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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
Believe
Deeply
Capable
Highest
Level
Levels
Symphonic
Words
Primacy
Language
Lifting
Making
Prose

More quotes by Dennis Lehane

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He wanted to ask her what sound a heart made when it broke from pleasure, when just the sight of someone filled you the way food, blood, and air never could, when you felt as if you'd been born for only one moment and this, for whatever reason, was it.
Dennis Lehane
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I was blessed to grow up in really interesting times and to go back to a home where I was very safe.
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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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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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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I was not going to use writing for advertising or journalism. I would tend bar, load trucks, chauffeur - do whatever it took. But from the moment I took my first writing workshop, I was a writer.
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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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.
Dennis Lehane
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What molds us is what maims us.
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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It's hard to close the door on optimistic expectations when you love someone.
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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He wondered if this was what clinical depression felt like, a total numbness, a weary lack of hope.
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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Or maybe I'd do what I always do - hang out and see what develops. Fatalist to the core.
Dennis Lehane
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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.
Dennis Lehane
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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.
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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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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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.
Dennis Lehane