Quotes from Dennis Lehane

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.

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.

The soul seemed to flower as the body declined.

This is America . . . where every adult shall have the full and inalienable right to eat her young

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.

Because truth hurts, truth costs, truth upends your world.

I'd like to be sitting here five years from now, Marshal, and know you're still in the world. Teddy looked down at the hand on his knee. Looked up at Cawley. I would too, he said softly.

What they didn't tell you about absolute power was that it was never absolute; the instant you had it, someone had already lined up to try to take it away. Princes could sleep soundly, but never kings. The ear was always tuned for the creak on the

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

When they'd first come out in the morning, a single flounder lay flapping and puffing in the breezeway, one sad, swollen eye looking back toward the sea.

I don't have room in my heart for most people. Got nothing against them, but I got nothing for them, either.

You told yourself it was okay—because that's what you had to do to cross a body of water—but it wasn't.

That's what ghosts are—they're testaments to what never should have happened and must be fixed before their spirits leave this world.

Everyone I know lies, breaks their word, and has perfectly legitimate excuses for why they do. Except you. Haven't you ever noticed that? Two times in twelve years, you said you'd find this girl no matter what. And you did. Why? Because you gave your word, babe. And that might not mean shit to the rest of the world, but it means everything to you. Whatever else hapened today, you found her twice, Patrick. When no one else would even try.

There's a bar around the corner. Lemme buy you a drink before the war.

I'll be waiting at the airport.' 'You just made my year' she said. 'You made my life.

All right', Bubba said. '... Just remember, the only sin in battle is hesitation. So don't fucking hesitate.

Only a child thinks life is about her wants.

glancing sideways right back at him with a secretive smile, and he considers the possibility that maybe the opposite of hate is not love. It's hope. Because hate takes years to build, but hope can come sliding around the corner when you're not even looking.

I will not dream anymore, you said. I will not set myself up for the pain. But then your team made the playoffs, or you saw a movie, or a billboard glowing dusky orange and advertising Aruba, or a girl who bore more than a passing resemblance to a woman you'd dated in high school—a woman you'd loved and lost—danced above you with shimmering eyes, and you said, fuck it, let's dream just one more time.

Danny could see it in their faces when they shook Steve's hand—they'd have preferred him dead. Death allowed for the illusion of heroism. The maimed turned that illusion into an uncomfortable odor.

People just want you to see them as they hope to be seen. And everyone wants to be seen as interesting.

Craftsmanship, his Uncle Cornelius had once told him, was just a fancy word for what happened when labor met love.

There seemed to be little rhyme or reason as to why one day snatching the correct words from the ether was like opening a faucet and other days it was like opening a vein