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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.

Dennis Lehane

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Dennis Lehane
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: August 4
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Dorchester
Massachusetts
Language
Lifting
Making
Prose
Believe
Deeply
Capable
Highest
Level
Levels
Symphonic
Words
Primacy

More quotes by Dennis Lehane

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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.
Dennis Lehane
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Patrick Kenzie asking a bemused waitress for a newspaper in smalltown USA. 'It's like a homepage without a scroll button?'
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But I often think we talk way too much in this society, that we consider verbalization a panacea that it very often is not, and that we turn a blind eye to the sort of morbid self-absorption that becomes a predictable by-product of it.
Dennis Lehane
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Happiness comes in moments, & then it's gone until the next time. Could be years. But sadness settles it.
Dennis Lehane
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Grief, I swear to God, doesn't live in the heart. It lives in the senses. And sometimes, all I want to do is cut off my nose so I can't smell her, hack my fingers off at the joint.
Dennis Lehane
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Do you honestly think Lenin is any different from J.P. Morgan? That you, if you were given absolute power, would behave any differently? Do you know the primary difference between men and gods?...Gods don't think they can become men.
Dennis Lehane
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How many psychiatrists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” “I don’t know. How many?” “Eight.” “Why?” “Oh, stop overanalyzing it.
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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Do you know the primary difference between men and gods? ... Gods don’t think they can become men
Dennis Lehane
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What molds us is what maims us.
Dennis Lehane
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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.
Dennis Lehane
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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.
Dennis Lehane
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The loneliness of another can be shocking when it lays itself bare without warning.
Dennis Lehane
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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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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.
Dennis Lehane
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Which would be worse - to live as a monster, or to die as a good man?
Dennis Lehane
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I sort of play golf because a lot of my friends are into it, but I'm awful - my handicap is about six or seven thousand.
Dennis Lehane
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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.
Dennis Lehane
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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.
Dennis Lehane
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He wondered if this was what clinical depression felt like, a total numbness, a weary lack of hope.
Dennis Lehane