Dennis Lehane Quotes

We all know who you are, Mr. Coughlin. Famous Yankee gangster. Friend of the colonel. It would be safer for a man to swim into the middle of the ocean and cut his own throat than to threaten you.' He solemnly made the sign of the cross. 'But when people starve and have nowhere to go, where would you have them end up?' 'Not on my land,' Joe said.'But it is not your land. It's God's. You are renting it. This rum? This life?' He patted his chest. 'We are all just renting from God.

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.

Maybe that's what love is-counting the bandages until someone says, 'Enough'.

Joe closed his hand over the watch and it was still warm from his father's pocket, ticking against his palm like a heart.

Got us a full moon too coming tomorrow night. Just make things a whole lot worse. All we need.- Why is that?- What’s that, Marshal?- The full moon. You think it makes people crazy?- I know it does.- Found a wrinkle in one of the pages and used his index finger to smooth it out.- How come?- Well, you think about it—the moon affects the tide, right?- Sure.- Has some sort of magnet effect or something on water.- I’ll buy that.- Human brain,- Trey said, - is over fifty percent water.- No kidding?- No kidding. You figure ol’ Mr. Moon can jerk the ocean around, think what it can do to the head.

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.

I go on the presumption that everyone's full of shit until proven otherwise, and this usually serves me in good stead.

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.

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.

There are so many more important things to worry about than how you're perceived by strangers.

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.

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

Angie was where most of me began and all of me ended.