Quote

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

More quotes by Dennis Lehane

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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.
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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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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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
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... scarred by wisdom she'd never asked for.
Dennis Lehane
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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.
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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Do you know the primary difference between men and gods? ... Gods don’t think they can become men
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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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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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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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.
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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Everyone sees different things.
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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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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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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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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Patrick Kenzie asking a bemused waitress for a newspaper in smalltown USA. 'It's like a homepage without a scroll button?'
Dennis Lehane