Dennis Lehane

“Which would be worse, to live as a monster or to die as a good man?”

“My blessings outweigh my regrets.”

“We all die alone...... I could have helped her with the dying.”

“She was his wife, mother, best friend, sister, lover, and priest.”

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

“You don't have a partner, Marshal, You came here alone.”

“Plans are just dreams until they're executed.”

“My father's gone," Joe said eventually. "Emma's dead. Your brother's dead. My brothers scattered. Shit, D, you're one of the only people I know anymore. I lose you, who the fuck am I?”

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

“It occurred to him that thinking like this could explain why, even after all the jobs he'd pulled, he rarely had much money in his pockets. Sometimes it seemed like he stole money from one place just to give it away somewhere else.”

“When a woman once asked Joe how he could come from such a magnificent home and such a good family and still become a gangster, Joe's answer was two-pronged: (a) he wasn't a gangster, he was an outlaw; (b) he came from a magnificent house not a magnificent home.”

“Growing up, Joe had adored his brother, Then he'd come to hate him. Now, he mostly didn't think about him. When he did, he had to admit, he missed his laugh.”

“What's your name?""Emma Gould," she said. "What's yours?""Wanted.""By all the girls or just the law?”

“I'm a detective, but nuns could stonewall Sam Spade into an asylum”

“Lately, though, he'd just been tired in general. Tired of people. Tired of books and TV and the nightly news and songs on the radio he'd heard years before and hadn't liked much in the first place. He was tired of his clothes and tired of his hair and tired of other people's clothes and other people's hair. He was tired of wishing things made sense. He'd gotten to a point where he was pretty sure he'd heard everything anyone had to say on any given subject and so it seemed he spent his days listening to old recordings of things that hadn't seemed fresh the first time he'd heard them.Maybe he was simply tired of life, of the absolute effort it took to get up every goddamned morning and walk out with into the same fucking day with only slight variations in the weather and food.He wondered if this was what clinical depression felt like, a total numbness, a weary lack of hope.”

“Brendan Harris loved everyone now because he loved Katie and Katie loved him. Brendan loved traffic and smog and the sound of jackhammers. He loved his worthless old man who hadn't sent him a single birthday or Christmas card since he'd walked out on Brendan and his mother when Brendan was six. He loved Monday mornings, sitcoms that couldn't make a retard laugh, and standing in line at the RMV. He even loved his job, though he wouldn't be going in ever again.”

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

“The trick, Teddy had long since learned, was to stay busy and stay focused. They couldn't catch you if you didn't stop running.”

“She died in a fire. I miss her like you... If I was underwater, I wouldn't miss oxygen that much.”

“You do not want to be a noble person?" She held her thumb and index finger close together. "A little bit?"He shook his head. "I've gt nothing against noble people, I've just noticed they rarely live past forty.""Neither do gangsters.""True," he said, "but we eat in better restaurants."(Live By Night - Dennis Lehane)”

“We all have our crosses to bear.”

“He wanted to go on for hours. He wanted someone to listen to him and to understand that speech wasn't just about communicating ideas or opinions. Sometimes, it was about trying to convey whole human lives. And while you knew even before you opened your mouth that you'd fail, somehow the trying was what mattered. The trying was all you had.”

“Driving down 93, I realized once and for all, that I love the things that chafe. The things that fill me with stress so total I can’t remember when a block of it didn’t rest on top of my heart. I love what, if broken, can’t be repaired. What, if lost can’t be replaced.I love my burdens.”

“Grief, he said, is carnivorous.”

“Men. If you give them half a chance, they'll fuck you over just to prove they can.”

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

“This woman was hard-core. Fuck with her at your peril.”

“It was the lack of a clear reason that got to her most, & it stabbed her that a relationship that had once seemed unbreakable could slip apart so easily due to nothing more than time, family turmoil, & growth spurts.”

“He'd told his son recently that life was luck. But life, he'd come to realize as he aged, was also memory. The recollection of moments often proved richer than the moment themselves.”

“He had a punch like a bag full of cue balls.”

“New Music, I guess, is all those bands Angie listens to. They have names like Depeche Mode and The Smiths and all they sound the same to me - like a bunch of skinny white British nerds on Thorazine. The Stones, when they started, were a bunch of skinny white British nerds too, but they never sounded like they were on Thorazine. Even if they were.”

“The sound of her breathing reminded me, as it so often did, of how vulnerable she was. And how vulnerable we were because of how much we loved her. The fear - that something could happen to her at any moment, something I'd be helpless to stop - had become so omnipresent in my life that I sometimes pictured it growing, like a third arm, out of the center of my chest.”

“I know you. I've known you my whole life. I've been waiting. Waiting for you to make an appearance. Waiting all these years.I knew you in the womb.”

“All the stuff our fathers took for granted as long as you worked hard, the great safety net and the fair wage and the gold watch at the end of it all? That's all gone around here, my friend.”

“It's odd how fast a beautiful woman can turn a guy's mind into lint storage. Just by being a beautiful woman.”

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

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

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

“Everyone sees different things.”

“The mean things of this world had only one lesson-we are meaner than you'd ever imagine.”

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

“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.”

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

“Life isn't happily ever after... It's work. The person you love is rarely worthy of how big your love is. Because no one is worthy of that and maybe no one deserves that burden of it, either. You'll be let down. You'll be disappointed and have your trust broken and have a lot of real sucky days. You lose more than you win. You hate the person you love as much as you love him. But you roll up your sleeves and work - at everything - because that's what growing older is.”

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

“Love like that? Hell, it seems so pure, it's damn near criminal.”

“Your father picks you up from prison in a stolen Dodge Neon with an 8-ball in the glove compartment and a hooker named Mandy in the back seat.”

“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 stared down the slim barrel of a gun, looked into eyes rabid with fear and hatred, and saw my reflection. Pulled the trigger to make it go away.I heard the echoes of my gunshots, smelled the cordite, and in the smoke, I still saw my reflection and knew I always would.”

“This was the photograph, I knew, that had already burned its way into my dreams and my shadows, into that part of my mind that I have no control over. Its image would reappear in all its wanton cruelty for the rest of my life, particularly when I was least prepared for it.”