Top 160 Dennis Lehane Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Dennis Lehane

2. “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?”

— Dennis Lehane

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

— Dennis Lehane

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

— Dennis Lehane

5. “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

6. “Everyone sees different things.”

— Dennis Lehane

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

— Dennis Lehane

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

— Dennis Lehane

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

— Dennis Lehane

10. “Everyone wants a quick fix. We’re tired of being afraid, tired of being sad, tired of feeling overwhelmed, tired of feeling tired. We want the old days back, and we don’t even remember them, and we want to push into the future, paradoxically, at top speed. Patience and forbearance become the first casualties of progress.”

— Dennis Lehane

11. “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

12. “If you’re not crazy but people have told the world you are, then all your protests to the contrary just underscore their point.”

— Dennis Lehane

13. “Monsters don’t dress like monsters; they dress like humans. Even stranger, they rarely know they’re the monsters.”

— Dennis Lehane

14. “She was his wife, mother, best friend, sister, lover, and priest.”

— Dennis Lehane

15. “People just want you to see them as they hope to be seen. And everyone wants to be seen as interesting.”

— Dennis Lehane

16. “The world according to Bubba is simple – if it aggravates you, stop it. By whatever means necessary.”

— Dennis Lehane

17. “That if you believe, really believe, and if your strategy is sound, and if you’re willing to leave everything you’ve got on the field of battle to win the day” – he held his arms wide – “you can do anything.” She’d.”

— Dennis Lehane

18. “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

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

— Dennis Lehane

20. “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

21. “Maybe there are some things we were put on this earth not to know.”

— Dennis Lehane

22. “God loves violence. You understand that, don’t you?” “No,” Teddy said, “I don’t.” The warden walked a few steps forward and turned to face Teddy. “Why else would there be so much of it? It’s in us. It comes out of us. It is what we do more naturally than we breathe. We wage war. We burn sacrifices. We pillage and tear at the flesh of our brothers. We fill great fields with our stinking dead. And why? To show Him that we’ve learned from His example.”

— Dennis Lehane

23. “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

24. “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

25. “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

26. “There’s a bar around the corner. Lemme buy you a drink before the war.”

— Dennis Lehane

27. “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.”

— Dennis Lehane

28. “A complaint that’s not looking for a solution is a disease that’s not looking for a cure.”

— Dennis Lehane

29. “The world does not have tidy endings. The world does not have neat connections. It is not filled with epiphanies that work perfectly at the moment that you need them.”

— Dennis Lehane

30. “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.”

— Dennis Lehane

31. “Music” – he smiled his glorious smile and raised his index finger – “music speaks for the soul because words are too small.”

— Dennis Lehane

32. “We age as the rest of the world watches, she thought, but somehow we’re the last to know. There.”

— Dennis Lehane

33. “There’s something ugly about the flawless.”

— Dennis Lehane

34. “Achievement? Depends on luck – to be born in the right place at the right time and be of the right color. To live long enough to be in the right place at the right time to make one’s fortune. Yes, yes, hard work and talent make up the difference. They are crucial, and you know I’d never argue different. But the foundation of all lives is luck. Good or bad. Luck is life and life is luck. And it’s leaking from the moment it lands in your hand.”

— Dennis Lehane

35. “Win for me. Win for my kids. Win for my marriage so I can carry your winning back to the car with me and sit in the glow of it with my family as we drive back toward our otherwise winless lives.”

— Dennis Lehane

36. “How much violence, Marshal, do you think a man can carry before it breaks him?”

— Dennis Lehane

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

— Dennis Lehane

38. “She said once that time is nothing to me but a series of bookmarks that I use to jump back and forth through the text of my life, returning again and again to the events that mark me in the eyes of my more astute colleagues, as bearing all the characteristics of the classic melancholic.”

— Dennis Lehane

39. “You can have two families in this life, Joe, the one you’re born to and the one you build.”

— Dennis Lehane

40. “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

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

— Dennis Lehane

42. “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

43. “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

44. “Grief,” he said, “is carnivorous. It feeds whether you’re awake or not, whether you fight it or you don’t. Much like cancer. And one morning you wake up and all those other emotions – joy, envy, greed, even love – are swallowed by it. And you’re alone with grief, naked to it. And it owns you.”

— Dennis Lehane

45. “We are not special. We are lit from within by a single candle flame and when that flame is blown out and all light leaves our eyes it is the same as if we never existed at all. We don’t own our life. We rent it.”

— Dennis Lehane

46. “We live in a world of disposable memory, nothing’s built to last, not even shame.”

— Dennis Lehane

47. “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.”

— Dennis Lehane

48. “I love my burdens.”

— Dennis Lehane

49. “Choice, I’ve always believed, is all that separates us from animals.”

— Dennis Lehane

50. “I don’t have room in my heart for most people. Got nothing against them, but I got nothing for them, either.”

— Dennis Lehane