Dennis Lehane Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“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.”
-- Dennis Lehane -
“There's something ugly about the flawless.”
-- 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?”
-- 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.”
-- 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.”
-- Dennis Lehane -
“There are threads in our lives. You pull one, and everything else gets affected.”
-- Dennis Lehane -
“There are so many more important things to worry about than how you're perceived by strangers.”
-- 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 -
“In Greek tragedy, they fall from great heights. In noir, they fall from the curb.”
-- Dennis Lehane -
“The world according to Bubba is simple - if it aggravates you, stop it. By whatever means necessary.”
-- Dennis Lehane -
“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.”
-- 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.”
-- 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.”
-- 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)”
-- Dennis Lehane -
“And he hated himself and hated her,too, for the ruin they'd made of each other.”
-- Dennis Lehane -
“Whatever she saw beyond the camera lens, beyond the photographer, beyond anything in the known world probably - wasn't fit to be seen.”
-- 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 -
“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 -
“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.”
-- 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 -
“You've learned that every good lie is threaded with truth and every accepted truth leaks lies.”
-- 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)”
-- Dennis Lehane -
“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.”
-- Dennis Lehane -
“Charm was the luxury of those who still believed in the essential rightness of things. In purity and picket fences.”
-- Dennis Lehane -
“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.”
-- Dennis Lehane -
“... scarred by wisdom she'd never asked for.”
-- 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.”
-- 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.”
-- Dennis Lehane -
“Choice, I've always believed, is all that separates us from animals.”
-- Dennis Lehane -
“The loneliness of another can be shocking when it lays itself bare without warning.”
-- Dennis Lehane
