Top 160 Dennis Lehane Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “He wanted to go on for hours. He wanted someone to listen to him and to understand that speech wasn’t just about communicating ideas or opinions. Sometimes, it was about trying to convey whole human lives. And while you knew even before you opened your mouth that you’d fail, somehow the trying was what mattered. The trying was all you had.”

— Dennis Lehane

102. “She had straight brown hair that fell to her shoulders, a rock the size of a Prius on her left ring finger, and she might have been pretty if the skin weren’t stretched so tight against her face it gave her the unfortunate look of someone who’d been struck by lightning during an orgasm.”

— Dennis Lehane

103. “Or maybe I’d do what I always do – hang out and see what develops. Fatalist to the core.”

— Dennis Lehane

104. “She had that light about her that turned people around her into moths.”

— Dennis Lehane

105. “Grief, he said, is carnivorous.”

— Dennis Lehane

106. “What molds us is what maims us.”

— Dennis Lehane

107. “I was blessed to grow up in really interesting times and to go back to a home where I was very safe.”

— Dennis Lehane

108. “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

109. “The ornament of beauty, Shakespeare wrote, is suspect. And he was right. But beauty itself, unadorned and unaffected, is sacred, I think, worthy of our awe and our loyalty.”

— Dennis Lehane

110. “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

111. “You‘ve always had a soft heart, son. You just hide it better than most.” Danny shrugged. “Starting to hide it from myself, then, I guess.” “Always the danger, that. Then one day, sure, you can‘t remember where you left all those pieces you tried so hard to hold on. Or why you work so hard at the holding.”

— Dennis Lehane

112. “I’m just bones in a box, Teddy.”

— Dennis Lehane

113. “Life isn’t happily ever after... It’s work. The person you love is rarely worthy of how big your love is. Because no one is worthy of that and maybe no one deserves that burden of it, either. You’ll be let down. You’ll be disappointed and have your trust broken and have a lot of real sucky days. You lose more than you win. You hate the person you love as much as you love him. But you roll up your sleeves and work – at everything – because that’s what growing older is.”

— Dennis Lehane

114. “After all your years climbing around in people’s heads like a cranial janitor, do you think people know why they do things? People rationalize, they turn their delusions into something romantic that they can disguise as ethics or principles or ideals. People are selfish, Doctor- odiously, monstrously, but in so small and paltry a monstrousness that we barely notice it.”

— Dennis Lehane

115. “Without me, that girl will be gone. Gone-gone. You understand? Gone, baby, gone,′ he sang.”

— Dennis Lehane

116. “Good movies, man, they give you another life. A whole other future for a while.”

— Dennis Lehane

117. “Those who did remember probably shrugged off the chill of her memory, turned their heads down to the sports page or up toward the approaching bus. The world is a terrible place, they thought. Bad things happen every day. My bus is late.”

— Dennis Lehane

118. “Those eyes, Teddy thought. Even frozen in time, they howled. You wanted to climb inside the picture and say, ‘No, no, no. It’s okay, it’s okay. Sssh.’ You wanted to hold her until the shakes stopped, tell her that everything would be all right.”

— Dennis Lehane

119. “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

120. “This was a cruel trick of the mind, yes, but Teddy had long ago accepted the logic of it – waking, after all, was an almost natal state. You surfaced without a history, then spent the blinks and yawns reassembling your past, shuffling the shards into chronological order before fortifying yourself for the present. What.”

— Dennis Lehane

121. “In his time on earth, he’d learned one truth above all else when it came to power – those who lost it usually didn’t see it vanishing until it was already gone.”

— Dennis Lehane

122. “Chuck said, “Hey. How many surrealists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” Cawley looked over at him. “I’ll bite. How many?” “Fish,” Chuck said and let loose a bright bark of a laugh.”

— Dennis Lehane

123. “I’d like to say I found a sublime beauty in it all, but I didn’t. And yet. And yet, this life we’d built filled our car.”

— Dennis Lehane

124. “Civilization seems to be something we choose when it fits our purpose.”

