Top 160 Dennis Lehane Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “You’ve mislaid your trust in the past, had your faith in people broken, shattered even. You’ve been betrayed. Lied to. So you’ve chosen not to trust. And this protects you to some extent, I’m sure. But it also isolates you from the rest of humanity. You are disconnected. You are displaced. And the only way to find your way back to a place, to a connection, is to trust again.”

— Dennis Lehane

52. “I do have my dark days. I suppose everyone does. The difference is that most people don’t kill their husbands with an axe.”

— Dennis Lehane

53. “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

54. “Cruelty is older than the Bible. Savagery beat its chest in the first human summer and has kept beating it every day since. The worst in men is commonplace. The best is a far rarer thing.”

— Dennis Lehane

55. “I won the parental lottery. Most of the kids I grew up with either came from really fractured homes, or really violent ones. I went home to a very traditional, good Irish Catholic family.”

— Dennis Lehane

56. “We all believe lies that bring us more comfort than the truth.”

— Dennis Lehane

57. “I believe so deeply in the primacy of language, in lifting your prose to the highest level you’re capable of and making your words symphonic.”

— Dennis Lehane

58. “It’s very simple. If you learn how to write well, to write with depth, cream will rise to the top. You’ll get published. But, there is no secret.”

— Dennis Lehane

59. “Patrick Kenzie asking a bemused waitress for a newspaper in smalltown USA. ‘It’s like a homepage without a scroll button?’”

— Dennis Lehane

60. “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

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

— Dennis Lehane

62. “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

63. “It’s been a complicated decade for me.” She.”

— Dennis Lehane

64. “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.”

— Dennis Lehane

65. “And she was-definitely-a woman who did not shrink from gauntlets, but stepped up to them, and said, Okay, bring it. Bring your worst. I will get back up. Every time. I will not shrivel and die. So watch out.”

— Dennis Lehane

66. “He wondered if this was what clinical depression felt like, a total numbness, a weary lack of hope.”

— Dennis Lehane

67. “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

68. “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

69. “It never works that way. Once that ugliness has been forced into you, it becomes part of your blood, dilutes it, races through your heart and back out again, staining everything as it goes. The ugliness never goes away, never comes out, no matter what you do. Anyone who thinks otherwise is naive. All you can do is hope to control it.”

— Dennis Lehane

70. “You don’t have a partner, Marshal, You came here alone.”

— Dennis Lehane

71. “Don’t get me wrong, I love literary fiction. It’s faux literary fiction I can’t stand.”

— Dennis Lehane

72. “The trick, Teddy had long since learned, was to stay busy and stay focused. They couldn’t catch you if you didn’t stop running.”

— Dennis Lehane

73. “He held up a hand to stop her. “Then one day, about six months ago, it hit me – love doesn’t trump all for you, safety does. And I knew sooner or later you’d dump me before I’d dump you because – and this is the important part, Rach – I would never dump you.” He gave her a beautiful, broken smile. “And that’s been my purpose all along.” After.”

— Dennis Lehane

74. “Some ghost of myself still lived back in the days when we’d shared a bed and talked of the future. But that love we’d had and those selves we’d been were gone, placed in a box like old photographs and letters you’d never read again.”

— Dennis Lehane

75. “Visitation Street is urban opera writ large. Gritty and magical, filled with mystery, poetry and pain, Ivy Pochoda’s voice recalls Richard Price, Junot Diaz, and even Alice Sebold, yet it’s indelibly her own.”

— Dennis Lehane

76. “There’s darkness in this world you can’t learn about by watching TV and reading books.”

— Dennis Lehane

77. “An entire tree swept past the door, upside down, its roots sprouting upward like horns. “You see that?” “Yeah. It’s gonna wake up in the middle of the ocean, say, ‘Wait a second. This isn’t right.’ “’I’m supposed to be over there.’ “’Took me years to get that hill looking the way I wanted it.”

— Dennis Lehane

78. “She told him that he had the most beautiful voice she’d ever heard, that it sounded like whiskey and wood smoke.”

— Dennis Lehane

79. “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

80. “It’s an island, boss. They’ll always find us.” Teddy met Chuck’s eyes and nodded. For the first time since they’d met, he could see fear in Chuck’s eyes, his jaw trying to tighten against it.”

— Dennis Lehane

81. “I once again felt an odd flush of admiration for my partner’s faith in a religion I had long ago abandoned. She doesn’t advertise it or announce it at every turn, and she has nothing but scorn for the patriarchal hierarchy that runs the church, but she nevertheless holds firm to a belief in the religion and ritual with a quiet intensity that can’t be shaken.”

— Dennis Lehane

82. “If Donald Trump puked, Copley Place is probably what would hit the toilet.”

— Dennis Lehane

83. “We don’t know how she got out of her room – It’s as if she evaporated, straight through the walls.”

— Dennis Lehane

84. “Hospitals strip a lot from you – your independence, your confidence, sometimes your will to live. But pettiness too. Pettiness is the first casualty of the ICU waiting room. No one has the energy for it.”

— Dennis Lehane

85. “That little girl, I adore her, but she’s an anarchist. She wakes us up whenever she feels like it, she thinks high-energy at seven in the morning is a positive, sometimes she screams for no reason, she decides on a second-to-second basis which foods she’ll eat and which she’ll fight you over, she puts her hands and face into truly disgusting places, and she’s attached to our hips for at least another fourteen years, if we’re lucky enough for a college we can’t afford to take her off our hands.”

— Dennis Lehane

86. “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

87. “It’s good not only to realize that you can’t please all of the people all of the time, but that you don’t want to. There’s a certain type of reader that you don’t ever want to write for.”

— Dennis Lehane

88. “The loneliness of another can be shocking when it lays itself bare without warning.”

— Dennis Lehane

89. “Baby, why are you all wet?”

— Dennis Lehane

90. “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

91. “I love to write, so it rarely seems like work – even when it gets arduous.”

— Dennis Lehane

92. “I can’t remember coming across a more precise evocation of innocence lost since Golding’s The Lord of the Flies. With The Death of Sweet Mister, Daniel Woodrell has written his masterpiece-spare, dark, and incandescently beautiful. It broke my heart.”

— Dennis Lehane

93. “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

94. “It’s a lot easier to ask a woman’s forgiveness than her permission.”

— Dennis Lehane

95. “So, about the only difference I see between a thief and a banker most times is a college degree.”

— Dennis Lehane

96. “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

97. “People surprise you sometimes.”

— Dennis Lehane

98. “As far as I could see, she didn’t take any better care of her apparel than I did mine, but I owned shirts that looked like they’d been run through a car engine half an hour after I removed the price tags, and she had socks from high school that were still as white as palace linen. Women and their clothes often astounded me this way, but I figured it was one of those mysteries I’d never solve – like what really happened to Amelia Earhart or the bell that used to occupy our office.”

— Dennis Lehane

99. “Maybe that’s what love is-counting the bandages until someone says, ‘Enough’.”

— Dennis Lehane

100. “I open up – ” Cawley again: “Using your keys, correct, Mr. Ganton?” Ganton nodded at Cawley, looked back at his knees. “I use my keys, yeah, ’cause the door’s locked.”

— Dennis Lehane