Dennis Lehane Quotes & Sayings

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

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

It had occurred to Sean once - on a bender about ten years before with some buddies, Sean and a bloodstream full of bourbon turning philosophical - that maybe they HAD gotten in that car. All three of them. And what they now thought of as their life was just a dream state. That all three of them were, in reality, still eleven-year-old boys trapped in some cellar, imagining what they'd become if they ever escaped and grew up. — 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

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

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

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

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

I don't believe he casts people into eternal flame for fornication, as you pointed out. Or for believing in a version of him that is a little off the mark. I believe - or, I want to believe - he considers the worst sins to be those we commit in his name. — Dennis Lehane

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

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

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

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

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

The loneliness of another can be shocking when it lays itself bare without warning. — 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

I'm driving a stolen car On a pitch black night And I'm telling myself I'm gonna be alright. — Dennis Lehane

The only people who ask questions like, 'Did he want to be something besides a bartender,' are people who can become whatever they want. The rest of us are just Americans. — Dennis Lehane

You're just pissed off. And when you're pissed off, you lash out. — Dennis Lehane

He looked back at the page, got one last glimpse before the match blew itself out.
Going to find you today, Andrew. If I don't owe Dolores my life, I owe her that much, at least.
Going to find you.
Going to kill you dead. — Dennis Lehane

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, when you felt as if you'd been born for only one moment and this, for whatever reason, was it. — Dennis Lehane

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

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

Don't get me wrong, I love literary fiction. It's faux literary fiction I can't stand. — 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

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

I love my burdens. — Dennis Lehane

Grief," he said, "is carnivorous. It feeds whether you're awake or not, whether you fight it or you don't. Much like cancer. And one morning you wake up and all those other emotions - joy, envy, greed, even love - are swallowed by it. And you're alone with grief, naked to it. And it owns you. — Dennis Lehane

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

She had the air of someone clinging to a wall of soap. — Dennis Lehane

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 — Dennis Lehane

Me, either. What — Dennis Lehane

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

Jesus, Dolores, you've got to get yourself together. You've got responsibilities. Think about those sometimes - okay? - and get your fucking head right.
Those were the last words his wife heard from him. He'd closed the door and walked down the stairs, paused on the last step. He thought of going back. He thought of going back up the stairs and into the apartment and somehow making it right. Or, if not right, at least softer.
Softer. That would have been nice. — Dennis Lehane

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

People just want you to see them as they hope to be seen. And everyone wants to be seen as interesting. — Dennis Lehane

A pretty face had been damaged by acne scars and she wore and extra forty pounds on her frame like a threat. Her eyes were dull with anger disguised as apathy. If she kept on her current path, she'd grow into the type of person who fed her kids Doritos for breakfast and purchased angry bumper stickers with lots of exclamation points. But right now, she was just another in a long line of pissed-off small-town girls with a shitty outlook. — Dennis Lehane

I believe in God. Maybe not the Catholic God or even the Christian one because I have a hard time seeing any God as elitist. I also have a hard time believing that anything that created rain forests and oceans and an infinite universe would, in the same process, create something as unnatural as humanity in its own image. I believe in God, but not as a he or she or an it, but as something that defines my ability to conceptualize within the rather paltry frames of reference I have on hand. — 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

...you have to bear witness to your dead. You simply have to. You have to step into their 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. — Dennis Lehane

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

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

But I say their rules are bullshit. I say there are no rules but the ones a man makes for himself. — Dennis Lehane

You hear it most when politicians who live in places like Hyannis Port and Beacon Hill and Wellesley make decisions that affect people who live in Dorchester and Roxbury and Jamaica Plain, and then step back and say there isn't a war going on. There is a war going on. It's happening in playgrounds, not health clubs. It's fought on cement, not lawns. It's fought with pipes and bottles, and lately, automatic weapons. And as long as it doesn't push through the heavy oak doors where they fight with prep school educations and filibusters and two-martini lunches, it will never actually exist. — Dennis Lehane

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

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. — Dennis Lehane

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

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

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

Her forehead was unlined in the way of the recently embalmed and her smile resembled that of someone undergoing electroshock. — Dennis Lehane

When she found his eyes, hers were fuller and sharper, lit with something that had entered the world centuries before civilized things. "I get off at midnight," she said. — Dennis Lehane

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

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

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 — 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

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

Goddamn embarrassing what a civilian you've become, man. — 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

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

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

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

We live by night and dance fast so grass can't grow under our feet. That's our creed. — Dennis Lehane

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

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

We're humans, so we're messy — Dennis Lehane

Bob, who had never been late in his life, suspected there was something hostile at the core of people who always were. — 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

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

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

It's hard to close the door on optimistic expectations when you love someone. — Dennis Lehane

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

Charm was the luxury of those who still believed in the essential rightness of things. In purity and picket fences. — 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

Maybe there are some things we were put on this earth not to know. — Dennis Lehane

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

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

He had a punch like a bag full of cue balls. — Dennis Lehane

Luther had passed many a white church in his day, heard them singing their hymns and chanting their "Amens" and seen them gather on a porch or two afterward with their lemonade and piety, but he knew if he ever showed up on their steps, starving or injured, the only response he'd get to a plea for human kindness would be the amen of a shotgun pointed in his face. — Dennis Lehane

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

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

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

She smiled darkly and shook her head. 'I'm not crazy. I'm not. Of course what else would a crazy person claim? That's the Kafkaesque genius of it all. If you're not crazy but people have told the world you are, then all your protests to the contrary just underscore their point. Do you see what I'm saying? — Dennis Lehane

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

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

Love like that? Hell, it seems so pure, it's damn near criminal. — Dennis Lehane

I once again felt an odd flush of admiration for my partner's faith in a religion I had long ago abandoned. She doesn't advertise it or announce it at every turn, and she has nothing but scorn for the patriarchal hierarchy that runs the church, but she nevertheless holds firm to a belief in the religion and ritual with a quiet intensity that can't be shaken. — 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's a lot easier to ask a woman's forgiveness than her permission. — 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

Men. If you give them half a chance, they'll fuck you over just to prove they can. — Dennis Lehane

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. — Dennis Lehane

He was broad-shouldered, dark-haired and dark-eyed; more than once, women had been noted openly regarding him, and not just immigrant women or those who smoked in public. — Dennis Lehane

Confidence you haven't earned always has the brightest glow. — Dennis Lehane

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

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

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

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