Dennis Lehane Quotes

29 Sourced Quotes

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.

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

Dennis Lehane
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.

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.

Dennis Lehane
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.

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

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

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

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.

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
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
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.

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

Dennis Lehane
Wickham is not an upwardly mobile community. It's dingy and gray as only a mill town can be. The streets are the color of a shoe bottom, and the only way to tell the difference between the bars and the homes is to look for the neon signs in the windows. The roads and sidewalks are uneven, the tar cracked and pale. Many of the people, especially the workers as they trudge home from the mills in the dying light, have the look of those who've long ago gotten used to the fact that no one remembers them. It's a place where the people are grateful for the seasons, because at least they confirm that time is actually moving on.

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

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

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

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

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

Dennis Lehane
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.

Dennis Lehane
Hate came in a maelstrom, and we called it several things—racism, pedophilia, justice, righteousness—but all those words were just ribbons and wrapping paper on a soiled gift that no one wanted to open.

Dennis Lehane