Quote

Charm was the luxury of those who still believed in the essential rightness of things. In purity and picket fences.

Dennis Lehane

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Dennis Lehane
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: August 4
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Dorchester
Massachusetts
Things
Purity
Charm
Luxury
Believed
Essential
Picket
Essentials
Rightness
Stills
Fences
Still
Fence

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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.
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I won the parental lottery. Most of the kids I grew up with either came from really fractured homes, or really violent ones. I went home to a very traditional, good Irish Catholic family.
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Everyone sees different things.
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I can't remember coming across a more precise evocation of innocence lost since Golding's The Lord of the Flies. With The Death of Sweet Mister, Daniel Woodrell has written his masterpiece-spare, dark, and incandescently beautiful. It broke my heart.
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He wondered if this was what clinical depression felt like, a total numbness, a weary lack of hope.
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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.
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Vanity is a weakness. I know this. It's a shallow dependence on the exterior self, on how one looks instead of what one is. I know this well... Vanity and dishonesty may be vices, but they're also the first forms of protection I ever knew.
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Happiness comes in moments, & then it's gone until the next time. Could be years. But sadness settles it.
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How am I supposed to let you go, that's all I'm asking. I want to hold you again, smell you, and, yes too, I just want you to fade. To please, please fade.
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Waking, after all, was an almost natal state. You surfaced without history, then spent the blinks and yawns reassembling your past, shuffling the shards into chronological order before fortifying yourself for the present.
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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.
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She was afraid of all that and so much more, but what terrified her most was inside of her, an insect of unnatural intelligence who’d been living in her brain her entire life, playing with it, clicking across it, wrenching loose its cables on a whim.
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Chuck said, “Hey. How many surrealists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” Cawley looked over at him. “I’ll bite. How many?” “Fish,” Chuck said and let loose a bright bark of a laugh.
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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.
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We were supposed to grow old together, Dolores. Have kids. Take walks under old trees. I wanted to watch the lines etch themselves into your flesh and know when each and every one of them appeared. Die together.
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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.
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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.
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The loneliness of another can be shocking when it lays itself bare without warning.
Dennis Lehane
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It's hard to close the door on optimistic expectations when you love someone.
Dennis Lehane
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Which would be worse - to live as a monster, or to die as a good man?
Dennis Lehane