Dennis Lehane Quotes

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

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. ~ Dennis Lehane

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 ~ Dennis Lehane

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

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

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. ~ Dennis Lehane

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

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

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. ~ Dennis Lehane

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

The mind ... It's an engine essentially. That's what it is. A very delicate, intricate motor. And it's got all these pieces, all these gears and bolts and hinges. And we don't even know what half of them do. But if just one gear slips, just one ... Have you thought about that?
It's just like a car. No different. One gear slips, one bolt cracks, and the whole system goes haywire. Can you live knowing that?" He tapped his temple. "That it's all trapped in here and you can't get to it and you don't really control it. But it controls you, doesn't it? And if it decides one day that it doesn't feel like coming to work?" He leaned forward and they could see tendons straining in his neck. "Well, then you're pretty much good and fucked, aren't you? ~ Dennis Lehane

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

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

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

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

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

Patrick Kenzie asking a bemused waitress for a newspaper in smalltown USA. 'It's like a homepage without a scroll button? ~ Dennis Lehane

But always in the back of your throat is this scream, barely suppressed. ~ Dennis Lehane

The world according to Bubba is simple - if it aggravates you, stop it. By whatever means necessary. ~ Dennis Lehane

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

Goddamn embarrassing what a civilian you've become, man. ~ Dennis Lehane

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 ... ~ Dennis Lehane

She should have a ride named after her at Epcot, man. ~ Dennis Lehane

This is America ... where every adult shall have the full and inalienable right to eat her young ~ Dennis Lehane

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

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

When it came down to it, though, you had to remember all those assholes cutting you off in traffic and walking the streets and shouting in bars and turning their music up too loud and mugging you and raping you and selling you lemon cars-all those assholes were just children who'd aged. No miracle. Nothing sacred in that. ~ Dennis Lehane

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

How much violence, Marshal, do you think a man can carry before it breaks him? ~ Dennis Lehane

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

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

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

God loves violence. You understand that, don't you?" "No," Teddy said, "I don't." The warden walked a few steps forward and turned to face Teddy. "Why else would there be so much of it? It's in us. It comes out of us. It is what we do more naturally than we breathe. We wage war. We burn sacrifices. We pillage and tear at the flesh of our brothers. We fill great fields with our stinking dead. And why? To show Him that we've learned from His example. ~ Dennis Lehane

There's something ugly about the flawless. ~ Dennis Lehane

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

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. ~ Dennis Lehane

Hell, everyone's nice until some kind of hard choice is put in front of them.
Coronado: Stories ~ Dennis Lehane

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

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. ~ Dennis Lehane

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

Grief, he said, is carnivorous. ~ Dennis Lehane

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

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. ~ Dennis Lehane

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

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

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. ~ Dennis Lehane

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. ~ Dennis Lehane

I love to write, so it rarely seems like work - even when it gets arduous. ~ Dennis Lehane

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

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

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

If it's ever within your power to do so, she considered saying aloud to Brian (but didn't), you have to bear witness to your dead. You simply have to. You have to step into the energy field of whatever remains of their spirit, their soul, their essence and let it pass through your body. And in the passing, maybe a wisp of it adheres to you, grafts itself to your cells. And in this communion, the dead continue to live. Or strive to. Instead, ~ Dennis Lehane

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

After my daughter was born, I'd considered buying a shotgun to ward off potential suitors fourteen or so years up the road. Now, as I listened to these girls babble and imagined Gabby one day talking with the same banality and ignorance of the English language, I thought of buying the same shotgun to blow my own fucking head off. ~ Dennis Lehane

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. ~ Dennis Lehane

She had that light about her that turned people around her into moths. ~ Dennis Lehane

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

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

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. ~ Dennis Lehane

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

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. ~ Dennis Lehane

Everyone sees different things. ~ Dennis Lehane

There are threads in our lives. You pull one, and everything else gets affected. ~ Dennis Lehane

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

Men who believe that the way to the mind is not by way of ice picks through the brain or large dosages of dangerous medicine but through an honest reckoning of the self. ~ Dennis Lehane

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

Each day in this country, twenty-three hundred children are reported missing. ~ Dennis Lehane

He'd known of her, of course; everyone in the neighborhood knew of Katie. She was that beautiful. But few people really knew her. Beauty could do that; it scared you off, made you keep your distance. It wasn't like in the movies where the camera made beauty seem like something that invited you in. In the real world, beauty was like a fence to keep you out, back you off. ~ Dennis Lehane

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. ~ Dennis Lehane

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

And two men standing up top, weeping like children because they'd somehow never known the world could get this bad. ~ Dennis Lehane

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

We all die alone ... I could have helped her with the dying. ~ Dennis Lehane

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

As far as I could see, she didn't take any better care of her apparel than I did mine, but I owned shirts that looked like they'd been run through a car engine half an hour after I removed the price tags, and she had socks from high school that were still as white as palace linen. Women and their clothes often astounded me this way, but I figured it was one of those mysteries I'd never solve - like what really happened to Amelia Earhart or the bell that used to occupy our office. ~ Dennis Lehane

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

Work and its results always outlived those who labored at it as any Egyptian slave-ghost will tell you. ~ Dennis Lehane

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

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

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

Maybe honor was in its twilight. Maybe it had always been heading that way. Or worse, maybe it had always been an illusion. ~ Dennis Lehane

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

Clifford paints true-to-life characters with the same gritty touch as the best of Dennis Lehane. Straightforward and edgy, Lamentation gnaws with nail-biting tension on every page. A must-read for contemporary hardboiled mystery fans who appreciate the type of terse dialogue and real life conflicts and settings Elmore Leonard so richly brought to life. ~ Robert Dugoni

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

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? ~ Dennis Lehane

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

I was blessed to grow up in really interesting times and to go back to a home where I was very safe. ~ Dennis Lehane

We all have our crosses to bear. ~ Dennis Lehane

Twelve dead?" I said. "Jesus. ~ Dennis Lehane

We age as the rest of the world watches, she thought, but somehow we're the last to know. There ~ Dennis Lehane

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. ~ Dennis Lehane

I go on the presumption that everyone's full of shit until proven otherwise, and this usually serves me in good stead. ~ Dennis Lehane

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

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