Best 114 quotes of Dennis Lehane on MyQuotes

Dennis Lehane

  • By Anonym
    Dennis Lehane

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

  • By Anonym
    Dennis Lehane

    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)

  • By Anonym
    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.

  • By Anonym
    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)

  • By Anonym
    Dennis Lehane

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Dennis Lehane

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Dennis Lehane

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

  • By Anonym
    Dennis Lehane

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

  • By Anonym
    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.

  • By Anonym
    Dennis Lehane

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

  • By Anonym
    Dennis Lehane

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Dennis Lehane

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

  • By Anonym
    Dennis Lehane

    Everyone sees different things.

  • By Anonym
    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.

  • By Anonym
    Dennis Lehane

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

  • By Anonym
    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.

  • By Anonym
    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.

  • By Anonym
    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.

  • By Anonym
    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.

  • By Anonym
    Dennis Lehane

    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.

  • By Anonym
    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.

  • By Anonym
    Dennis Lehane

    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.

  • By Anonym
    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.

  • By Anonym
    Dennis Lehane

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Dennis Lehane

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Dennis Lehane

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

  • By Anonym
    Dennis Lehane

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

  • By Anonym
    Dennis Lehane

    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.

  • By Anonym
    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.

  • By Anonym
    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.

  • By Anonym
    Dennis Lehane

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Dennis Lehane

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

  • By Anonym
    Dennis Lehane

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Dennis Lehane

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

  • By Anonym
    Dennis Lehane

    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.

  • By Anonym
    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.

  • By Anonym
    Dennis Lehane

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Dennis Lehane

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Dennis Lehane

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Dennis Lehane

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Dennis Lehane

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

  • By Anonym
    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?

  • By Anonym
    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.

  • By Anonym
    Dennis Lehane

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

  • By Anonym
    Dennis Lehane

    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?

  • By Anonym
    Dennis Lehane

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

  • By Anonym
    Dennis Lehane

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

  • By Anonym
    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.

  • By Anonym
    Dennis Lehane

    There's something ugly about the flawless.

  • By Anonym
    Dennis Lehane

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