get into the city or out of it, everyone in an irritated rush, probably half aware that they wouldn't feel any better once they got home. Half of them would go right back out again to the market for something they'd forgotten, to a bar, to the video store, to a restaurant where they'd wait in line again. And for what? What did we line up for? Where did we expect to go? And why were we never as happy as we thought we'd be once we got there?

Happiness comes in moments, & then it's gone until the next time. Could be years. But sadness settles it.

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.

He understood people a little too well, and the knowledge made him nervous.

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.

Got us a full moon too coming tomorrow night. Just make things a whole lot worse. All we need.
- Why is that?
- What's that, Marshal?
- The full moon. You think it makes people crazy?
- I know it does.- Found a wrinkle in one of the pages and used his index finger to smooth it out.
- How come?
- Well, you think about it - the moon affects the tide, right?
- Sure.
- Has some sort of magnet effect or something on water.
- I'll buy that.
- Human brain,- Trey said, - is over fifty percent water.
- No kidding?
- No kidding. You figure ol' Mr. Moon can jerk the ocean around, think what it can do to the head.

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.

Happiness doesn't lie in conspicuous consumption and the relentless amassing of useless crap. Happiness lies in the person sitting beside you and your ability to talk to them. Happiness is clear-headed human interaction and empathy. Happiness is home. And home is not a house-home is a mythological conceit. It is a state of mind. A place of communion and unconditional love. It is where, when you cross its threshold, you finally feel at peace.

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,

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

This terrible smallness of men was bigger than him, bigger than anything.

Everyone wants to tell you something -anything, everything - about themselves and they just go on and on and on. But when it comes time to show you who they are? Their shit is weak, Nadia. Their shit is lacking. And they just cover it up by talking more, by explaining away what can't be explained away. And then they go on talking more shit about someone else.

What's your name?"
"Emma Gould," she said. "What's yours?"
"Wanted."
"By all the girls or just the law?

"Emma Gould," she" title="Dennis Lehane Quotes: What's your name?"
"Emma Gould," she" width="913px" height="515px" loading="lazy"/>

Sympathy's easy. You have sympathy for starving children swatting at flies on the late-night commercials. Sympathy is easy because it comes from a position of power. Empathy is getting down on your knees and looking someone else in the eye and realizing you could be them, and that all that separates you is luck.

It never works that way. Once that ugliness has been forced into you, it becomes part of your blood, dilutes it, races through your heart and back out again, staining everything as it goes. The ugliness never goes away, never comes out, no matter what you do. Anyone who thinks otherwise is naive. All you can do is hope to control it.

This was a cruel trick of the mind, yes, but Teddy had long ago accepted the logic of it - waking, after all, was an almost natal state. You surfaced without a history, then spent the blinks and yawns reassembling your past, shuffling the shards into chronological order before fortifying yourself for the present. What

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.

Civilization seems to be something we choose when it fits our purpose.

She was forced to face how cold and unlike her fantasy her own marriage was? Or did she suddenly just get tired of living this long-ass life? Joella

This woman was hard-core. Fuck with her at your peril.

Dave put his head down and ate his eggs. He heard his mother leave the kitchen, humming Old MacDonald all the way down the hall.
Standing in the yard now, knuckles aching, he could hear it too. Old MacDonald had a farm. And everything was hunky-dory on it. You farmed and tilled and reaped and sowed and everything was just fucking great. Everyone got along, even the chickens and the cows, and no one needed to talk about anything, because nothing bad ever happened and nobody had any secrets because secrets were for bad people, people who climbed in cars that smelled of apples with strange men and disappeared for four days, only to come back home and find everyone they'd known had disappeared, too, been replaced with smiley-faced look-alikes who'd do just about anything but listen to you.

