“How much violence, Marshal, do you think a man can carry before it breaks him?”
— 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
“When a child disappears, the space she’d occupied is immediately filled with dozens of people. And these people—relatives, friends, police officers, reporters from both TV and print—create a lot of energy and noise, a sense of communal intensity, of fierce and shared dedication to a task. “But amid all that noise, nothing is louder than the silence of the missing child. It’s a silence that’s two and a half to three feet tall, and you feel it at your hip and hear it rising up from the floorboards, shouting to you from corners and crevices and the emotionless face of a doll left on the floor by the bed. “It’s a silence that’s different from the one left at funerals and wakes. The silence of the dead carries with it a sense of finality; it’s a silence you know you must get used to. But the silence of a missing child is not something you want to get used to; you refuse to accept it, and so it screams at you.“The silence of the dead says, Goodbye. “The silence of the missing says, Find me.”
— Dennis Lehane
“All the stuff our fathers took for granted as long as you worked hard, the great safety net and the fair wage and the gold watch at the end of it all? That’s all gone around here, my friend.”
— Dennis Lehane
“Angie was where most of me began and all of me ended.”
— 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
“Choice, I’ve always believed, is all that separates us from animals.”
— Dennis Lehane
“It’s hard to close the door on optimistic expectations when you love someone.”
— Dennis Lehane
“Brendan knew about the truth. In most cases, it was just a matter of deciding whether you wanted to look it in the face or live with the comfort of ignorance and lies. And ignorance and lies were often underrated. Most people Brendan knew couldn’t make it through the day without a saucerful of ignorance and a side of lies.”
— Dennis Lehane
“She told him that he had the most beautiful voice she’d ever heard, that it sounded like whiskey and wood smoke.”
— 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
“Men who believe that the way to the mind is not by way of ice picks through the brain or large dosages of dangerous medicine but through an honest reckoning of the self.”
— Dennis Lehane
“I go on the presumption that everyone’s full of shit until proven otherwise, and this usually serves me in good stead.”
— Dennis Lehane
“There are so many more important things to worry about than how you’re perceived by strangers.”
— Dennis Lehane
“We live in a world of disposable memory, nothing’s built to last, not even shame.”
— Dennis Lehane
“Do you know the primary difference between men and gods? … Gods don’t think they can become men”
— Dennis Lehane
“Men. If you give them half a chance, they’ll fuck you over just to prove they can.”
— 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
“The harsh light above them caught her face, and Sean could see what she’d look like when she was much older – a handsome woman, scarred by wisdom she never asked for.”
— Dennis Lehane
“You, you buy into all this stuff about good guys and bad guys in the world. A loan shark breaks a guy’s leg for not paying his debt, a banker throws a guy out of his home for the same reason, and you think there’s a difference, like the banker’s just doing his job but the loan shark’s a criminal. I like the loan shark better because he doesn’t pretend to be anything else, and I think the banker should be where I am sitting right now. I’m not going to live some life where I pay my fucking taxes and fetch the boss a lemonade at the company picnic and buy life insurance. Get older, get fatter, so I can join a men’s club in Back Bay, smoke cigars with a bunch of assholes in a back room somewhere, talk about my squash game and my kid’s grades. Die at my desk, and they’ll already have scraped my name off the office door before the dirt’s hit the coffin.”
— 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
“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.”
— Dennis Lehane
“Lately, though, he’d just been tired in general. Tired of people. Tired of books and TV and the nightly news and songs on the radio he’d heard years before and hadn’t liked much in the first place. He was tired of his clothes and tired of his hair and tired of other people’s clothes and other people’s hair. He was tired of wishing things made sense. He’d gotten to a point where he was pretty sure he’d heard everything anyone had to say on any given subject and so it seemed he spent his days listening to old recordings of things that hadn’t seemed fresh the first time he’d heard them.Maybe he was simply tired of life, of the absolute effort it took to get up every goddamned morning and walk out with into the same fucking day with only slight variations in the weather and food.He wondered if this was what clinical depression felt like, a total numbness, a weary lack of hope.”
— Dennis Lehane
“It took only a second for another to arrive on the same path as yours and change your life to a point it couldn’t change back. One second.”
— 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
“Each day in this country, twenty-three hundred children are reported missing.”
— Dennis Lehane
“Sympathy’s easy. You have sympathy for starving children swatting at flies on the late-night commercials. Sympathy is easy because it comes from a position of power. Empathy is getting down on your knees and looking someone else in the eye and realizing you could be them, and that all that separates you is luck.”
— Dennis Lehane
“I will not dream anymore, you said. I will not set myself up for the pain. But then your team made the playoffs, or you saw a movie, or a billboard glowing dusky orange and advertising Aruba, or a girl who bore more than a passing resemblance to a woman you’d dated in high school— a woman you’d loved and lost— danced above you with shimmering eyes, and you said, fuck it, let’s dream just one more time.”
— 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
“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