Dennis Lehane Quotes

“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.”

“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.”

“Everyone sees different things.”

“There's something ugly about the flawless.”

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

“People surprise you sometimes.”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

“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?”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

“What molds us is what maims us.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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