You heard me. Let someone else send you to your blaze of glory. You're a speck, man. You're nothing. You're not worth the bullet or the mark on my soul for taking you out."
You trying to piss me off again, Patrick?" He removed Campbell Rawson from his shoulder and held him aloft.
I tilted my wrist so the cylinder fell into my palm, shrugged. "You're a joke, Gerry. I'm just calling it like I see it."
That so?"
Absolutely." I met his hard eyes with my own. "And you'll be replaced, just like everything else, in maybe a week, tops. Some other dumb, sick shit will come along and kill some people and he'll be all over the papers, and all over Hard Copy and you'll be yesterday's news. Your fifteen minutes are up, Gerry. And they've passed without impact."
They'll remember this," Gerry said. "Believe me."
Gerry clamped back on the trigger. When he met my finger, he looked at me and then clamped down so hard that my finger broke.
I depressed the trigger on the one-shot and nothing happened.
Gerry shrieked louder, and the razor came out of my flesh, then swung back immediately, and I clenched my eyes shut and depressed the trigger frantically three times.
And Gerry's hand exploded.
And so did mine.
The razor hit the ice by my knee as I dropped the one shot and fire roared up the electrical tape and gasoline on Gerry's arm and caught the wisps of Danielle's hair.
Gerry threw his head back and opened his mouth wide and bellowed

That's how the Sukulowskis got out?" Captain Byner asked. "Yup." Joe lit a cigarette. "Where'd they end up?" Joe tossed his match in the ashtray. "You don't really want to know." Rico said, "Gentlemen, I agree with you. Freddy was a fucking asshole going after Montooth in the first place." Freddy, already aggrieved, looked even more dismayed. "You were." Rico looked Freddy in the eye and formed a circle with the thumb and index of his right hand. "Huge asshole. Size of a fucking paint can." He turned to the other men in the room. "But, gents, we can't let a nigger kill a white man. Even if it's a nigger we like, and I like Montooth Dix. I've broken bread with the man. But still. And we can't let a guy who's not in our thing kill someone who is. No matter what. Dion? Joe? You two taught

I do have my dark days. I suppose everyone does. The difference is that most people don't kill their husbands with an axe.

And she was so simply his love, his girl, watching him approach as if she were memorizing him and his walk and those flowers and this moment, and he wanted to ask her what sound a heart made when it broke from pleasure, when just the sight of someone filled you the way food, blood, and air never could ...

She died in a fire. I miss her like you ... If I was underwater, I wouldn't miss oxygen that much.

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.

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.

And yet they acquired. They built scaffolds of debt, and just when it seemed the pile would come tumbling down from the weight, they bought a living room set on layaway, tossed it up on top. And as they needed to acquire, they seemed to need to discard in equal or larger measure. There was an almost violent addiction in the piles of trash he saw, the sense it gave him of shitting out food you shouldn't have eaten in the first place.

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.

We all have our crosses to bear.

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.

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.

Do you know the primary difference between men and gods?" "No, sir." "Gods don't think they can become men.

If you're not crazy but people have told the world you are, then all your protests to the contrary just underscore their point.

She told him that he had the most beautiful voice she'd ever heard, that it sounded like whiskey and wood smoke.

All he wanted was to not be alone, but he knew there was no getting rescued from that

You are sheep among wolves. Be wise as serpents, yet innocent as doves.

She blew a stream of smoke up at the empty clotheslines. 'These silly dreams you have when you're young. I mean, what, Katie and Brendan Harris were going ot make a life in Las Vegas? How long would that little Eden have lasted? Maybe they'd be on their second trailer park, second kid, but it would have hit them sooner or later - life isn't happily ever after and golden sunsets and shit like that. It's work. The person you love is rarely worthy of how big your love is. Because no one is worthy of that and maybe no one deserves the burden of it, either. You'll be let down. You'll be disappointed and have your trust broken and have a lot of real sucky days. You lose more than you win. You hate the person you love as much as you love him. But, shit, you roll up your sleeves and work - at everything -because that's what growing older is.

It was one of those sneaky days in late winter where spring came along to get a lay of the land.

The foundation of your life is luck. Hard work and talent make up the difference.

Some ghost of myself still lived back in the days when we'd shared a bed and talked of the future. But that love we'd had and those selves we'd been were gone, placed in a box like old photographs and letters you'd never read again.

Teddy wondered, and not for the first time, not by a long shot, if this was the day that missing her would finally be too much for him.

What you put out into the world will always come back for you.

That when a woman moves on, she doesn't look back, and I'm that woman.

