Dennis Lehane Quotes

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.

There's something ugly about the flawless.

She smiled darkly and shook her head. 'I'm not crazy. I'm not. Of course what else would a crazy person claim? That's the Kafkaesque genius of it all. If you're not crazy but people have told the world you are, then all your protests to the contrary just underscore their point. Do you see what I'm saying?

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.

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.

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

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

Your first family is your blood family and you always be true to that. That means something. But there's another family and that's the kind you go out and find. Maybe even by accident sometimes. And they're as much blood as your first family. Maybe more so, because they don't have to look out for you and they don't have to love you. They choose to.

It's hard to close the door on optimistic expectations when you love someone.

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

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

Grief, he said, is carnivorous.

Happiness comes in moments, & then it's gone until the next time. Could be years. But sadness settles it.

I normally can't stand vice-free people. They conflate a narcissistic instinct for self-preservation with moral superiority. Plus, they suck the life right out of a party.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Do you know the primary difference between men and gods? ... Gods don’t think they can become men

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

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

I love to write, so it rarely seems like work - even when it gets arduous.

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.