Quotes from Dennis Lehane

He was broad-shouldered, dark-haired and dark-eyed; more than once, women had been noted openly regarding him, and not just immigrant women or those who smoked in public.

Safety is an illusion we sell to children to help them sleep. Then I wanted to be a child.

It took only a second for another to arrive on the same path as yours and change your life to a point it couldn't change back. One second.

Me gustaría quedarme contigo, Patrick. ¿Te parece bien? —Es la mejor oferta que he recibido este año, Ange.

They couldn't catch you if you didn't stop running.

You should write because some stray scrap of your soul is trying to manifest itself verbally.

Inland Florida was not the Florida of blue ocean, white sand, and crushed-white-shell parking lots. It was a land sun bleached and sickened after too many droughts and wildfires.

We age as the rest of the world watches, she thought, but somehow we're the last to know.

And often the worst thing wasn't the victims—they were dead, after all, and beyond any more pain. The worst thing was those who'd loved them and survived them. Often the walking dead from now on, shell-shocked, hearts ruptured, stumbling through the remainder of their lives without anything left inside of them but blood and organs, impervious to pain, having learned nothing except that the worst things did, in fact, sometimes happen.

He gave me the same shrug and I saw that his mind wasn't for the changing. People like Mulkern are used to creating the facts on their own, then letting the rest of us in.

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.

I want the capital-G God the televangelists claim moves tornadoes out of their paths. The one who cures cancer and arthritis in the faithful, the God professional athletes thank for taking an interest in the outcome of the Super Bowl or World Cup or home run in the 87th of 162 games played by the Red Sox this year.

It transformed and sharpened everything she saw, smelled, felt. She could hear the ping of water moving through the pipes and smell metal in the river and hear rodents scuttle along the foundation. Her flesh felt as if it had been freshly slathered over her body this morning. She bet if she tried to guess the thread count of these sheets she'd come close, and her blood raced through her veins like a train moving across a desert at night.

How long since she yearned? How long since she dared believe something so foolish as the idea that someone anywhere has the answers to questions she can't even put into words?

If it's ever within your power to do so, she considered saying aloud to Brian (but didn't), you have to bear witness to your dead. You simply have to. You have to step into the energy field of whatever remains of their spirit, their soul, their essence and let it pass through your body. And in the passing, maybe a wisp of it adheres to

We are not special. We are lit from within by a single candle flame, and when that flame is blown out and all light leaves our eyes, it is the same as if we never existed at all. We don't own our life, we rent it.

Autumn died in technicolor all around us. Bright yellows and reds afire, burnished oranges and rusty greens painted the leaves that floated from the branches, collected in the grass.

For every solution, a problem.

But what? No one's good, no one's bad. Everyone's just trying to make their way.

Change, for those who don't have a say in it, feels like a pretty word for death. Death to what you want, death to whatever plans you'd been making, death to the life you've always known.

Qualsiasi cosa tu abbia intenzione di fare, Teddy, non prendere quelle pillole.

she hadn't grown weaker, as she'd thought, only wearier, yes, but that would change now that she'd remembered who she was.

Tuve la impresión de que el tal Rogin era de los que se meten a poli por el mismo motivo por el que otros se convierten en carceleros: para dar rienda suelta a su sadismo de una manera socialmente aceptable.

È un'isola, capo. Ci troveranno sempre.