I'm a detective, but nuns could stonewall Sam Spade into an asylum

Rumors or no, Thomas, if the men strike, we'll see fecal gravity at work like never before. Ain't a man in this room who won't be covered in shit.

So he's a bad guy."
"Everyone's bad."
"No," Bob said, "they're not. Most people are okay."
"Yeah?" A smile of disbelief.
"Yeah. They just, I dunno, make a lotta messes and then they make more messes trying to clean those first messes up and after a while that's your life."
She sniffled and chuckled at the same time. "That's it, uh?"
"That's it sometimes.

Music" - he smiled his glorious smile and raised his index finger - "music speaks for the soul because words are too small.

I've built something valuable here. But valuable things also have a way of being misunderstood in their own time. Everyone wants a quick fix. We're tired of being afraid, tired of being sad, tired of feeling overwhelmed, tired of feeling tired. We want the old day back, and we don't even remember them, and we want to push into the future, paradoxically, at top speed. Patience and forbearance become the first casualties of progress.

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.

Soft waves broke against the rocks.

Sometimes, when outrage begat outrage with enough frequency, it threatened the fabric of the universe, and the universe pushed back.

A complaint that's not looking for a solution is a disease that's not looking for a cure.

Lately, though, he'd just been tired in general. Tired of people. Tired of books and TV and the nightly news and songs on the radio he'd heard years before and hadn't liked much in the first place. He was tired of his clothes and tired of his hair and tired of other people's clothes and other people's hair. He was tired of wishing things made sense. He'd gotten to a point where he was pretty sure he'd heard everything anyone had to say on any given subject and so it seemed he spent his days listening to old recordings of things that hadn't seemed fresh the first time he'd heard them.
Maybe he was simply tired of life, of the absolute effort it took to get up every goddamned morning and walk out with into the same fucking day with only slight variations in the weather and food.
He wondered if this was what clinical depression felt like, a total numbness, a weary lack of hope.

Another thing Tim was fond of saying was when a house falls down, the first termite to bite into it is just as much to blame as the last. Joe didn't get that one--the first termite would be long fucking dead by the time the last termite got his teeth into the wood. Wouldn't he? Every time Tim made the analogy, Joe resolved to look into termite life expectancy, but then he'd forget to do it until the next time Tim brought it up, usually when he was drunk and there was a lull in the conversation, and everyone at the table would get the same look on their faces: What is it with Tim and the fucking termites already?

The best thing that can happen to people entering creative professions is the dwindling of all other possibilities.

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.

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.

L.A. burns, and so many other cities smolder, waiting for the hose that will flood gasoline over the coals, and we listen to politicians who fuel our hate and our narrow views and tell us it's simply a matter of getting back to basics while they sit in their beachfront properties and listen to the surf so they won't have to hear the screams of the drowning.

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.

SUN WAS in the room when he woke. He sat up and looked toward the bars, but the bars weren't there. Just a window, lower than it should have been until he realized he was up

Cruelty is older than the Bible. Savagery beat its chest in the first human summer and has kept beating it every day since. The worst in men is commonplace. The best is a far rarer thing.

You've learned that every good lie is threaded with truth and every accepted truth leaks lies.

Monsters don't dress like monsters; they dress like humans. Even stranger, they rarely know they're the monsters.

scarred by wisdom she'd never asked for.

Nobody learned nothing. Nobody evolved.

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.

You've mislaid your trust in the past, had your faith in people broken, shattered even. You've been betrayed. Lied to. So you've chosen not to trust. And this protects you to some extent, I'm sure. But it also isolates you from the rest of humanity. You are disconnected. You are displaced. And the only way to find your way back to a place, to a connection, is to trust again.

He thought: so this is what it feels like to love. No logic to it - he barely knew her. But there it was just the same. He'd just met the woman he'd known, somehow, since before he was born. The measure of every dream he'd never dared indulge.

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

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.

Choice, I've always believed, is all that separates us from animals.

You don't have a partner, Marshal, You came here alone.

Chuck said, "Fuck if I know."
Cawley stepped up beside them. "Quite similar to our clinical conclusion.