Dennis Lehane quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Dennis Lehane

Dennis Lehane Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Dennis Lehane on Wise Famous Quotes.

Your father picks you up from prison in a stolen Dodge Neon with an 8-ball in the glove
compartment and a hooker named Mandy in the back seat.

Conflate a narcissistic instinct for self-preservation with moral superiority.

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

What molds us is what maims us.

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

Baby, why are you all wet?

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

Cawley probably wasn't used to questions that continued after he'd shown displeasure with them, so they gave him a minute to catch his breath.

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

Grief, he said, is carnivorous.

He was done with every lie he'd ever allowed himself to believe, every lie he'd ever lived, every lie.

How naive can you be before it becomes unforgivable?

Joe closed his hand over the watch and it was still warm from his father's pocket, ticking against his palm like a heart.

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

We're humans, so we're messy

Someday ... , we'll medicate human experience right out of the human experience.

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

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.

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

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

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

One that society can't forgive, but I can.

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

The mean things of this world had only one lesson-we are meaner than you'd ever imagine.

We met when we were both majoring in Space Invaders with a Pub Etiquette minor at the Happy Harbor Campus of UMass/Boston.

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

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.

My blessings outweigh my regrets.

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

Or maybe I'd do what I always do - hang out and see what develops. Fatalist to the core.

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

Nobody learned nothing. Nobody evolved.

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

You can have two families in this life, Joe, the one you're born to and the one you build.

It's a lot easier to ask a woman's forgiveness than her permission.

There's always a 'she'. Isn't there?

As they've always been. And they don't change just because you want them to.

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

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

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

She was his wife, mother, best friend, sister, lover, and priest.

Craftsmanship, his Uncle Cornelius had once told him, was just a fancy word for what happened when labor met love.

There are so many more important things to worry about than how you're perceived by strangers.

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

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

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

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

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.

Twelve dead?" I said. "Jesus.

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

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

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.

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

Angie was where most of me began and all of me ended.

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.

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

Catch me on a good day, I think half of my books aren't too bad. Catch me on a bad day, I think I've never written a good line.

There's darkness in this world you can't learn about by watching TV and reading books.

This world can only give me reminders of what I don't have, can never have, didn't have for long enough.

It's odd how fast a beautiful woman can turn a guy's mind into lint storage. Just by being a beautiful woman.

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

Which would be worse, to live as a monster or to die as a good man?

People don't fix each other, Joseph. And they never become anything but what they've always been.

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.

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.

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

Plans are just dreams until they're executed.

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

You was in all sorts of places, huh?" "Yeah, I was. Saw the world." "What'd you think of it?" "Different languages, same shit.

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

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

The lines in her face were deep enough to hide gravel in.

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

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

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

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

And he hated himself and hated her,too, for the ruin they'd made of each other.

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

You should write because some stray scrap of your soul is trying to manifest itself verbally.

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

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.

I love my burdens.

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

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.

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

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

moaned his final breath into the imitation Oriental.

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

Another death. The more I see, the less I know.

Everyone sees different things.

I'll be waiting at the airport.'
'You just made my year' she said.
'You made my life.

It's been a complicated decade for me." She

There's something ugly about the flawless.

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

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

How many psychiatrists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?" "I don't know. How many?" "Eight." "Why?" "Oh, stop overanalyzing it.

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.

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.

We all have our crosses to bear.

If a man was lucky, he was moving toward something his whole life.