Dennis Lehane Quotations

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

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.

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. I know this well...Vanity and dishonesty may be vices, but they're also the first forms of protection I ever knew.

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

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

Life isn't happily ever after... 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 that 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 you roll up your sleeves and work - at everything - because that's what growing older is.

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.

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.

If you are deemed insane, then all actions that would oherwise prove you are not do, in actuality, fall into the framework of an insane person’s actions. Your sound protests constitute denial. Your valid fears are deemed paranoia. Your survival instincts are labeled defense mechanisms. It’s a no-win situation. It’s a death penalty really.

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.

My daughter squealed again and both Bubba and I winced. It’s not an attractive sound, that. It’s high-pitched and it enters your ear canals like hot glass. No matter how much I love my daughter, I will never love her squealing. Or maybe I will. Maybe I do. Driving down 93, I realized once and for all, that I love the things that chafe. The things that fill me with stress so total I can’t remember when a block of it didn’t rest on top of my heart. I love what, if broken, can’t be repaired. What, if lost can’t be replaced. I love my burdens.

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.

Do you honestly think Lenin is any different from J.P. Morgan? That you, if you were given absolute power, would behave any differently? Do you know the primary difference between men and gods?...Gods don't think they can become men.

The brain controls pain. It controls fear. Sleep. Empathy. Hunger. Everything we associate with the heart or the soul or the nervous system is actually controlled by the brain. Everything. What if you could control it?

...I normally can't stand vice-free people. They conflate a narcissistic instinct for self-preservation with moral superiority. Plus they suck the life right out of a party.

Do you know the primary difference between men and gods? ... Gods don’t think they can become men

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.

And often the worst thing wasn't the victims--they were dead, after all, and beyond any more pain. The worst thing was those who loved them and survived them. Often the walking dead from now on, shell-shocked, hearts ruptured, stumbling through the remainder of their lives without anything left inside of them but blood and organs, impervious to pain, having learned nothing except that the worst things did, in fact, sometimes happen. (Mystic River)

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.

What molds us is what maims us.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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

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.

Whatever she saw beyond the camera lens, beyond the photographer, beyond anything in the known world probably - wasn't fit to be seen.

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

Your first family is your blood family and you always be true to that. That means something. But there's another family and that's the kind you go out and find. Maybe even by accident sometimes. And they're as much blood as your first family. Maybe more so, because they don't have to look out for you and they don't have to love you. They choose to.

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.

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

... scarred by wisdom she'd never asked for.

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...

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

I was not going to use writing for advertising or journalism. I would tend bar, load trucks, chauffeur - do whatever it took. But from the moment I took my first writing workshop, I was a writer.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Everyone sees different things.

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

Grief, he said, is carnivorous.

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

He wondered if this was what clinical depression felt like, a total numbness, a weary lack of hope.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

There's something ugly about the flawless.

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?

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.

Dave has a moment when he's young where he tries to talk to his mother, who just shuts him down, ... From that point on, Dave had to create someone else; that's where his problems begin. That's the tragedy of his character: He's been hiding it for too long. He doesn't know himself.

I had a 97 mile-an-hour fast ball, and I couldn't hit the plate. Like Nuke LaLoosh.