Top 160 Dennis Lehane Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

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

— Dennis Lehane

103. “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

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

— Dennis Lehane

105. “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

106. “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

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

— Dennis Lehane

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

— Dennis Lehane

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

— Dennis Lehane

110. “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

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

— Dennis Lehane

112. “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

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

— Dennis Lehane

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

— Dennis Lehane

115. “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

116. “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

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

— Dennis Lehane

119. “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

120. “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

121. “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

122. “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

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

— Dennis Lehane

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

— Dennis Lehane

125. “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

126. “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

127. “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

128. “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

129. “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

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

— Dennis Lehane

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

— Dennis Lehane

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

— 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. “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

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

— Dennis Lehane

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

— Dennis Lehane

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

— Dennis Lehane

138. “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

139. “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

140. “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

141. “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

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. “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

145. “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

146. “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

147. “You think the whole electrical system is fried?” Chuck said, “Good possibility.” “That would mean fences.” Chuck picked up an apple as it floated onto his foot. He went into a windup and kicked his leg and fired it into the wall. “Stee-rike one!” He turned to Teddy. “That would mean fences, yes.”

— Dennis Lehane

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

— Dennis Lehane

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

— Dennis Lehane

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

— Dennis Lehane