— Dennis Lehane

125. “The lines in her face were deep enough to hide gravel in.”

— Dennis Lehane

126. “Her forehead was unlined in the way of the recently embalmed and her smile resembled that of someone undergoing electroshock.”

— Dennis Lehane

127. “Each day in this country, twenty-three hundred children are reported missing.”

— Dennis Lehane

128. “On September 7th, after the Cubs dropped Game Three, the two teams boarded the Michigan Central together to embark on the twenty-seven hour trip, and Babe Ruth got drunk and started stealing hats.”

— Dennis Lehane

129. “He thought: so this is what it feels like to love. No logic to it – he barely knew her. But there it was just the same. He’d just met the woman he’d known, somehow, since before he was born. The measure of every dream he’d never dared indulge.”

— Dennis Lehane

130. “He knew her. He knew her, this man she’d married, this man she’d committed herself to walking through this life with. He knew her. And – wonder of wonders – he was still here.”

— Dennis Lehane

131. “SUN WAS in the room when he woke. He sat up and looked toward the bars, but the bars weren’t there. Just a window, lower than it should have been until he realized he was up.”

— Dennis Lehane

132. “People were lost and people were scared and their lynch ropes couldn’t reach bankers or stockbrokers, so they looked for targets closer to home.”

— Dennis Lehane

133. “Don’t forget – Charlie Chaplin too, my friend.” “I’d do an imitation, but I don’t know what he sounds like.” “Hey, not bad, boss. You can open for me in the Catskills.”

— Dennis Lehane

134. “The best thing that can happen to people entering creative professions is the dwindling of all other possibilities.”

— Dennis Lehane

135. “There’s always a ‘she’. Isn’t there?”

— Dennis Lehane

136. “The only people who ask questions like, ‘Did he want to be something besides a bartender,’ are people who can become whatever they want. The rest of us are just Americans.”

— Dennis Lehane

137. “I love television. I think we’re in a renaissance of epic proportion in television now.”

— Dennis Lehane

138. “But always in the back of your throat is this scream, barely suppressed.”

— Dennis Lehane

139. “I don’t believe he casts people into eternal flame for fornication, as you pointed out. Or for believing in a version of him that is a little off the mark. I believe – or, I want to believe – he considers the worst sins to be those we commit in his name.”

— Dennis Lehane

140. “She was guilty, after all, of success, a success that stemmed from birthright and privilege. She took hope for granted, saw opportunity as her due, and had never really had to worry about vanishing into a sea of unseen faces and unseen voices.”

— Dennis Lehane

141. “Cawley probably wasn’t used to questions that continued after he’d shown displeasure with them, so they gave him a minute to catch his breath.”

— Dennis Lehane

142. “It’s like I’m in a beautiful library but none of the books have titles.”

— Dennis Lehane

143. “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

144. “But in those final seconds, a catalogue of emotion found his eyes. There was dismay. Self-pity. Terror. An abandonment so total it took thirty years off his life and turned him into a ten-year-old before her eyes.”

— Dennis Lehane

145. “Teddy laughed, heard the sound of it carry off on the sweep of night air and dissolve in the distant surf, as if it had never been, as if the island and the sea and the salt took what you thought you had and...”

— Dennis Lehane

146. “Sometimes, when outrage begat outrage with enough frequency, it threatened the fabric of the universe, and the universe pushed back.”

— Dennis Lehane

147. “Another death. The more I see, the less I know.”

— Dennis Lehane

148. “One that society can’t forgive, but I can.”

— Dennis Lehane

149. “He lay on his side, looking out at the sea. So blue at this time of day, so vibrant as the afternoon died around it. He lay there feeling the breeze on his face and the sea spreading out forever under the darkening sky and he felt so small, so utterly human, but it wasn’t a debilitating feeling. It was an oddly proud one. To be a part of this. A speck, yes. But part of it, one with it. Breathing.”

— Dennis Lehane

150. “We’re humans, so we’re messy.”

— Dennis Lehane